For six decades psychologist M. Brewster Smith worked to advance the integration of social science with social action. As he wrote in the introduction to his 2003 essay collection, For a Significant Social Psychology, "I wanted psychology not only to yield scientific understanding but also to apply to the amelioration of social problems and the improvement of human life."
To that end, Smith testified in 1952 as an expert witness in a case before a Richmond, Va., Federal appeals court, arguing that school segregation harmed a child's self-esteem, impairing his or her ability to learn. The case was one of five lower court cases that led to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Smith, '39, MA '40, died August 4 in Santa Cruz, Calif., following a short hospital stay. He was 93.
Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Smith attended Reed College before transferring to Stanford, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology and met his future wife, Deborah Anderson, '41.
Shortly after beginning doctoral studies at Harvard, Smith was drafted into the U.S. Army. He developed tests to assess the psychological fitness of Air Corps officers, which led to The American Soldier, his classic study of soldiers in combat.
After the war, Smith completed his PhD and joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor. He taught at Vassar College, New York University and UC-Berkeley before becoming vice chancellor for social sciences at UC-Santa Cruz in 1970.
While at Berkeley, Smith interviewed and qualified the first group of Peace Corps volunteer teachers headed to Ghana in 1961. He twice visited the volunteers there, and never lost touch with the group. "He kept track of all of them over the years," says Deborah Smith. "He got together with them once a year, and they all kept up a lively correspondence."
Smith became a professor of psychology at UC-Santa Cruz in 1975 and remained active in research following his retirement in 1988. When he received the Distinguished Social Sciences Emeriti Faculty award in 2010, his colleagues cited his reputation as "psychology's gentle conscience."
Smith is survived by his wife of 64 years, sons Joshua, MBA '76, Dance and Torquil, daughter Rebecca Garber and five grandchildren including Garret Smith, '03, MS '04.
Julie Muller Mitchell, '79, is a writer in San Francisco.
