Vol. 17, No. 4	Sept. 25, 1997

Noted sociologist to speak in Pearson Hall

Sociologist William Julius Wilson, named one of the 25 most influential people of 1996 by Time magazine, will speak at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 8, at the University. His free, public talk, "When Work Disappears: The New Challenge Facing Families and Children in America's Inner City," will be held in Pearson Hall auditorium.

Wilson is the director and the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also directs the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program there. An adviser to President Bill Clinton, he is a member of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships and the President's Commission on the National Medal of Science.

His teaching and research interests include urban poverty, urban race and class relations and social inequality in cross-cultural perspective. Current projects include studies of race and the social organization of neighborhoods, the effects of high risk neighborhoods on adolescent social outcomes and the new social inequality and race-based social policy.

Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is past president of the American Sociological Association and a MacArthur Prize fellow.

He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Power, Racism and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Socio-Historical Perspective; The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions; and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass and Public Policy, which was selected as one of the 16 best books of 1987 by editors of The New York Times Book Review.

His most recent book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 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.

Wilson's UD appearance is sponsored by the Center for Community Development and Family Policy and the Group for Family Research and is supported by the colleges of Human Resources, Education and Public Policy, and of Arts and Science and by the departments of Economics, History, Individual and Family Studies, Political Science and International Relations and Sociology and by the Black American Studies and the Visiting Minority Scholars programs.

For more information, call 831-6500.

-Beth Thomas