John Thomas Dunlop - Early Life, Education, and University Career

Early Life, Education, and University Career

Dunlop was born in the northern California town of Placerville, 45 miles east of Sacramento, where his family owned a pear ranch. Devoted Presbyterian missionaries, his parents moved to the Philippines when Dunlop was four years old, the eldest of a family that grew to seven children. He was raised and educated on the island of Cebu, and remained there until his graduation from high school. Following graduation, Dunlop returned to the US with his older brother in order to enroll in college. He was initially rejected from the University of California at Berkeley because of his unusual high school background and enrolled instead in 1931 at Marin Junior College, a community college in northern California.

He then transferred to the University of California Berkeley. Graduating with highest honors in 1935, Dunlop remained at Berkeley for his PhD in Economics, delivering the dissertation “Movements of wage-rates in the business cycle” (1939). During his studies at Berkeley, he met his wife, Dorothy Emily Webb. The couple married in 1937.

In 1937, Dunlop went to Cambridge University on a fellowship in order to study under John Maynard Keynes. John and Dorothy shared a small house “…in a neighborhood of small, unattractive homes…” with John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife Kitty. With both earning PhDs in Economics from UC Berkeley, Dunlop and Galbraith would remain colleagues and friends for the next 60 years, having offices at Harvard two doors from one another throughout their long careers.

Although Dunlop’s intention was to study with Keynes during his fellowship, Keynes’ poor health limited their interaction. Nonetheless, Dunlop’s study of wage setting in the cotton mill industry based on field work conducted during that visit led him to publish a major paper in the Economic Journal in September 1938 demonstrating a problem in Keynes’ depiction of wage rigidity in his seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936): specifically that real wages fall in recessions not in booms, contrary to simple marginal productivity analysis. In a laudatory note published with Dunlop’s paper, Keynes acknowledged the correction and the contribution of the paper. Regarding this scholarly coup, Galbraith later commented “Keynes not only conceded his error but thanked Dunlop for the correction. One thought of a graduate student in physics who successfully amended Einstein.”

Dunlop was shortly after offered a teaching fellowship at Harvard University’s economics department that he maintained throughout the rest of his life. He was tenured in 1945 and became a full professor at Harvard in 1950. He later chaired the Department of Economics between 1961 and 1966, and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences between 1970 and 1973. Dunlop was named Lamont University Professor in 1971.

Dunlop focused on wage determination and the role of markets and institutions in their determination. He wrote a series of articles in economic journals regarding the role of unions in wage setting, arguing that unions focused on balancing wage gains in collective bargaining against their employment effects. He also explored the impact of product market forces on the level of wages, arguing that neoclassical models of wage determination underplayed the important (and sometimes idiosyncratic) role of product markets. In 1958, he brought together his scholarly work on wage determination with applied experience in dispute resolution in his seminal book Industrial Relations Systems. The book proposed a model of how an “industrial relations system” brings together product market, regulatory, and technological factors with the institutional practices of labor and business to produce wages, benefits, and other workplace outcomes. Several decades of scholarly debate followed its publication. He subsequently collaborated with Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison, and Charles Myers on cross-national studies of the evolution of industrial relations systems, resulting in the book Industrialism and Industrial Man in 1960.

Dunlop trained several generations of doctoral students in the course of his career at Harvard. In the 1930s-50s, students included academics who became prominent industrial relations specialists, labor historians, and labor economists, including Irving Bernstein, David Brody, Morris Horowitz, Mark Leiserson, William Miernyk, Herbert Northrup, Jean Pearlson, Martin Segal, Jack Stieber, Lloyd Ulman, and Donald White. His students in the 1960s—80s went on to distinguished careers in labor and health economics, including Katharine Abraham, Kim Clark, Peter Doeringer, Richard B. Freeman, Jack Hirshleifer, Carol Jones, Garth Mangum, Daniel Quinn Mills, Joseph Newhouse, Michael Piore, James Scoville, Paula Voos, Michael Wachter, and David Weil. He collaborated with many other academics in a variety of fields including Frederick Abernathy, Derek Bok, Ray Goldberg, James Healy, Larry Katz, Clark Kerr, George Shultz, and Arnold Zack.

Along with his scholarly activities at Harvard, he was deeply involved in the creation of many programs and innovations at the university. In 1942, Dunlop, along with Professors Sumner Slichter and James Healy, co-founded the Harvard Trade Union Program, only the second executive program at Harvard (the first being the Neiman Fellows program in journalism) that continues to provide training to senior leaders in the labor movement in the US and around the world. He taught in this program from its founding until his death in 2003. An unnamed colleague told reporter Daniel Q. Haney of the Associated Press that Dunlop is “more at home with a plumbers’ convention than with the Harvard faculty. He even sort of looks like a plumber, the way he always wears bow ties.” He also helped to found in 1959 the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. He played significant roles in the early days of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and served as the Acting Director of its Center for Business and Government from 1987 to 1991.

Dunlop also played an active role in solving problems at the university. During a critical period in its history following the police bust in 1969 and subsequent shutdown of the University, Dunlop played a crucial role in restoring stability to the institution, leading a student faculty committee through a process to resolve the conflict and ultimately to introduce governance reforms. Following Nathan Pusey’s resignation as president, he then served as Dean and as a close advisor to President Derek Bok during the tumultuous period of the Vietnam War, settling disputes between students, faculty, and the Harvard administration. Bok commented “He probably saved this university at a very critical time after the student riots in 1968-69” with “leadership and a cool head.”

Many years later, following a highly contentious series of organizing efforts, a new union was elected at Harvard to represent clerical and technical workers. In light of the acrimony that accompanied Harvard’s campaign against unionization, Harvard President Derek Bok tapped Dunlop to lead the university’s management negotiation team. Dunlop negotiated with the President of the newly formed Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers Union, Kris Rondeau, what is widely regarded as an innovative collective bargaining agreement that focuses on problem solving and staff engagement. The agreement remains in effect today, the ninth contract currently being negotiated in 2012.

Dunlop remained on the Harvard faculty his entire life, taking Emeritus status in 1985. Even after retirement, he remained active in research and teaching including leading newly established freshmen seminars at the age of 85.