Edward Zigler

Sterling Professor of Psychology, Sterling Professor and Director of the Bush Child Study Center

Ed Zigler, B.S., M.A., University of Missouri at Kansas City, Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, and faculty member at Yale since 1959, your scholarly work spans the fields of mental retardation, psychopathology, intervention programs, and the effects of out-of-home care on the children of working parents. But the over-arching theme of your career has been helping children—and locally and nationally, in teaching, research, policy-making and advocacy, you have done that indefatigably, all the while authoring over 30 books and more than 600 scholarly articles.

The influence you have had on social and national policy for children is probably unparalleled. You led the effort to found the national Head Start program in 1968. As former director of the Office of Child Development in the early seventies you were instrumental in establishing other innovative programs such as Health Start, Home Start, Education for Parenthood and the Child and Family. You founded Yale’s Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy in 1978, bringing research in child development to federal and state policy arenas. You chaired national committees whose work led to the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the School of the 21st Century in 1999, a model that adds childcare to the mission of public schools. You have also made outstanding contributions locally, collaborating with schools and communities across Connecticut and with state-level policy makers. And you have made great contributions to Yale’s Department of Psychology, managing to teach undergraduates even in the midst of the busiest of schedules.

In all of this you have been courageous and outspoken. In 1987, when Head Start was basking in accolades, you announced that it needed stricter quality controls. During your years in Washington you have remained resolutely non-partisan, and proved this by serving under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. You once said that children were your “colleagues” and that you owed them much. They in turn owe you much, and so does this faculty, which on your retirement thanks you for your years of service to Yale, to children and parents, and to this country.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans