James Q. Wilson (Ph.D. ’59) was honored with the 2006 University Alumni Medal. We put together a very nice dinner for him at Frontera Grill.
From the University's press release:
Wilson has had a distinguished career as a political scientist, a criminologist, a scholar of public administration, a policy analyst, a government advisor and a public intellectual. Wilson is considered to be America’s preeminent political scientist. The American Political Science Association honored him with its James Madison Award for a career of distinguished scholarship in 1990, and with its John Gaus Award for exemplary scholarship in the fields of political science and public administration in 1994. He served as president of the association from 1991 to 1992.
Wilson is most widely known for his “broken windows” theory of crime, holding that public disorder and police acceptance of nuisances and low-level crimes lead to further deterioration of the urban environment and public passiveness, which in turn foster higher crime rates. Wilson’s solution, emphasizing community-based foot patrols and enforcement of nuisance violations, was later implemented in New York City and was credited with reducing crime significantly during the 1990s.
Wilson’s book American Government. is more widely used on university campuses than any other government textbook. As a policy analyst and government advisor, he has served as Chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime, on the board of directors of the Police Foundation, as Chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention, on the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime, and on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Most recently, Wilson was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and in 2003 the White House honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As noted in one of the written recommendations to receive the Alumni Medal, “Wilson has often expressed . . . the importance of his education at the University of Chicago and the debt he owes to our University. It was at Chicago where he acquired his devotion to sound empirical research, his appreciation of the "big questions," his courage to cross disciplinary boundaries, and his willingness to think thoughts out of fashion . . . Though he has taught at Harvard, UCLA and other places, he regards himself intellectually and professionally as a man of Chicago.”
