William H. Sewell
November 27, 1909 — June 24, 2001
When William Hamilton Sewell became chair of the UW-Madison Department of Sociology in 1960, he established a guiding principal of “decency, excellence, and diversity” that the department still aims toward at the start of the 21st Century.
Sewell joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1946. For over 40 years, he guided a remarkable longitudinal study of more than 10,000 Wisconsin high school graduates of 1957, tracing their post-secondary schooling, careers, and marriages to identify, measure, and explain the linkages between social background and social and economic achievements in adulthood. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study has become a major national resource in studies on the life course and aging. Sewell’s career as an educator, researcher, and sociologist spanned more than six decades, and he was a major force in the development of sociology as a scientific discipline.
Sewell, the son of a pharmacist, was born in Perrinton, Michigan. He had wanted to become a physician, but first became a licensed pharmacist. He completed a pre-med curriculum as an undergraduate at Michigan State, and was accepted by several medical schools, but he decided to study sociology, earning both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in sociology from Michigan State, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1944 to 1946 and served in the postwar strategic bombing survey of Japan.
During his long and distinguished academic career at UW-Madison, he served as chair of the University Committee and of the departments of Rural Sociology and Sociology. He was Vilas Research Professor of Sociology from 1964 until his retirement in 1980, and he was a visiting professor at the universities of Texas, Puerto Rico, Washington, Bombay, Poona, Delhi, and Columbia University. Sewell served as the University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor from October, 1967, to June, 1968, during the height of campus unrest over the war in Vietnam--a period he later described as “the worst possible time.”
On a national level, Sewell served as chair of the National Commission on Research, 1978-80; president of the Sociological Research Association, 1953-54; the Rural Sociological Society, 1955-56; and the American Sociological Association, 1970-71. Bill was proud of his attendance at meetings of the American Sociological Association–he missed only 3 annual meetings over a 60-year period. He played key roles in creating support for the social and behavioral sciences in the National Institutes of Health. Sewell was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
As an emeritus professor, Sewell remained active in the research he loved until the end of his life. For several winters, he worked at the Population Institute of the East-West Center in Hawaii, where he embarked on a new line of research on the life-long effects of cognitive ability, and he continued working on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study until his final illness.