Douglas “Doug” Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, transitioned to emeritus status on July 1, 2023. Born in Olympia, Washington, in 1952 to Ruth M. and E. Martin Massey, Doug revealed his inner crusader in the fourth grade, when he played the fiery German theologian Martin Luther in the church Christmas play. Throughout middle and high school, Doug’s name regularly appeared in the local paper, the Olympian, for making the honor roll and earning perfect grades. In his senior year, Doug, who started to learn Spanish in the third grade, was selected to participate in a prestigious summer learning opportunity in Spain.

His mother, the daughter of immigrants who’d taken a job at an Alaskan canning factory to save toward college in Seattle, instilled in her son the value of hard work. In that regard, Doug has said, “I was my mother’s son,” mowing lawns and picking strawberries in the field during the summers of his youth and inspiring those around him with his prodigious work ethnic throughout a distinguished academic career.

Doug enrolled at Western Washington State College (now Western Washington State University) in 1970 and majored in sociology-anthropology, psychology, and Spanish. It was there he formed a vital mentoring relationship with Ed Stephan, a professor in the sociology-anthropology department who first introduced Doug to demography. Doug’s first publication (with classmate Lucky Tedrow) was written while he was still an undergraduate, appearing in Population Studies in 1976. Another (with Stephan) was published the following year in the flagship journal of the Population Association of America (PAA), Demography. Several years later Doug and Stephan would publish another paper together in the journal Teaching Sociology, “The Undergraduate Curriculum in Sociology: An Immodest Proposal,” in which they argued — provocatively — that the best way to teach Introduction to Sociology was to teach Introduction to Demography.

Doug graduated from WWSC in 1974 and was named Outstanding Student in Sociology and arrived at Princeton the next year to begin his Ph.D. training. While a graduate student, Doug pursued twin interests: migration and urban ecology, a field that sparked his interest in racial residential segregation. Doug’s dissertation capitalized on the U.S. Census bureau’s addition of a Hispanic identifier to the 1970 census; it was the first nationwide study of Hispanic segregation in the U.S. In 1979, an article based on the dissertation, “Residential Segregation of Spanish Americans in U.S. Urbanized Areas,” was published in Demography.

It was in 1978, while on a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, that Doug first started becoming interested in studying Mexico. There, he met an anthropologist, Joshua Reichert, who had just returned from a year of field research on migration from a Mexican village for his dissertation. Doug was impressed with Reichert’s meticulous fieldnotes and was able to code and analyze them with demographic methods. From that effort came the 1979 publication, “Patterns of Migration from a Central American Town to the United States, a Comparison of Legal and Illegal Migrants,” published in International Migration Review.

Doug wrote a postdoctoral fellowship application to the National Science Foundation in 1979 to study the patterns of neighborhood change underlying the segregation patterns he had uncovered in his dissertation, which he took to the University of California-Berkeley. Doug’s interest in human ecology had its roots in the literature that had been emerging since the 1920s from the Chicago School of Sociology. The early research in this vein held that cities should be seen as organisms naturally sorting immigrants, rural migrants, and extant populations in ways that created inequality. But this was not true for Black Americans, who were segregated by non-natural forces, as Doug would document in another 1979 publication in the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the ASA (American Sociological Association).

In his second year at Berkeley, due to a connection with another anthropologist, Rick Mines, Doug was able to add a second village to his Mexican migration study. It was in that year that Doug received a job offer as assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Before arriving, he had submitted a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which was funded in 1981, to apply a blend of anthropological and survey methods to study additional Mexican communities. In 1982, Doug connected with Jorge Durand, Rafael Alarcon, and Humberto Gonzales, Mexican anthropology students at El Colegio de Michoacán. Due to his early collaboration with these colleagues, the study now included migrants from four communities: a traditional rural village, a commercialized rural village, an industrial town, and an urban neighborhood in Guadalajara. The data collected in the four communities led to the publication in 1987 of the book Return to Aztlan: The Social Processes of International Migration from Western Mexico with Alarcon, Durand, and González.

Two important grants secured while at Penn (both from NICHD) included a 1984 proposal to undertake a systematic study of segregation using the 1980 census. A second proposal, in 1986, sought support to apply the data collection methods Doug and his collaborators had developed in Mexico to gather similar data in four communities per year over five years. This proposal received a MERIT Award from NICHD, which extended the data collection period to ten years, launching what became one of the signature studies of his career, the Mexican Migration Project, which has studied thousands of households over several decades.

To conduct the study of segregation, Doug paired up with Nancy Denton. He brought these grants to the University of Chicago — along with former students Denton and Mitchell Eggers — after joining the faculty there in 1987 as professor of sociology. He set up the fledgling Mexican Migration Project there with Chicago student David Lindstrom as project manager.

 The landmark work, American Apartheid, written with Denton, appeared in 1993 to wide acclaim, winning the ASA’s Distinguished Publication Award, among other honors. The volume combined historical analysis with ethnography (drawing on the work of ethnographer Elijah Anderson) and census data to tell the story of the central role of race in shaping U.S. residential patterns. While his colleague, William Julius Wilson, had made famous the notion that, despite the War on Poverty, poverty persisted in the U.S. because income segregation had increased, especially in Black urban neighborhoods, Doug and Denton held firmly to the notion that ongoing racism, not just socioeconomic isolation, played a pivotal role in perpetuating poverty, particularly among Black Americans. The debates between the two scholars were legendary, drawing large crowds at important venues such as the ASA’s annual meeting.

The next few years (during which he returned to Penn) cemented Doug’s stature as one of the most respected demographers and sociologists in the nation. In 1996, he was elected president of the Population Association of America, where he gave an impassioned address on the perils of rising inequality in America — a theme that could not have more resonance today. Then, in 2000, he became president of the ASA. His presidential address, “Emotion and the History of Human Society,” was pathbreaking.

Doug returned to Princeton in 2003 as professor of sociology and public affairs and was named to his endowed professorship in 2005. His bio-social research has continued to flourish and his circle of influence to widen. Many population-based surveys now routinely collect genetic data along with demographic and social information. As William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University recently said, “When I think of brilliant quantitative social scientists, Doug immediately comes to mind. His frequently and widely cited research transcends studies based on arbitrary empirical measures and provides a model for operationalizations that are theoretically driven and designed to identify causality.”

As of this writing, Doug has published sixteen books (with several more in process, slated to be completed in his upcoming “permanent sabbatical”), thirteen edited volumes, 205 peer reviewed articles, and has raised nearly $18 million in research grants. If Google Scholar is even a crude guide, Doug is easily one of the most influential sociologists living today, with more than 116,000 citations, more than 16,000 for American Apartheid alone.

He is also a public facing sociologist. While still a postdoctoral researcher, he published his first op-ed, in the New York Times, entitled “Hordes of Illegals? No.” He would go on to publish 110 additional opinion pieces in outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, and the American Prospect, along with a number of international outlets. He has appeared on dozens of radio and TV talk shows, including an appearance on the Today Show, with Katie Couric. He has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. Early in his career, he built a museum exhibit featuring Mexican artists, along with Durand. It has toured Mexico and the U.S. ever since. No wonder that, in 2012, he won the Public Understanding of Sociology award from the ASA.

Doug has also devoted considerable time to service, taking special care to nominate sociologists and demographers to the four learned societies of which he is an elected member, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), the National Academy of Sciences (1998), the American Philosophical Society (2004), and the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2004), the latter of which he served as president from 2006 to 2019. Doug derived an additional benefit from his service to the NAS. He and his wife, Susan Fiske, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, met at an NAS board of directors meeting. Susan is transitioning to emeritus status the same day as Doug, and they will celebrate their twentieth anniversary this year.

Doug has served society, the profession, SPIA, and Princeton’s sociology department in ways too numerous to count, but of special note is his leadership of three of the nation’s major population science centers (Chicago, Penn, and the Office of Population Research [OPR] at Princeton). He is especially proud of the sixty students whose dissertations he has chaired. Evidence for this can be found in his CV. Of its seventy-eight pages of accomplishments, sixteen are reserved for naming these former students, along with detailed information on their current positions. He has often offered his students the following advice: “Write it up, send it out.” Those who have been lucky enough to enjoy Doug’s mentorship as undergraduates, graduate students, or early career scholars often tell stories about how his mentorship had a transforming effect on their careers.

Indeed those of us who know Doug well don’t dwell on a list of accomplishments too numerous to count. What we note are his work
ethic and passion for knowledge, but also his warmth, humor, modesty, a passion for tequila, and his commitment to making a difference in the world.

Written by members of the Department of Sociology and the School of Public and International Affairs faculty.