Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America

William Julius Wilson Ph.D.
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

November 14, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

Based on nearly three years of ethnographic field research in four working- and lower-middle class Chicago neighborhoods African-American, white-ethnic, Latino, and one in transition from white-ethnic to Latino, this lecture focuses on the racial, ethnic and class dynamics in these neighborhoods and discusses how and why certain urban residents react to looming racial, ethnic, or class changes, and what their reactions mean in terms of the stability of their neighborhood. The implications of the research findings for the future of race and ethnic relations in urban America and for public policy designed to address inter-group conflict are also discussed.

About the Speaker

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Only 17 of Harvards professors currently hold University Professorships, Harvards highest professorial distinction. After receiving the 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. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicagos Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July of 1996.

Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 32 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, and the American Philosophical Society. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of America's 25 Most Influential People. Finally, 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 Associations 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, and received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award; and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which was chosen 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. His latest book is The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

Other honors granted to Wilson include the Seidman Award in Political Economy (the first and only non-economist to receive the Award); the Golden Plate Achievement Award; the Distinguished Alumnus Award,Washington State University; the American Sociological Associations Dubois, Johnson, Frazier Award (for significant scholarship in the field of inter-group relations); the American Sociological Associations Award for Public Understanding of Sociology; Burton Gordon Feldman Award ("for outstanding contributions in the field of public policy") Brandeis University; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Award (granted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Los Angeles).

Professor Wilson is a member of numerous national boards and commissions, including the Presidents Commission on White House Fellowships, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and The Century Foundation.

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