Benson, Peter L.

In a scholarly world that values dispassionate specialization, Peter L. Benson has persistently pursued a broad quest for understanding—and influencing—the individual, family, community, and social forces that shape young people's lives, beliefs, values, and commitments. Undaunted by those who insist on methodological purity, he has embraced multiple ways of learning, knowing, and teaching. In a time when policymakers and academic leaders advocate for “proven programs” to address risks and deficits in the lives of young people, Benson articulates a vision and strategies for broad community innovation based on building strengths or developmental assets.

Benson's international reputation in applied developmental science emerged in the 1990s through his innovative, research-based framework of developmental assets and the accompanying vision of multifaceted, community-based change. Yet his approach and the themes in his work emerged much earlier, beginning in his family of origin.

Born on May 2, 1946, in Duluth, Minnesota, to John and Dorothy Benson, Peter spent his childhood and adolescence watching his father, a Lutheran pastor, and mother, a homemaker, model social concern and action during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. He recounts stories of his father giving calling cards to homeless people who came to the parsonage asking for help. With that card, they could go to a local restaurant for a meal, and the restaurant would bill the pastor. No one was ever turned down. Peter also remembers his father mobilizing fellow clergy to get [Page 145]involved in the cause of civil rights, including actively registering African Americans to vote.

The Benson family moved every 5 years or so throughout Peter's childhood, following John's pastoral assignments. After Duluth, they lived in Salina, Kansas; Chicago; Joliet, Illinois; and Rockford, Illinois, where Peter graduated from high school before attending Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. There his integrative thinking and penchant for scholarship began to emerge, as he earned a double major in psychology and religion and became intrigued with many other disciplines, including anthropology, biology, ethics, and sociology. He also became active in campus antiwar protests, which became formative in his ongoing attention to social change and social movements. Upon college graduation in 1968, Benson and his fiancée, Tunie Munson, an aspiring writer and social activist, moved to the New York City area and then married a year later. He attended Yale University, where he earned an MA in psychology of religion (1970), studying under James E. Dittes, who became a lifelong mentor.

After completing his Yale degree, Benson and Munson-Benson moved to Denver, where he studied at the University of Denver under Bernard Spilka. He earned another MA (1972) and a PhD (1973) in experimental social psychology, with a concentration in child development. His dissertation focused on the development of altruism, establishing a lifelong interest in how the inner life forms and shapes behavior.

His first full-time position was as an assistant professor of psychology at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti (1973–1975). The themes of his work truly began to emerge, however, when he moved in 1975 to Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana, with a deep commitment to social justice and change. He was first an assistant professor of psychology, but became the department chair a year later. In 1977, Benson became the founding cochair of the Program in Human Development and Social Relations, an interdisciplinary major in anthropology, biology, ethics, psychology, and sociology that became the school's most popular major. Among other features, the program required that no professor could lecture in her or his own discipline; rather, they were to model ongoing scholarship by teaching in other fields.

...