Doctor of Humane Letters
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist and educator, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who studies the culture of schools, the ecology of education and the relationship between human development and social change. She pioneered an approach to social science known as portraiture, which she profiled in one of the 10 books she has written.
Lawrence-Lightfoot’s work has been widely recognized throughout her more-than-40-year career. A one-time fellow at the Bunting Institute and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, she received a MacArthur Prize in 1984. In 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize, which recognizes research that makes the “most valuable contribution to science [for] the benefit of mankind.” She became a Spencer Senior Scholar in 1995 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow by the Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2008. In 1993, Swarthmore, her alma mater, established the Sara Lawrence-Light- foot Chair, an endowed professorship, and in 1998 she received Harvard’s Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair, which, upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, making her the first African- American woman in the university’s history to have an endowed profes- sorship named in her honor.
Lawrence-Lightfoot’s books include Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978) and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (1983), winner of the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. Balm in Gilead: Journey of A Healer (1988) won the Christopher Award for “literary merit and humanitarian achievement.” Most recently, the professor has explored how mature adults reinvent themselves in The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50 (2009) and the importance of saying goodbye in Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free (2012).