| 1 | Name: | Dr. James Q. Wilson | |
| Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | ||
| Year Elected: | 1984 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1931 | ||
| Death Date: | March 2, 2012 | ||
Dr. James Q. Wilson taught political science at Harvard University from 1961 to 1987 as the Shattuck Professor of Government. He was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy from 1985 to 1997. He then was the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Dr. Wilson was the author or coauthor of fifteen books, including The Marriage Problem, Moral Judgement, The Moral Sense, Bureaucracy, Crime and Human Nature (with Richard J. Herrnstein), Political Organizations, Thinking About Crime, Varieties of Police Behavior, The Amateur Democrat, and Negro Politics. His essays on morality and human character have been collected in On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson. His textbook on American government is widely used on college and high school campuses. Dr. Wilson has served on a number of national commissions. He was chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime in 1966, the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse Prevention in 1972-73, and the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies. He was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1985 to 1991. He has been a trustee of the Rand Corporation, the Police Foundation, State Farm Mutual Insurance Company, and Protection One. Dr. Wilson has been president of the American Political Science Association (1991-1992) and received the APSA's James Madison Award for a career of distinguished scholarship and the John Gaus Award for exemplary scholarship in political science and public administration. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was educated at the University of the Redlands (B.A., 1952) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1959). In 2003 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at the White House. He died March 2, 2012, at age 80 in Boston, Massachusetts. | |||