Retiring Rutgers–Camden Psychology Professor Stays True to Egalitarian Social Values Shaped by the ’60s
He has plans to seek out former SDS compatriots for interviews
Bill Tucker is passionate when he talks about his work as a psychology professor at Rutgers—Camden, but when he looks back over his four-decade career, there’s only one achievement that sparks a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
The professor, who will retire December 31, was thrilled when he recently received a copy of his own FBI file.
Opened during his graduate school days at Princeton University, the file says Tucker distributed leaflets and took over buildings as a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which opposed racial bigotry and the Vietnam War.
“There was no reason to think I was a threat to the republic,” said Tucker, who has posted the FBI papers on a wall in his home – sandwiched, ironically, between the letters of commendation he earned as a drafted soldier in the U.S. Army.
It’s an image that makes him smile whenever he passes by
it.
At the same time, the papers are a meaningful reminder of the egalitarian sensibility that has guided Tucker since his SDS days.
“My research interests concern the use – or more properly the misuse – of social science to support oppressive social policies, especially in the area of race,” explains Tucker on his Rutgers webpage
Since becoming a full-time professor in 1970, Tucker has written three books on that topic and engendered a skepticism in his students that, he hopes, will help them recognize attempts at injustice.
His work has earned him numerous honors, including an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award – given previously to Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – a $40,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2006, and a Rutgers Provost’s Teaching Award in 2007.
And Tucker has no intention of slowing down. Over the next few years, he plans to interview his former SDS compatriots about what they’ve done with their lives.
The interviews are one reason Tucker will leave his post at the end of 2009, two weeks shy of his 70th birthday. He also expects to resume playing billiards, something he pursued competitively as a young man, and to remain active in the Rutgers faculty union and with a lunchtime basketball group composed of university employees.
“The older you get,” he says, “the more you realize that every important decision in your life is about what to do with your time – the one resource that is irreplaceable.”
Throughout his career, Tucker has dedicated much of his time to his students, developing courses – including one on intelligence and another on the college admissions process – that cross into the areas of ethics, history, and social policy.
“In all of the classes I’ve taken in my life, I’ve never learned more matters of substance than in Bill’s class,” says Jayaram Uparna, a former student of Tucker’s who is now pursuing a doctorate at Northwestern University. “Bill has taught us the true meaning of being ethical.”
“Many students have emphasized how effectively he taught them to think critically,” adds J.W. (Bill) Whitlow Jr., a psychology professor at Rutgers—Camden.
Tucker has also made change through his books – the third of which, published this year, was born out of an uproar he helped create in 1997.
Tucker penned The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology after he discouraged a prominent organization from honoring psychologist Raymond Cattell. A pioneer in the measurement of personality, Cattell was an unsuitable recipient, Tucker argued, because he wanted his methodology used to determine which racial groups were contributing the most to evolution so that other groups could be phased out.
“The field just did not know a lot about the purpose Cattell viewed his science as serving,” Tucker says, “but it was so egregious that it would have been hard not to object.”
The professor’s passion for social fairness was born during the Civil Rights movement and reinforced during his teenage years, when he was “the only white kid” in an African-American neighborhood on the outskirts of Great Neck, New York.
“It sensitized me,” he says. “I was always aware of race and the kind of role it played.”
Not surprisingly, Tucker was drawn to Rutgers–Camden for its social reform activities. He stayed because of his students, often the first in their families to go to college.
“They think of college as advanced occupational training,” the professor says. “It’s fascinating to see their transition from that view to people who become more interested in ideas for their own sake.”
Tucker is just as intriguing to his students, Uparna says.
“Bill is most certainly a hero for us on many levels,” he says, “and each day I work to be just a little bit more like him.”