William Julius Wilson

Harvard Sociologist Address Founders' Convocation

Jan. 31, 2003

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — One of the country’s preeminent sociologists, Harvard University’s William Julius Wilson, will address the Founders’ Day Convocation at Illinois Wesleyan University on Wednesday, February 12, when the University honors an alumnus who was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. in sociology in the United States.

The convocation will be held at 11 a.m. in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall (1210 N. Park Street in Bloomington). Wilson’s address is titled "The Growing Pressure for Policy Relevant Scholarship." The program is open to the public.

This year’s convocation will recognize James R. L. Diggs (1866-1923) who received the Ph.D. from the University in sociology in 1906, making him not only the first African-American to receive the Ph.D. in sociology but also the ninth to receive a doctorate in any field in the United States. Diggs lectured alongside W. E. B. Dubois and was one of the few black educators to join the Niagara Movement, a precursor of the NAACP. He held academic positions at several institutions and was the president of Virginia Seminary and Clayton-Williams University in Baltimore. He was pastor of Baltimore Trinity Baptist Church from 1915 to his death in 1923.

In addition to Diggs, Illinois Wesleyan granted the country’s second Ph.D. to an African-American in 1889 when Alfred O. Coffin received a Ph.D. in biology.

"How fitting that we take this occasion during Black History Month to celebrate the University’s historic role in the education of African-Americans," said Illinois Wesleyan President Minor Myers, jr. "We are proud of the pioneering roles of Dr. Diggs and Dr. Coffin."
Wilson is a prominent expert on the issues of race relations and welfare reform. He is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and is one of only 18 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. He has taught since 1996 at Harvard, where he has also been the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and served as director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program.

Before moving to Harvard, Wilson spent most of his professional career at the University of Chicago, where he held numerous named professorships and served as director of the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality from 1990-96.

Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 38 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth and the University of Amsterdam in Holland. A MacArthur Prize Fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society and the Institute of Medicine. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of America's 25 Most Influential People. He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States.

He is the author of numerous publications, including The Declining Significance of Race, winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly Disadvantaged, which was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books of 1987; When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. His most recent book, co-edited with Neil Smelser and Faith Mitchell, is America Becoming: Racial Trends and Consequences in the United States, published in 2001 by the National Academy Press.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972.