As economist, educator, and administrator, Robert De Blois Calkins has played a continuing important role in the development of public understanding of problems of national concern, and in the formulation of programs designed to resolve them.
As professor and dean at both the University of California (Berkeley) and Columbia University, he guided a generation of young economists, political scientists, and administrators through an academic curriculum that was leavened and made pertinent through his participation in such fields as labor negotiations and the activities of New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Calkins’s influence was then greatly expanded through his service first as the head of the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and then as President of the Brookings Institution. Under his guidance, the “Brookings” became a center of study and research from which flowed a series of conferences, symposia, and publications that proposed new national policies, examined old ones, and in general contributed greatly to the important task of generating Governmental foreign and domestic policy.
Now back at his first love, the University of California, where he is the Vice Chancellor-Social Sciences on the new campus at Santa Cruz, Calkins continues a career of public service, once again in education. His contributions to the country have been continuing and significant; he is indeed one in whom we can take pride as the recipient of the Sixth Cosmos Club Award.
