Nevitt Sanford

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Nevitt Sanford (1909–1996) was founder and President of the Wright Institute, Professor of Psychology at the Leland Stanford, Jr. University, Vassar College, an associate at the Tavistock Institute in London, Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was an associate in the Harvard University Department of Psychology and Social Relations's Harvard Psychological Clinic under its founder and Sanford primary clinical professor, Henry A. Murray, MD, PhD, a chemist, physician, and psychoanalyst.

Sanford studied the roots of ethnocentrism and antisemitism, and was influenced in those interests by his Harvard professor Gordon Allport, and his fellow Harvard psychology doctoral student, Muzafer Sheriff.

Sanford was the primary senior author, along with his co-senior author Teodor Adorno, of The Authoritarian Personality. Other co-authors in this work were the Berkeley Psychology Department Psychology Clinic's Rorschach expert, Else Frankel-Brunswik, and Sanford and Frankel-Brunswick's doctoral student and later Yale Psychology professor, Daniel Levinson. Sanford and his colleagues in that legendary work studied interactions between social systems and personality, arguing that authoritarian and reactionary social conditions could encourage those with authoritarian dogmatic biases to persecute the groups against which they were prejudiced. Sanford and his colleagues believed that authoritarian social systems could not just encourage such prejudice and persecution, but could set the stage in which this prejudice and related persecution of groups against which authoritarians were prejudiced, could actually spread unfettered. Nazi Germany, was an exemplar for the authors' in their conceptualization of the social environment in which authoritarian ideologies, prejudiced beliefs, and consequent persecutory behaviors could thrive.

Robert Nevitt Sanford was born in Chatham, Virginia, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. Sanford acquired the preference for being called "Nevitt" early on. Sanford was not religious in later life, but did embody the social teachings of the church in terms of its emphasis on the teaching of Jesus about how difficult it was for the rich to reach heaven because of the intrinsic wrong of oppressing others.

Sanford received his baccalaureate degree at the University of Richmond, where all of his brothers also had been college students and, like Sanford, had played college football. To the current day, Nevitt Sanford still holds the record at the University of Richmond for the longest run in a football game, having received the kickoff at the end line and running all the way to the end zone.

Sanford baccalaureate days at Richmond were followed by a master's degree at Columbia University's Department of Psychology, and then a Ph.D. in social and clinical psychology from Harvard University. Sanford then joined the staff at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in 1935 under the tutorship of his clinical mentor and founder of the Clinic, Henry A. Murray, MD, PhD. In 1940 Sanford became Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1950 UC Berkeley dismissed Sanford and 11 other professors because of their refusal to sign the newly enacted California State Loyalty Oath, still required of all employees of the State of California.

After his abrupt departure from Berkeley, Sanford briefly became a research affiliate at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London, acquiring a fondness for its negotiating techniques that he nurtured throughout the remainder of his life. Following his year at Tavistock, Nevitt returned to the US to teach in New York State at Vassar College.

In 1959 as a result of a ruling of the California Supreme Court finding the loyalty oath dismissal illegal, Sanford was reinstated to his professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. Once reinstated, he nearly immediately quit, and in 1961 Sanford moved on to become a professor at Leland Stanford, Jr. University, where he taught psychology and did extensive substance abuse research, heading studies in alcoholism.

Later in the 1950s and in the early 60s Sanford played a lead role in a major study of American higher education, leading to publications including The American College (1962) and Where Colleges Fail (1967). In these studies Sanford argued that there was an overemphasis in AMerican higher education on research and academic publishing, a phenomenon often referred to as a syndrome of "publish or perish." Sanford believed that this imperative to emphasize publications was a syndrome that was contributing to a deterioration in the quality of teaching in American higher education.

In 1968 Sanford founded the Wright Institute. The Institute is a free-standing graduate school to provide a sophisticated doctoral education in social clinical psychology that would incorporate psychoanalysis, social theory, social justice issues and public health issues, as well as the more traditional elements of clinical psychology such as diagnosis and treatment methods. The Wright Institute continues in this tradition today, both in its original Berkeley location, and in an offshoot, Wright Institute Los Angeles (WILA). The Wright institute currently offers a doctorate in social clinical psychology, as well as a masters in counseling psychology, both with a social clinical orientation.

Sanford was the author or co-author of approximately 200 academic articles and around 12 books.

External links

• New York Times obituary
• The Wright Institute