Donald George Marquis: 1908-1973 Author(s): Robert R. Sears Source: The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 1973), pp. 661-663 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1421954 Accessed: 18-11-2015 22:20 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Journal of Psychology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:20:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Donald George Marquis: 1908-1973 Don Marquis, as he was universally known to his colleagues, was born into an academic family at Two Harbors, Minnesota, on June 22, 1908. His father later became a professor at Bellingham (Washington) State Teachers' College. Don grew up in Bellingham and attended the College in his freshman year. He transferred to Stanford as a sophomore and received his A.B. in 1928. In his undergraduate years at Stanford, Don's future career as a leader in the scholarly community was predictable only to a few intimates among the psychology students and faculty. Shy, and with a mild speech impediment, he was not at first very visible. With characteristically quiet effort he gradually controlled the stammer, and a decade later only a speech pathologist could recognize its residue. The shyness grew into an attractive modesty, in spite of the fact that he soon became a highly noticeable campus figure. This was due to two nonacademic talents: on the clarinet, and at tap-dancing. He played regularly with a popular campus dance band, and whenever there was a campus show of some sort, he and a similarly skilled friend would provide the high point of the evening with their tap routines. He looked and seemed the very essence of the jazz era. But unlike the prototypic F. Scott Fitzgerald, who flunked out of Princeton, Don Marquis had a straight-A average, with a psychology major and a physiology minor, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He started his graduate work at Stanford and completed two years there before transferring to Yale in 1930. His mentors, C. P. Stone and L. M. Terman, were reluctant to have him get all his training at Stanford and urged him to complete his Ph.D. elsewhere. Fortunately, there was a Yale fellowship in neuroanatomy going begging for the next year; he applied for it at once, won, and in the fall of 1930 started the last two years of his graduate work there. At Yale he worked with Harold Burr in anatomy, John Fulton in physiology, and some with E. S. Robinson in psychology. His doctoral dissertation was an experimental study of the effects of occipital-lobe lesions on visual-discriminatorybehavior of dogs. In 1931, he and Dr. Dorothy Postle were married, she being then a postdoctoral fellow with Gesell. She turned her attention to clinical psychology. And after receiving his Ph.D. in 1932, Marquis was appointed National Research Council (NRC) Fellow in neurophysiology for a year. During that year he and E. R. Hilgard, then an instructor in the Yale psychology department, produced several important research reports on their studies of the visual cortex, and when Hilgard accepted an appointment at Stanford, Marquis succeeded him as instructor. With the exception of a year spent at Oxford on a Rockefeller fellowship, he was at Yale from 1930 to 1945 - first as a graduate student, then as faculty (to the associate professorship), and finally as chairman of the department from 1942 to 1945. These were strenuous and exciting years. The senior faculty were heavily en661 American Journal of Psychology 1973, Vol. 86, No. 3, pp. 661-663 This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:20:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 662 SEARS gaged in research and had little interest in students. Marquis soon was accorded the leadership of the younger faculty. The staff was small and seminars were desperately needed. In this context Marquis developed that love of teaching which characterized his university work to the end of his life. His class in experimental psychology was the cornerstone of Yale's graduate program in psychology for a dozen years, and it was he who in the late 1930s stimulated the younger departmental group to reform and upgrade the undergraduate program. His own research suffered under this regimen, but there was no misfortune in this, for Marquis' talents as a teacher magnified his influence beyond what any one person could have achieved in his own laboratory. His knowledge of the research literature was nonetheless - or perhaps therefore - encyclopedic. It was put to good use in his collaboration with E. R. Hilgard on the book Conditioning and Learning, published in 1940; its quality can be assessed by the fact that after a third of a century its latest revision by a younger colleague is entitled Hilgard and Marquis's "Conditioning and Learning." When World War II began there were no psychologists in Washington. The NRC was pressed to find some. In company with the APA an Office of Psychological Personnel was established in 1943 with Marquis as a part-time director. This forerunner of the APA central office was housed in two small rooms at the National Academy building. Don soon became accustomed to bedding two or three nights a week on the New Haven railroad, running his office with one hardworking assistant and the Yale department with a literally decimated faculty. By 1945 the war was over. Don was tired, but Washington had been a heady experience. He was restless. The University of Michigan needed a vigorous young entrepreneur to revitalize its department, to build up the faculty, to provide the facilities for the massive host of returning veterans. Marquis was an obvious choice and he accepted the challenge. The next dozen years were a golden age for Michigan. With incredible ingenuity, Marquis put together half-salaries, research grants, VA stipends, training grants, industrial contracts, to bring together a faculty to satisfy the pressing needs of the university. He brought them in individually, many of them youngsters with promise, as well as in virtually wholesale lots. There was the Survey Research Center and the Center for Group Dynamics, and later there was the Mental Health Research Institute. The story of Michigan's growth, of its development of cross-disciplinary graduate programs, of its emphasis on training Ph.D.s to teach as well as to do research, is not a one-man story. Characteristic of Don Marquis was the quiet way in which he stimulated others to do all the things that had to be done - and were. Not surprisingly, Don Marquis' visibility as a teacher and organizer brought heavy demands on him for consultation. He was active in the reorganization of the APA in the early forties, and became its president-elect in 1947. He was consultant to several foundations and government agencies, chairman of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology, and a member of several top-level committees in federal agencies. Around 1950 he was a consultant to the Ford Foundation task force that recommended the establishment of its Fifth Program, the Behavioral Science Division, which in turn ultimately created the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The Marquis marriage failed in the mid-fifties. Don left Michigan and became a staff associate at the Social Science Research Council from 1957 to 1959, This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:20:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DONALD GEORGE MARQUIS: 1908-1973 663 and then accepted a professorship of industrial management at M.I.T. In the same year he married Dr. Peggy Cook, the social psychologist. Industrial management may seem a strange final home for a man who started his professional life as a physiological psychologist, but Marquis' career had moved steadily in that direction for a quarter century. He was an organizer and entrepreneur from the beginning. He was a kind and sensitive man. He understood and respected individuals as individuals. But it was he who brought the Center for Group Dynamics to Michigan and his practitioner's talents in that field were as great as his scholarship in experimental psychology, and more usefully applicable in the modem world. At M.I.T. he turned his interests in social psychology to the problems of management, and finally came to devote his skills to teaching and research alone. Reversing the usual order of procedure, Don Marquis did more research and published more research in his last decade than in all his time before. For three decades he had practiced the art of management, and then finally turned to the practice of its science. M.I.T. honored him with its David Sarnoff Professorshipof Industrial Management just a few months before his sudden death from coronary heart disease on February 17, 1973. Robert R. Sears, Portola Valley, California This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:20:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
