G William Domhoff

Early life

Domhoff was born in Youngstown, Ohio and raised in Rocky River, Ohio, 12 miles from Cleveland. His parents were George William Domhoff Sr., a loan executive, and Helen S. (Cornett) Domhoff, a secretary at the same company, before becoming a homemaker when he was born. Once his younger sister enrolled in college, his mother returned to work as a secretary at Magnificat High School, a Catholic School, then a doctor's office.

In high school, Domhoff was a tri-athlete in baseball, basketball, and football as running back, wrote for his school newspaper's sports section, served on student council, and won the batboy position for the Cleveland Indians. His sister was a cheerleader, in an admittedly idyllic upbringing in a sheltered world. He graduated as co-valedictorian and tested in the top 1 percent in Ohio, where his name appeared in print for the first time.

Education

Domhoff received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at Duke University (1958), where he finished freshman year as sixth in his class, wrote for the Duke Chronicle, played baseball as an outfielder, tutored the student-athletes, and was classmates with Elizabeth Dole. During undergrad, he also wrote for The Durham Sun and received his Phi Beta Kappa key. He later earned a Master of Arts in Psychology at Kent State University (1959), and a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Miami (1962).

Personal life

In 1961 at 25, he married Judy Boman, a nursery school teacher. They had four children, including Lori (née Domhoff) Hill, wife of Glenallen Hill, a former MLB player on the Chicago Cubs (1993–94, 1998–2000), San Francisco Giants (1995–97), and New York Yankees (2000).

Founding faculty, research professor, dean, and chair

In the early 1960s, Domhoff was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles.

In 1965, he became Assistant Professor, and then Associate Professor of Psychology in 1969 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a founding faculty member of the UCSC Cowell College as a Research Professor of Psychology and Sociology from 1975 until his early retirement in 1994.

Domhoff eventually served as Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, sociology chair, chair of the Academic Senate, chair of the Committee on Academic Personnel, chair of the Statewide Committee on Preparatory Education (chairing four committees total), a Research Committee member, and founder of the Santa Cruz Harbor Commission, before retiring early in 1994 at 58, while remaining an active scholar in both fields.

In 2007, he received the University of California's Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which honors the postretirement contributions of UC faculty.

Author

His first book, Who Rules America? (1967), was a 1960s bestseller (#12) arguing that the United States is dominated by an elite ownership class, both politically and economically. The was followed by a series of sociology and power structure books like C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968), Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1978), and three other bestsellers: The Higher Circles (1970, #39), The Powers That Be (1979, #47), and Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43).

Domhoff also wrote six subsequent WRA editions, all used as sociology textbooks, including Who Rules America Now?, Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance (2009), Who Rules America? Power and Politics (2013), Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (2013), and the forthcoming, Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America (2017). The University of California, Santa Cruz hosts his online summary collection, also titled "Who Rules America?"

As a pioneer of scientific dream research, his other research books include Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, (1996), The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis (2003), and the forthcoming, The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and The Default Network by Oxford University Press.