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In Memorium
Professor John Ogbu
Professor John Ogbu died on August 20, 2003, from a heart attack after undergoing back surgery. He was 64. Ogbu had a distinguished career as an anthropologist who did research in education. He was a member of the faculty of the Anthropology Department and the Graduate School of Education and served on the committees of many doctoral students in the School.“John Ogbu was a brave scholar whose research led him to challenge many politically correct views,” said Professor Sarah Warshauer Freedman. “He was generous with his time and genuinely committed to education and to students of education. My students and I will miss his generosity, his integrity, and his ongoing scholarly contributions. However, he leaves an impressive body of work and a personal legacy that insures that he will remain with us in mind and spirit.”
Ogbu was born in 1939 in the village of Umudomi in Nigeria to an Ibo family. His minority status in his own country gave him insight into the challenges facing minorities in the U.S., where he attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and graduate student. He formulated a theory that distinguished between “voluntary minorities” and “involuntary minorities” as a way to account for the different responses of groups to schools.
Ogbu was widely recognized and celebrated in the field of educational anthropology. An entire issue of the journal Education and Anthropology was devoted to his work in 1997. The American Educational Research Association conferred on him its Research Contribution to Education Award, and he received the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology.
“John was a friend and colleague for many years,” recalled Professor Herbert Simons. “He was a cheerful, friendly, and kind person who was generous with his time and available to students. His work has had widespread influence in studies of the achievement of minority students and will be referenced for many years to come.”“John Ogbu made an indelible mark on educational research and on conceptions of why some kids don’t do well at school,” said Professor Glynda Hull. “Although the details of his theory have been vigorously debated over the years, no one would discount the power of his insights on how beliefs about the efficacy of schooling differ among different minority groups. His ideas had common sense appeal as well as theoretical elegance, and he did not shy away from public forums such as school boards and community organizations, or from using his understandings to motivate and direct reform,” Hull continued. “He will be sorely missed on this campus, and he will be missed nationally and internationally by many, many scholars and other individuals who were surprised, convinced, challenged, sometimes even angered, but always engaged by his durable ideas.”
return to BEL Fall 2003 contents return to GSE publications
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