MEMORIAL RESOLUTION PAUL WALLIN (1910 – 1971)

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION

PAUL WALLIN
(1910 – 1971)

Paul Wallin, who died unexpectedly on May 26, 1971, at the age of sixty, spent
his entire academic career as a sociologist at Stanford University. His dedicated
scholarship and teaching, his deep social involvement, and his personal warmth will be
missed by his longtime colleagues and his new young friends.

Paul's life blended humanistic concerns, a cosmopolitan outlook and scientific
objectivity. His early experiences and his later activities both reflect this amalgam of
diverse strains. Throughout his career there was a continual interplay of passion and
detachment, of action and thought.

Born in Ottawa, Paul moved with his family to western Canada. His
undergraduate work was at the University of Manitoba. He was a member of a group of
young Encyclopedists who took all human knowledge as their field of concentration.
After graduation in 1930, he toured the world, using his thumb. This pioneering venture
had a great impact on his vision of human unity amidst diversity. In many ways he felt
close to today's youth, and he often compared today's mobile armies of the young with
his own experiences.

Paul received his M.A. in Psychology at the University of Toronto in 1933. He
then shifted school and field to study Sociology at the University of Chicago. A student
in the depths of the depression, he served as a social worker and was an instructor in the
People's Junior College of Chicago. His brilliant performance at the University of
Chicago led to numerous honors and achievements. One outstanding accomplishment
was his coauthors hip, while still a graduate student, of The Prediction of Personal
Adjustment, a landmark in quantitative social science. This was not his Ph.D.
dissertation. During his stay at Chicago he worked closely with Ernest W. Burgess on a
major contribution to the sociology of family relations. This fruitful collaboration
resulted in a series of articles and a classic monograph, Engagement and Marriage.

Following fellowships at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and with the
Social Science Research Council, he completed his dissertation at Chicago. His first
appointment after receiving the Ph.D. was at Stanford in September, 1942. In 1943 he
began three years of wartime service in research units of the Army. Drafted and assigned
to a psychological research team, after a few months he was reassigned to the War
Department in Washington where he worked in the famous Research Branch with many
of his former teachers and future colleagues.

After his discharge he returned to Stanford and began a decade of research on
marital sexual behavior. In addition to numerous articles in journals, he also published a
major review of the Kinsey report on male sexual behavior. This scrupulously impartial
review deservedly achieved great renown. Upon completion of the analysis of his data on

sexual behavior, he turned to the study of educational goals. After preliminary work with
school children in England and Washington, D.C., he developed and completed massive-
surveys of family and school influence on the educational goals of working-class and
middle-class children. At his death, Paul was working on a book on the development of
educational goals, and he was beginning a study of youth movements, particularly the
counterculture.

Although a perfectionist in his own work, Paul had enormous patience with
students, convincing them that they were capable of making a contribution. Students with
deficiencies in their educational background, many from other departments and schools,
found him particularly helpful. He patiently renewed self-confidence, nudging with good
humor while providing firm and critical direction. With the renewed interest in applied
social research on problems of the family, Paul's courses reached a peak of popularity in
his last year.

Many of us knew Paul best through his deep involvement in the movements for
peace, for civil rights, and for social justice. Paul was a leader of the peace movement in
the Stanford area. He was one of the organizers of the Stanford teach-in on Viet Nam ---
the first of many projects he helped design to make the University and the community
better aware of what was happening in Southeast Asia. He was rarely center-stage
himself, but few worked with greater energy and dedication. The peace movement, in the
words of one colleague, became a way of life for Paul and Freda.

Movements like the peace movement are characterized by the rapid rate at which
people enter and leave. But Paul was in the movement for the long pull; he provided the
continuity of long term leadership. He was a leader by virtue of his continuing optimism
and steadfastness, but also because of his willingness to take on the almost daily tasks
that are crucial to the life of almost all voluntary movements. His willingness to do this
was particularly important in those most difficult times when public interest was at a
minimum and those remaining in the movement were tired and depressed.

As all who have worked in such causes know, movements can be plagued by
doctrinaire disagreements and factional conflicts. Paul believed in the good faith of
others and had confidence in the ability of reasoned argument to convince. This concern
for mediation among different positions made him a particularly valuable member of the
peace movement on a university campus where life in close association with colleagues
must continue despite different value commitments.

Paul's love and respect for his family permeated his life. Freda was his partner in
academic and non-academic ventures. An expert on the family, his own family life could
be used as a model. His admiration for his own children, David and Michael, inspired his
desire for sympathetic understanding of alternative value systems, as in his uncompleted
study of the counterculture. Paul's family was not just a source of emotional satisfaction
to him, but also of intellectual stimulation and of moral commitment.

A noteworthy feature of Paul Wallin's character was his capacity to maintain a
balance between his academic responsibilities and his humanistic convictions, even in
times of stress. From his graduate student days, he worked well in many spheres with

calm and equilibrium. This sense of balance, his ability to separate and yet somehow
combine the academic and the personal-political, seems ever to have remained with him.
A person with strong liberal commitments, he nevertheless always "kept his cool" as a
scholar and a teacher. Considerateness, concern, and dignity marked his life in his home,
community and classroom.

Paul was a complex man, including many diverse facets. So handsome that he
almost became an actor, so athletic that he used to beat his teachers and students in
tennis, his whole life combined disparate elements. His research, for example, was tough-
minded and rigorous, but the subjects of his analyses were the value choices made by
active human beings. He was opposed to manipulation of the human spirit, and yet he
believed deeply in the quantitative study of human nature. He saw human beings as being
influenced by society, but each individual defining the meaning of his own life. Paul
defined his life well.

Sanford M. Dornbusch, Chairman
Bernard P. Cohen
Charles Drekmeier
Benjamin D. Paul
Martin L. Perl