Prof. Wilbur Scott
Winner of the Morris Janowitz Career Achievement Award at the 2019 Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society conference

Wilbur Scott was trained at Louisiana State University in the eclectic tradition of political sociology developed there by the German émigré and scholar, Rudolf Heberle. Scott’s 1976 dissertation accounted for the stunning election of New Orleans’ first black mayor in 1972, just seven years after the Voting Rights Act enfranchised African-Americans. Over the next ten years at the University of Oklahoma, Scott published astute analyses of many other elections and political controversies.
 
Scott’s subsequent work may be best described as that of a sociologist making sense of his own experiences as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam and veteran thereafter. The first phase culminated in a ground-breaking work, The Politics of Readjustment. This 1993 book has been hailed as a definitive treatise on the sociology of veterans’ issues. In 1995, he and Sandra Carson Stanley published an especially timely volume, Gays and Lesbians in the Military, addressing the U.S. military’s newly-adopted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.
 
In 2004, Scott moved to the U.S. Air Force Academy, first as Distinguished Visiting Professor, then Resident Sociologist. His research expanded to include leader decision-making in complex socio-cultural war environments and the sociologies of irregular warfare and remotely-piloted aircraft. His courses developed a popular following at USAFA among cadets, especially his Sociology of Violence and War. In military sociology, Scott has more than 60 refereed articles, book chapters, and invited presentations. Scott and co-authors Karin De Angelis and David Segal currently are completing the book, Sociology through the Prism of Military Sociology.
 
Scott is now Professor Emeritus, both at the University of Oklahoma and the U.S. Air Force Academy. He and his wife, Carol, live in downtown Colorado Springs.