2005
Julian Cecil Stanley, born in East Point, Georgia, in 1918, died at age 87 in Columbia, Maryland, on Friday, August 12, 2005, after an energetic scholarly career spanning six decades. He is best known for his tireless search for intellectually talented young people, many of whom he not merely identified but mentored. He championed the cause of bringing them an education worthy of their talents. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, who never knew him are in his debt.
Although Julian was accelerated through the Georgia public school system of his day and entered his senior year at South Georgia Teachers College at age 19, it was not until he had spent a two years manning a chemical warfare dump in North Africa during WWII that his life's work assumed the form that would carry him through his 55 year academic career. Julian felt that some of the best years of his life were wasted in the military. When he emerged from service in 1945 and entered Harvard Graduate School of Education to earn his doctorate with Phillip Rulon, he already felt that he had many years to make up. After finishing his EdD in 1950—his dissertation was a rat running experiment—he took a position briefly at Peabody College in Nashville, followed by an appointment in the mid-1950s at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is there that I met him in 1961.
Flush with NDEA training fellowships, Julian sent out the word in 1960 to his colleagues around the country to test all their undergraduates with the Miller Analogies Test and the Doppelt Mathematical Reasoning Test, and send the high scores to him; he would give them PhD fellowships. Thus did his search for bright young people begin. Julian turned out a couple dozen PhDs in statistics and measurement during his tenure at Madison. But not until 1967 after two years spent at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a change of venue to Johns Hopkins University did he find his true vocation: find really young people, get them into college well before their age-mates, and get them out just as fast. And so was the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) program born. One of Julian's favorite lines was from Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
Those who knew Julian only through his SMPY work may not have been familiar with his singularly impressive contributions to statistics and research methods during the first three decades of his professional life. In the early 1960s, he collaborated with Donald T. Campbell in writing what was to become one of the most influential—and incidentally most cited—works in the social sciences of his generation, viz., Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research (Rand-McNally, 1966). Even strangers described him as an indefatigable correspondent and writer (19 books, roughly half a thousand articles). He admired Cyril Burt for his longevity.
His many contributions were widely recognized by his election to the presidency of AERA, the National Council on Measurement in Education, Divisions 5 (Evaluation, Measurement & Statistics) and Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association, and to Fellow status of six APA Divisions and the American Statistical Association.
He is survived by his wife Dorothy, his daughter Susan Roberta Stanley Willhoft, and a grandson, Spencer Willhoft, having himself outlived his first wife Rose Sanders and his second wife Barbara Sprague Kerr.
Gene V Glass
Regents' Professor
Arizona State University
November 20, 2005