Harvard University Press Blog

On Burnout Today with Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter

In The Burnout Challenge, leading researchers of burnout Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter focus on what occurs when the conditions and requirements set by a workplace are out of sync with the needs of people who work there. These “mismatches,” ranging from work overload to value conflicts, cause both workers and workplaces to suffer. In our interview, the authors discuss the current state of burnout in the workplace as well as the reaction to their book.

 You both have been researching burnout in the workplace for a long time. What has been the biggest workplace or management style change you have observed over the full scope of your research? 

While the pressure has increased in many workplaces, others have striven to become more respectful, considerate settings for their people. They do not always succeed in these endeavors, but values of respect and inclusion have become more salient over the decades during which we have been working on burnout. This shift is important because workplace culture plays a major role in shaping experiences at work. 

We know that, since hybrid work is so new, you are reluctant to comment on it without in-depth study, but anecdotally, how do you think this will inform your research going forward?

A big lesson learned from the pandemic is that the job can change. It doesn’t have to be “it is what it is.” And if the job can change, it could change in many innovative ways to create a better work environment for workers to do good work and feel good about it. We must learn from what worked well during the pandemic and what did not.

To some extent, hybrid work increases employees’ sense of control. First, they can exercise more choice in where and when to work. Second, they have less performative pressure when they are working. On management’s end, hybrid work requires managers to have a clearer idea of what exactly they expect from people, to develop trust in employees’ commitment to meeting those expectations, and to articulate clear rationales when they require people to come to a work location. In-person work no longer goes without saying.

But hybrid work is not perfect—it can raise issues of fairness when it is unevenly implemented. Given the various types of work people do and differences in the extent to which work is tied to a specific location, one size will not come close to fitting all. This means that we should also be thinking about other ways to improve the matches between people and their jobs.

When you speak to employees and leaders about the causes of chronic burnout, what is something you say that often surprises them?

The common response is often stronger than surprise. In fact, it is often considered a “game-changer.” What we say is that burnout is not simply a flaw of the worker, but of the workplace. And that means it is not enough to simply fix the worker—the workplace needs to be fixed too. The worker fix tells employees that it is entirely up to them to cope and be resilient, which is often understood as code for putting up with the way things are. The workplace fix requires better management of chronic job stressors that actually cause burnout.  

 How about something you have heard from them that was surprising?

We used to hear that “burnout is a good thing, because it means workers will quit on their own, and I don’t have to fire them.” But recently, we heard a CEO say, “I never worry about my bright, young staff working from home—but I do worry about them living at work.”

With a new book out, you are talking about burnout a lot—does it leave you feeling hopeful or not?

Definitely hopeful! Our book seems to be providing more of a common language for all levels of employees within a workplace, so that everyone can find ways to get on the same page in terms of identifying workplace mismatches and figuring out better solutions.

At our talks about the book, our focus on addressing mismatches seems to be resonating with people. The huge changes to the way people work that occurred during the lockdown phase of the pandemic have increased awareness of the extent to which work can be done so differently than it used to be done.

 

The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs has been recommended by Forbes, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and Arianna Huffington, who called it “Vital reading for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.”

Order your copy of The Burnout Challenge »

Schelling the Trailblazer

Books influence us in untold ways, and the ones that influence us the most are often read in childhood. Harvard University Press Senior Editor Julia Kirby is reminded of this on the anniversary of the birth of one of this country’s most celebrated economists.

This month would have brought Thomas Schelling’s one-hundredth birthday—and he got closer to seeing it than many mortals. The Nobel laureate economist died just five years ago, after a brilliant career as both a scholar and an advisor to US foreign policy strategists. What better day to dip into his classic work, The Strategy of Conflict, itself now sixty years old but still relevant and a lively read.

Schelling’s breakthrough contribution was his application of the then-novel framework of game theory to the realm of Cold War decision-making. He saw in the dynamics of geopolitics many situations where adversarial nations were in conflict but at the same time held interests in common—and where a zero-sum mentality would not yield the most effective moves. Today, as Russia’s massing of troops on its border with Ukraine has analysts guessing, and Joe Biden prepares for a probable summit with Vladimir Putin, Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict remains a useful model for parsing the possibilities.

For me, however, there’s another book that also comes to mind whenever Schelling’s name is mentioned. It’s certainly not an HUP book, or anything you would find on a syllabus, but Schelling made a habit of mentioning it. According to his wife, Alice Schelling, whenever he was asked about books that had influenced his own thinking, he responded without pause: Smoky the Cow Horse.

It sounds like a joke of an answer—most anyone would have expected him to name a work like Games and Decisions by Howard Raiffa and R. Duncan Luce—but Schelling really meant it. Will James’s 1926 book about a colt was just the kind of tear-jerking tale, offered in a tough cowboy twang, that could go straight to the eight-year-old Schelling’s heart and get him thinking. I’ve always recalled this fact not because it is whimsical but because it strikes me as truer than any other response I have heard to the question, “What book influenced you most?” Purely on logical grounds, the books one encounters earliest have the greatest potential for impact in the long term. Path dependency being what it is, early choices open up channels for further exploration in certain directions, while pushing alternative paths to the shadows. Way leads on to way, and one’s thinking and character are formed on the journey that follows.

Alice Schelling said her husband recalled reading Smoky as “the first time he understood empathy for other human beings.” It’s possible to imagine the path from that moment to his ability, first, to be an effective negotiator, and later to see averting nuclear crisis as a matter of imagining what your enemy might be thinking you were thinking.

Schelling’s youthful devotion to Smoky came to mind recently when I had the pleasure of editing Susan Engel’s wonderful book The Intellectual Lives of Children. The impetus for the book was Engel’s realization that, while over a century of work has gone into the study of cognitive development in children, the focus of that work has always had a major blind spot. It concerns itself with children’s acquisition of knowledge—the mastery of language, skills, and information needed to function in the world—but ignores the fact that children also generate ideas of their own. An important part of their cognitive development is learning what to do with those notions—how to explore them, how to refine them, how to communicate them—and this is intellectual work that we could be doing much more as adults to support.

In a book rich with stories, Engel even includes one of another economist, one of her colleagues at Williams College, whose innovative work also involves applying ideas from one discipline to another. Roger Bolton advanced the idea that a community’s economy gets a boost when its members have a “sense of place,” rooted in its geography. Engel’s interest is in Bolton’s boyhood memories of engineering complex water systems in the road outside his farmhouse, after a heavy rain had turned the dirt to deep mud. Clearly, reading books is not the only activity that hones a person’s ability to engage with ideas.

By the time HUP issued its 1980 paperback of The Strategy of Conflict, the book was a widely acclaimed classic, but Schelling in his preface to the new edition singled out one person’s reaction to it as especially gratifying. John Strachey, a British economist and parliamentarian who had also served his country as war minister, sought him out during a visit to Harvard to express “how much this book had done for his thinking” but did not mention any fine point of its reasoning. As Schelling recalls:

“I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.”

In that moment of Strachey confessing his debt in all “modesty and dignity,” I suspect Schelling realized that he had achieved something akin to Smoky the Cow Horse’s effect. Often, authors can’t imagine in what ways their work will cause readers to rethink things. But whether a reader is influenced early or late in life, the course alteration can be profound. As Schelling concluded his preface, “You never know what will come of writing a book.”

Getting Through a Crisis

How do we respond when a crisis occurs? And how do we know what to do? Catherine Sanderson, a renowned psychologist who has done pioneering research on social norms and the author of  Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels, tells us that we tend to look to each other for answers—and that’s why it’s important we model proper behavior for those around us.

In October of my senior year at Stanford, I was in a psychology class on the fourth floor of a building when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. All of a sudden, everything changed. Classes were cancelled—and in 1989, there was no option for “online learning.” Students couldn’t reach their parents—and there were no cell phones. Some dorms were closed due to structural damage. I had a single room, but shared it that night with four friends—not wanting to be alone as aftershocks continued throughout the night. 

I’ve thought about that day repeatedly over the last few days, as multiple colleges, including my own and the ones my two sons attend, are sending students home. I’ve thought about what I needed at the time—as a 21-year-old 3,000 miles from home and totally freaked out—and what I want to do now to help ease anxiety—as a professor for my students at Amherst College and as a mom.

Here’s what research in psychology tells us about how people act in times of crisis—and how we can push people to act in more prosocial ways.

Ambiguity inhibits action. People are far more willing to take action in the case of a clear emergency than in an ambiguous situation. This finding explains why people rush to donate blood following mass shootings and send food and supplies to victims of national disasters. We recognize what’s going on, we want to help, and we have tangible ways to do so. But almost everything about the current pandemic is entirely uncertain: what causes it? how dangerous is it? how long will it last? That leads most of us to feel simultaneously like we are overreacting (they are closing colleges because of the flu?) and underreacting (I need to buy enough food to last for three months). And this ambiguity makes it hard to know how to respond. Is it safe to work out at the gym? Go out to dinner with a few friends? Get my hair cut?

In ambiguous situations, most of us experience evaluation apprehension, meaning a fear that our behavior will be judged by others. Our desire to do the right thing is therefore complicated, because we really don’t want to be seen as overreacting. So what do we do when we’re facing an ambiguous situation and we don’t know what’s going on or how to react? We look to how other people are reacting. 

Unfortunately, many high-profile people erred on the side of underreaction early on, which made it harder for others to take this threat seriously. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz wore a large gas mask on the floor of the House to illustrate how silly concerns were about the virus; he’s now under self-quarantine due to his own contact with someone infected with COVID-19. An NBA player ridiculed concern with the virus by deliberately touching all of the microphones during a press conference; two days later, he tested positive for the virus himself.  

But here’s the good news: psychology research can also tell us how we can act more rationally, even during times of great uncertainty. 

First, role models of all types—parents, professors, politicians—need to model the right behavior. That means elbow bumping or bowing instead of shaking hands or hugging. That means canceling travel plans, avoiding large crowds, canceling social engagements, and washing hands. When my college decided on Monday night to send students home for the rest of the semester, many people—students, parents, faculty—thought it seemed like a draconian response. After all, college students are a pretty hearty group, and no one on campus—or in the community—had tested positive. But three days later, this decision hardly seems like an overreaction, based on the social distancing recommendations now provided by the CDC.

Second, we need to emphasize that these norms are—at least for now—the new normal. Why?  Because people are highly motivated to follow norms—once they know what they are. In one study, researchers compared different types of messages given to hotel guests to encourage reusing their towels. Some guests received the standard pro-environmental message: “Help Save the Environment: You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.” Others received a similar message, but with a twist: “Join Your Fellow Guests in Helping to Save the Environment: Almost 75 percent of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.” Guess which one was more effective? The second, by far: if we think that most other people are engaging in a certain behavior, then many more of us will decide that we should be, too. Research on messages that inspire voting shows precisely the same point: informing people about (high) rates of voting in their neighborhood is far more effective at increasing voter turnout than simply telling people that voting is a civic duty.

So what does research tell us about how to fight the corona virus? Our civic duty is to reduce the spread of the disease. But we push people to take preventative actions by emphasizing that’s the choice most others are making. And the sooner we all embrace the new normal, the better off we all will be.

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

Why Read yet Another Book on Higher Education?

Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College begins with the observation that college doesn’t just start one day during orientation week and then end ceremonially some years later. Instead, argue authors Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle, college is “a liminal space and place in which students make lots of decisions that serve as practice for the many more they will make as older adults.” The case they make for the enduring value of liberal education is novel and unconventional, but—as they acknowledge early on—their book enters a not-uncrowded space. So why read yet another book on higher education? In the brief excerpt below, they address the question head-on.

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Over the past twenty years, many thoughtful, insightful, and field-changing books have been published on virtually every aspect of the college experience. While we have learned much from these and use them throughout to contextualize our own analysis, we believe that our research makes a number of unique contributions to the field of higher education that will interest parents, students, faculty, administrators, and researchers. Our analysis is based on narratives of the student experience that we constructed from repeated interviews with a diverse group of over 200 students who thrived, struggled, or stalled at various points during their college years. Because we interviewed students every semester while they were in college, we were able to gather enormously rich and detailed information about student decision-making. Why did you choose this course, this major, this advisor? Why did you choose to live with these friends, join these organizations, or study abroad? What is most on your mind as you start the school year? And because we asked these questions (and many others) in “real time,” we believe that the answers students gave constitute a valid account of their college experience.

Although you will hear from over one hundred students in this book, you will get to know a much smaller number—around twenty—fairly well. The longer narratives we have written about this group demonstrate that students find engaging academic experiences, advisors, friends, balance, or a sense of home in different places and via different routes. They also demonstrate that students’ academic engagement, friendships, advisor relationships, experience of time and balance, or sense of home often change over time. We chose some of these students because their narratives were similar to those of many of their peers. We chose others because they were in many respects outliers. Regardless of their typical or atypical nature, each of these students’ college experiences offers something instructive about the process of becoming liberally educated.

Vermont’s Healing Spaces

In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Dr. Esther Sternberg brought neuroscience, immunology, and architecture together to look closely at how one’s immediate physical surroundings can affect mood, the immune system, neural functioning, and general health. Drawing equally on the history of medicine and on emerging knowledge, Sternberg sought to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and environment. The findings presented in the book have broad application, but the central concern for healing made hospitals and other healthcare institutions the main focus of the book’s prescriptions.

And now comes word that the hospitals of Vermont have taken a step towards filling them. Inspired by Healing Spaces, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has completed the multi-year project of installing original works of art in each of the state’s roughly 400 inpatient hospital rooms. Sternberg, who didn’t learn of the project until it was near completion, confessed feeling deeply moved by the story. “When you write a book,” she said, “you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling.”

Tremendously fulfilling, indeed.

Gender Equality by Design

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day with the publication of Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design. Bohnet, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program, and co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group, told us early on that she had three goals for the book.

First, she wanted to convince readers that we all have implicit biases that the best of intentions can’t override and that a world of workshops can’t undo. These biases are a major problem, keeping us from valuing people for who they are.

Second, she hoped to communicate that this problem is costly—not just for the affected individuals, but for society at large. This is especially so in the stubborn case of gender, where biases can lead us to overlook fully half of the talent pool, at potentially great cost to our families, organizations, and economies.

Thirdly, she wanted the book to show that we can do better. We can design environments that help biased people get it right. We can move the needle towards more equality and better performance, and we can start right now.

Bohnet’s invitation to readers is to become behavioral designers, employing the research evidence presented throughout the book to change the environments in which we live, learn, and work. Small changes can have surprising effects, and opportunities are everywhere. We constantly make choices about how to present and evaluate information, how to structure interviews and create teams, whom to hire and promote. There is no design-free world. Why not design a bit more thoughtfully?

 

What Works for Our Shared Shelf

On January 6^th the actor and activist Emma Watson tweeted her desire to start a feminist book club.

Hi Team, ❤️ I want to start a feminist book club but so far have only brainstormed ‘Feminist Book Club’ and ‘Emma Watson Book Club’.

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) January 6, 2016

By January 7^th the group had a name, “Our Shared Shelf,” and its first selection, Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. On the group’s Goodreads page, Watson outlines the idea:

As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading as many books and essays about equality as I can get my hands on. There is so much amazing stuff out there! Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering! I’ve been discovering so much that, at times, I’ve felt like my head was about to explode… I decided to start a Feminist book club, as I want to share what I’m learning and hear your thoughts too.

The plan is to select and read a book every month, then discuss the work during the month’s last week (to give everyone time to read it!). I will post some questions/quotes to get things started, but I would love for this to grow into an open discussion with and between you all. Whenever possible I hope to have the author, or another prominent voice on the subject, join the conversation.

If you fancy it, please join up and participate. Everyone is welcome. I would be honoured!

The page for the group, which is already approaching 100,000 members, also hosts an active discussion board, where tens of thousands of people have suggested books to turn to next. Here at HUP we’re soon to publish a title we hope they’ll consider.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design, is by Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program. As research has repeatedly shown, and as resources like Project Implicit help to demonstrate, humans have biases related to characteristic like race, gender, and sexual orientation that the best of training and the purest of intentions can’t easily override. With What Works, Bohnet presents a relentlessly practical but determinedly optimistic guide to straightforward behavioral interventions that overcome gender bias by limiting opportunities for its intrusion.

Bohnet often introduces the notion of designing for gender equality by pointing to the simple but illustrative case of orchestras. From the book:

As late as 1970, only 5 percent of musicians performing in the top five orchestras in the United States were women. Today, women compose more than 35 percent of the most acclaimed orchestras, and they play great music. This did not happen by chance. Rather, it required the introduction of blind auditions. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was the first to ask musicians to audition behind a screen, and in the 1970s and 1980s most other major orchestras followed suit. When they did so, usually in preliminary rounds, it raised the likelihood that a female musician would advance by 50 percent and substantially increased the proportion of women hired.

Addressing the disparity, as Bohnet writes, required only “awareness, a curtain, and a decision. Or, more precisely, a design decision.” The blind assessment practiced by orchestras isn’t always feasible, but the approach—a focus on de-biasing systems rather than people—is an enormously useful tool for moving the needle towards equality.

What’s critical to recognize in the orchestra example is that the result isn’t just more female musicians: it’s also better music. Even if the gatekeepers and string-pullers of the world can’t be made to prioritize gender equality, rare are those who’d ignore proven strategies for improved performance. And yet, even as Bohnet emphasizes the business benefits of designing around biases, those gains cannot be the foundation for the changes we need:

While the macro- and the micro-evidence hold the promise of a business case, gender equality is not a magic bullet automatically leading to economic progress. This is why, at the end of the day, the case of gender equality must rest on a moral argument. It just is the right thing to do. Full stop. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

Certainly wonkier than a Gloria Steinem memoir, but What Works explains how, using behavioral insights, we can collapse gender inequality within our lifetime. A fitting book for Our Shared Shelf.

American Literature’s Adulthood Problem

Last month in this space, historian Steven Mintz previewed his forthcoming history of modern American adulthood by taking up recent commentaries on the death of adulthood in American culture. Below, Mintz turns to American literary treatments of grown-up life, which have more often depicted coming of age as a struggle against new constraints than as an entrée to independence.

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American literature has long had a problem with adulthood. The most obvious examples, of course, are found among the post-World War II generation of writers, from John Updike and Mary McCarthy to J.D. Salinger, who associated adulthood with stagnation and stress, with heavy drinking, marital discontent, adultery, and despair. 


Critical treatments of adulthood escalated during the 1960s and 1970s in such novels as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. The authoritative father who knows best came under attack as uncommunicative, emotionally withdrawn, and bottled up, while the self-denying, sacrificing mother became not an ideal to emulate, but a cautionary example of how women, mistakenly, forfeited their individuality and self-fulfillment for their husband’s sake.

Yet well before the 1950s and 1960s, American literature tended to paint a bleak picture of adulthood. Men come off particularly poorly. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain presents his readers with a rogues gallery of hucksters, charlatans, braggarts, con men, and cheats. Huck’s own father, Pap, is an ignorant, abusive drunk. From Melville’s monomaniacal Ahab and his depressed, deeply alienated Bartleby, to Henry James’s unfulfilled Lambert Strether, Edith Wharton’s “ruin of a man,” Ethan Frome, Dreiser’s greedy, ambitious, opportunistic Clyde Griffiths, and Sinclair Lewis’s narrow-minded, complacent, materialistic George F. Babbitt, fictional images of manhood were replete with examples of men with cramped emotional lives, loveless marriages, and work lacking opportunities for meaning and fulfillment. Each offered a vivid example of the life of quiet desperation and despair identified by Thoreau.

The Unknown Kenneth B. Clark

In the latter half of the 1960s, with the nation’s eyes on unrest in its cities, there arose a role for African American intellectuals in helping white America to understand black urban life. As Daniel Matlin details in On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis, these “indigenous interpreters” were left to balance the opportunities afforded by their prominence with the dilemmas and demands of their perceived social obligations. Among them was psychologist Kenneth B. Clark—born one hundred years ago this week—who became known as an establishment figure committed to an integrationist approach to solving the urban crises of the post-civil rights era. However, as Matlin explains below, Clark’s public acceptance of that role both concealed and constrained his sense of race as “merely one manifestation of a much deeper set of problems that confront human beings.”

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Civil rights anniversaries abound this year. Media interest has centered on the Civil Rights Act signed into law by Lyndon Johnson fifty years ago, but the summer of 1964 also witnessed the Harlem Riot, an event that inaugurated years of urban uprisings which broke any illusion that America’s racial divisions had been laid to rest. It was sixty years ago that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education shattered the legal foundations underpinning segregation. And one hundred years ago, on July 14, 1914, the scholar whose name became inextricably entwined with that landmark legal victory was born to Jamaican parents in the Panama Canal Zone.

Histories of the civil rights movement testify to Kenneth B. Clark’s vital contribution in coordinating the expert psychological testimony cited in the Brown ruling. Segregated schools, the Court was persuaded, stigmatized and harmed black children by their very nature, regardless of whether white and black schools were equally resourced. The famous “doll tests” through which Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark—like him, a psychologist trained at Howard and Columbia Universities—had exposed black children’s marked preference for white dolls still provides perhaps the most graphic and abiding image of the interior, emotional costs of institutionalized white supremacy.

Clark, who died in 2005, remains for historians a “symbol of integrationism,” the civil rights movement’s “reigning academic,” and “the epitome of the establishment social scientist” during the Kennedy-Johnson era of liberal reform. His credentials as a pillar of the postwar liberal establishment are plain to see. A tenured professor at the City College of New York, Clark served as an expert witness before courts and congressional committees and at White House conferences, fraternized with politicians and their advisers, and secured federal and municipal grants to support his research and activism. Those credentials, and his aura of respectability, were only underlined in 1969 when Clark was elected to serve as the first black president of the American Psychological Association, one of the nation’s largest professional bodies.

And yet, the remarkable controversy that ensued during Clark’s presidency is a forgotten story—one that casts his life and thought in a dramatically different light, and reveals much about the pressures and dilemmas that have confronted generations of African American intellectuals. On September 4, 1971, at the end of his term of office, Clark rose to deliver his presidential address at the APA’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. Within days, he had been ridiculed in the national press, denounced by many of his academic peers, and censured by the vice president of the United States.