W. Allen Wallis papers

Wilson Allen Wallis (1912-1998) was a professor, economist, Presidential advisor, and the Chancellor and sixth President of the University of Rochester. The papers in this collection were largely generated from Wallis’s activities outside the University of Rochester. Those relating to his positions at the University are in a separate collection of his papers in the University Archives. W. Allen Wallis, as he became known, was born in Philadelphia to Dr. Wilson Dallam Wallis, a physical anthropologist educated at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, and Grace Steele Allen Wallis of Finecastle, Virginia. Despite her lack of a college education, Grace Wallis and her husband co-wrote Our Social World, An Introduction to Social Life and Social Problems, a high school sociology textbook published in 1933, three years after Mrs. Wallis’s death. (A copy is available in our stacks.) In 1931, Dr. Wallis remarried Ruth Otis Sawtell Wallis, another physical anthropologist and author of a popular mystery series. Both her novels and research papers are available in Rush Rhees Library. W. Allen Wallis entered the University of Minnesota in 1928, where he majored in psychology and minored in sociology. During his college years he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, made President of Chi Phi fraternity, and wrote editorials for The Minnesota Daily, known then as "the world’s largest college daily." After graduating magna cum laude in 1932, Wallis entered the University of Chicago with a University Fellowship in Economics. He married Anne Armstrong of St. Paul, Minnesota on October 5, 1935. Wallis’s academic career also began around this time, as do the earliest papers in the collection. From 1935-36, he taught at Columbia University as a Granville E. Garth Fellow in Political Economy. He then served as an economist and statistician for the National Research Committee from 1936-37 and went on to work from 1937-38 as an economist for the National Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., while also teaching political economy at Yale. In 1938 he entered the Department of Economics at Stanford University, where he was later named Assistant and then Associate Professor of Economics. He would remain in this capacity until 1946. Wallis was still active elsewhere, however. He co-authored Consumer Expenditures in the United States with Hildegarde Kneeland for the National Resources Committee in 1939 and took leave from Stanford for two years to work as a Carnegie Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Shortly after the entry of the United States into World War II, Wallis was named Director of the US Office of Scientific Research Statistical Research Bureau at Columbia University (also known as the Statistical Research Group). This was Wallis’s first administrative post, and he held it until 1946. The Statistical Research Group published several collaborative papers between 1945 and 1948: Sequential Analysis of Statistical Data: Applications, Techniques of Statistical Analysis, and Sampling Inspection. Copies are included in the W. Allen Wallis collection, along with many notes, correspondence, memoranda, drafts, outlines, and other material related to Wallis’s work with the SRG. Wallis never received an official Ph.D., despite completing virtually all the requirements at Columbia and the University of Chicago. Before the formal process could be completed, he had been accepted as a full Professor of Statistics and Economics at Chicago’s Graduate School of Business under the condition that he give up his candidacy, as it was the University’s policy not to award degrees to its own tenured faculty. Wallis was named Chairman of the brand-new Department of Statistics, a Division of the Physical Sciences, in 1949. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business (as it was renamed in 2008) was instrumental in the formation of the Chicago School of economics, which emphasizes a free market with minimal government interference. As an early member of the Mont Pelerin Society (and treasurer from 1949-54) W. Allen Wallis valued these principles highly, as is evident in the collection’s extensive holdings of speeches and articles from his Chicago years to the end of his life in the 1990s. Wallis was not a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, but fellow economists George Stigler and Milton Friedman were. The trio had met as graduate students at Chicago in 1933 and would remain friends for the rest of their lives. Although the collection is light on material related to the Mont Pelerin Society, both Stigler and Friedman are present in lectures, articles, photographs, and collaborative works with Wallis. Wallis took leave from Chicago to direct the Ford Foundation’s Program of University Surveys of the Behavioral Sciences from 1953-54. The collection contains reports and correspondence relating to this project and similar undertakings related to psychology and statistics. Other examples of work in this area included a stint at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (1956-57) and articles on "The Poisson Distribution and the Supreme Court" (1936), "The Influence of Color on Apparent Size" (1935), and "Statistics of the Kinsey Report" (1949). (He followed up on Kinsey in the 1990s, when he corresponded with Dr. Judith Reisman, author of Kinsey:Crimes and Consequences, and reviewed parts of her manuscript.)Indeed, Wallis was very much an interdisciplinarian. His papers reveal interests in politics, history, contemporary issues, and administration and bureaucracy as well. Beginning in 1960 he was also Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board and the Executive Committee of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1968. March 1959 saw the beginning of Wallis’s career as a Presidential advisor. While on leave from Chicago until 1961, Wallis served as a Special Assistant to President Eisenhower and worked with Vice President Nixon on the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth. The Committee’s conclusions on inflation received considerable press coverage, as can be seen in the many newspaper articles and editorials Wallis saved. There is also a good deal of correspondence from this era, as well as copies of Wallis’s speeches and reports. W. Allen Wallis was elected President of the University of Rochester in 1962 and was officially inaugurated the following year. The collection initially included a small amount of material related to his tenure as President and then Chancellor but these have been removed and are now in the Wallis’s University of Rochester Presidential Papers. In addition to his position at the University of Rochester, Wallis was also a part of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (1962-64). President Nixon, whom Wallis had known since they worked together under President Eisenhower, appointed Wallis to several federal commissions as an advisor. Between 1968 and 1974 Wallis served on the Task Force on Education, the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (Wallis opposed the draft, in keeping with his beliefs on personal freedom), the President’s Commission on Federal Statistics (as Chairman), and the National Commission on Productivity. Shortly after President Reagan’s election in 1980, Wallis was appointed to the new Task Force on Education and the Transition Team on International Communication Agency. It was Reagan’s administration that gave W. Allen Wallis his most prestigious and influential position. Wallis’s old friend George Shultz had been named Secretary of State. Wallis served under him as Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and was often assigned to represent the United States at international conferences and economic summits. The collection contains a wealth of photographs of Wallis’s travels, in addition to several albums (including one of the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse). There is also extensive correspondence from the 1980s. Wallis’s last prominent role was his association in the 1990s with the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute as a Resident Scholar. He was socially and intellectually active right up to the end, corresponding with many notable individuals, writing, reviewing manuscripts, attending meetings and events, and giving speeches. W. Allen Wallis passed away October 12, 1998 in Strong Memorial Hospital while in Rochester to attend the memorial service of William H. Meckling, whom he had appointed as dean of the Graduate School of Business and Management (today the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration). The University of Rochester saw great expansion and development under Wallis’s direction as President and Chancellor, including increased enrollment, a new addition to Rush Rhees Library, major renovations to the Eastman School of Music, the construction of Wilson Commons, the recruitment of quality faculty, and a highly successful capital campaign that raised $10 million more than its original goal. On October 30, 1998, during Wallis’s memorial service, President Jackson announced that the Greek Revival building on Wilson Boulevard, completed in 1957 and known simply as the Administration Building, was to be renamed Wallis Hall. A final piece of Wallis’s legacy at the University of Rochester was the establishment of the Wallis Institute of Political Economy in 1992 as a collaboration between the Departments of Economics and Political Science.