Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 78, Fall 1999, p. 11-12
Gene Summers, Director of the Land Tenure Center’s North American Program, and Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, received the Rural Sociological Society’s Distinguished Rural Sociologist award for 1999. Lorraine Garkovich, Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky, presented the award at the RSS annual meeting, held in Chicago, 5–8 August 1999. Her award presentation celebrated Gene Summers as teacher and researcher:
"This description of Gene Summers, the recipient of the 1999 RSS Distinguished Rural Sociologist award, will not be a catalogue of articles and books published or extramural funding gained, because the numbers do not speak to the qualities that moved so many to write letters of support for this award. The words that weave through these letters are passion, organizational brilliance, commitment, activist, pioneering research, grounded research. The distinguished rural sociologist behind these words cannot be captured by mere counting."
The thread that binds the parts of Gene Summers’ professional career together is a passionate commitment to and concern about rural people and rural communities. From his "early studies of community economic development, Gene often noted that it was the neediest and most disadvantaged members of a community that bore most of the costs of change and benefited the least from it." This knowledge spurred his most significant contributions to the discipline, as noted by Paul Voss [UW Professor of Rural Sociology]. "From the courses he taught, to the content of his research program spanning his entire professional life, the well-being of rural communities and rural people has been the connecting thread. From the broadly interdisciplinary curricular program in community, economic development and land tenure he developed, to his leadership on the national Task Force … Gene consistently brought a profound and passionate concern for the plight of those forgotten by the prophets of progress."
Gene’s leadership appears in his teaching and research on rural minorities and rural poverty. Gene led the RSS Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty—an initiative that produced "an incredible amount of scholarship with the potential to improve the lot of the rural poor." As two of his nominees note: The problem of rural poverty "is not simply an area of intellectual engagement for Gene; it is an abiding passion”; “In his heart, Gene is an activist: the kind of activist who seeks to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
More recently, Gene has led the LTC’s North American Program—a multidisciplinary program to document, research, and develop applied programs related to landownership and land management issues. The LTC’s support for studies of how landownership patterns influence the structure of economic and life opportunities in America’s rural communities is another extension of Gene’s commitment to those left behind. Sonya Salamon [Professor of Family at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] asserts: "Gene does his organizing out of a commitment to bettering resources and life chances available to those who are deprived. It is this selflessness, combined with the highest standards of scholarship, that uniquely define Gene Summers’ contributions to RSS and the discipline."
Gene’s career can also be marked by the many rural sociologists he mentored through graduate school and the many others he helped shape through his undergraduate courses. As noted by Paul Voss: "Gene was a superb teacher and model for his students.…The power of Gene’s teaching had much to do with the degree to which it remained integrated with his research, with his professional service, and with his outreach work.… Gene was very effective not only at transmitting knowledge, but, perhaps even more importantly, in helping his students see how to take responsibility for their own learning."
"For a lifetime of significant influence on rural sociology and rural people," Garkovich concluded, "I am honored to present the 1999 Rural Sociological Society’s Distinguished Rural Sociologist award to Gene Summers."
Copyright © 1999 by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
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More information about LTC's North American Program
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