He also helped create the television program Sesame Street.
“Professor White was the model of a scholar. He attacked important problems with an incisive mind and a sense of history. He was an elegant model for what a university faculty member should be,” said Jerome Kagan, the Starch Research Professor of Psychology.
“White showed how childhood development is a product of schools and society’s design,” said University of Illinois Psychology Professor Philip Rodkin, a former doctoral student of White’s.
“At a time when so much work is oriented toward genetics and neuroscience, he was one of a small number of people who inspired me to see that the context, the situation, and the places that are built for kids can be as powerful as anything in the world,” said Rodkin.
White, a New York native, graduated from Harvard College in 1951, received his M.A. from Boston University in 1952, and earned his PhD at the State University of Iowa in 1957. After completing his doctorate, White taught at the University of Chicago before coming to Harvard.
“When people came in to talk to him...he didn’t just go through the motions of paying attention to them. Academia is not filled with good listeners, and he was one,” said longtime colleague Brendan A. Maher, the Henderson Research Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Personality.
Rodkin also noted White’s devotion to his students, recalling when White ate dinner with Rodkin and Rodkin’s grandmother.
“I was able to connect a personal part of who I am with my professional future, which is what [White] embodied as my advisor,” said Rodkin.
White is survived by his wife Barbara, his two sons Andrew and Gregory, their respective wives Elizabeth and Amie, and his three grandchildren Olivia, Alexander, and Jonathan.
Robert Wood
Robert C. Wood—academic, policymaker under U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy ’40 and Lyndon B. Johnson, and institutional leader (most notably of the University of Massachusetts system)—died on April 1 at his home in Boston of stomach cancer. He was 81.
Wood earned a masters of public administration, a masters, and doctorate in government and political economy at Harvard, after completing his undergraduate work at Princeton. According to his wife, Margaret, he taught government courses at Harvard from 1954 to 1957 and his students included now-Sen. Edward M. Kennedy D-Mass.
While running for the presidency, John F. Kennedy sought Wood’s advice on urban issues and Wood wrote a campaign speech for him in 1960.
In the 60s, while a member—and later chair—of the Political Science Department at MIT, Wood led the task force in the Johnson administration that created the Department of Housing and Urban Development and served as the department’s first undersecretary. He helped create the Model Cities Program, which directed federal funds towards needy neighborhoods; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in real estate transactions.
A “great part of working with him was that he was so involved with the country that you felt that whatever you said might make a difference,” said Jody Fisher Williams ’56, for whom Wood served as thesis adviser. She later worked under him at MIT and at the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, where Wood was director from 1969 to 1970.
From 1978 to 1980, Wood served as superintendent of Boston schools during the Boston desegregation case. Marcy M. Murninghan EDD ’83—another thesis advisee of Wood’s and later a staff associate in his administration—said Wood was fired in 1980 when members of the committee that elected him “did not like that he was changing the culture of the system.”
“I learned so much from working with him as he tried to navigate through those shark-infested waters,” Murninghan added.
“My father just believed that every person he came across counted and he taught me, as a new politician, that remembering people’s names is much less important than taking the time to get to know them,” said State Sen. Margaret Wood Hassan D-N.H., one of Wood’s daughters. “[He] taught us all that being smart was never enough, it was being good, too.”
-Compiled by Alexander H. Greeley