Name Howard Richards | ||
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Thesis Distributive Justice (1974) Major works Letters from QuebecUnderstanding the Global EconomyDilemmas of Social DemocraciesThe Evaluation of Cultural ActionGandhi and the Future of EconomicsRe-thinking the EconomyUnbounded Organization |
Howard richards on terrorism
Howard Richards (born June 10, 1938) is a philosopher of Social Science who works with the concepts of basic cultural structures and constitutive rules. He holds the title of Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana, United States, the Quaker School where he taught for thirty years. He officially retired from Earlham College, together with his wife Caroline Higgins in 2007, but retained the title of Research Professor of Philosophy. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the Stanford Law School, an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) from Oxford University (UK) and a PhD in Educational Planning from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada. He now teaches at the University of Santiago, Chile, and has ongoing roles at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business program. He is founder of the Peace and Global Studies Program and co-founder of the Business and Nonprofit Management Program at Earlham.
Contents
- Howard richards on terrorism
- Early life
- Academic background
- Social engagement research and teaching
- Law practice
- Major works and ideas
- Other books and articles
- Personal life
- Publications
- References
Early life
Howard Richards was born in Pasadena. California, United States, the eldest child of Kenneth F. Richards, a truck mechanic, originally from Connecticut, and his wife Donna. It was his mother's intellectual interest in philosophers such as Henri Bergson which prompted the family to break its ties with mormonism. His paternal grandparents fell into unemployment in Connecticut during the Great Depression and moved to Pasadena in 1932. It was his uncle Jack from his mother's side, who died during World War II, and especially his mother who fostered his early intellectual interest.
Academic background
After graduating from Redlands High School, CA, in June 1956, Richards enrolled in the same year as a Philosophy undergraduate at Yale. Being a top student, he was allowed to skip one year of the normal three year Major in Philosophy course. Afterwards he was admitted to Stanford Law School in 1958, graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1961. Later in that year he enrolled in graduate school at the University of California Santa Barbara, earning an M.A. in Philosophy there in 1964 with a thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre. Simultaneously he worked at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions think tank where he contributed several articles to the in-house Center Magazine. In 1965 he left for Chile, where they ultimately would settle in the town of Limache. Soon after their arrival, Howard took up the post of Dean of Studies at the Santiago College, (a college in Chile is a secondary school). While in Santiago, Howard joined the Chilean Ministry of Education as an advisor to President Eduardo Frei's Educational Reform, working on a Secondary Curriculum influenced by the ideas of the Brazilian Educator Paulo Freire In late 1970 Richards and his family left for the UK where Richards enrolled for an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) at Oxford University, simultaneously doing one on one tutorials and attending seminars by the philosophers Rom Harré and A. J. Ayer. He graduated with an honors thesis on Piaget. Back in Chile in 1972, now under president Salvador Allende, he continued to work with Freire's ideas at CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación - Educational Research and Development Center) where he founded the Parents and Children Program (Programa Padres e Hijos - PHH), a Community Development combined with a Parent Education program. Richards and his family left Chile in 1974, after Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état, but not before having helped friends and colleagues escape Pinochet's DINA police. The philosophy curriculum Richards had helped develop was repealed shortly after the coup, but was adopted in several other Latin American countries. In September 1974 Richards and his family returned to the USA where he started work at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Later that year he successfully defended his doctoral thesis in Philosophy at the University of California Santa Barbara, having done the preparatory work when still in Chile. While based in Richmond, he attended the Lawrence Kohlberg Summer School on Moral Education at Harvard University. Richards became a professor at Earlham College and was the founding director of its Peace and Global Studies program until 1989 and part-time Director until 2004. Between 1981 and 1985, Richards combined commitments in Richmond with those at OISE, Toronto, with the occasional stay in Quebec where their daughters were studying at a French-speaking school, he enrolled in another PhD program in Education, with a first field in curriculum planning and a second field in applied psychology and moral education, at the University of Toronto's Institute for Studies in Education (UT/OISE), which he successfully completed with a doctoral thesis based on the Chilean PPH program. He also became an active contributor to the OISE-based active think-tank about the new economic paradigm known as The Transformative Learning Centre (TLC).
Social engagement, research and teaching
At Stanford Law School (1958–61) he co-founded the Stanford Political Union's Socialist Caucus, became involved in the Peace Movement and began volunteer work for farm labor causes. He co-founded, with Stanford radical books seller Roy Kepler, Ira Sandperl and others, the Peninsula Peace Center, effectively running it for a while. He was also editor and author of a modest journal called Utopian Papers. After graduation from law school (1961), he joined the Santa Barbara, California Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions headed by Robert Hutchins to whom he became a personal assistant, and became the first volunteer attorney for Cesar Chavez' Farm Workers Association when he started organizing the FWA in Delano, California. He worked as evaluator of cultural change projects in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile He also did evaluative work on economic institutions (Economía Solidaria) in Argentina. Economic theory and Community Development together with Public Employment Programs are his more recent research areas. He is on the Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS), a global transdisciplinary fellowship of concerned academics and practitioners who wish to promote dignity and transcend humiliation. Richards’ principal teaching experience stretches from 1974 to 2007 as Professor of Philosophy and Education on the Peace and Global Studies Program (PAGS) at Earlham College. When no longer at Earlham, he taught short courses in different international locations. Starting in 2009 he became a distinguished fellow of the South African Research Chairs Initiative in Development Education (SARChI) based at the University of South Africa (UNISA) Pretoria, and then a collaborator at the Johannesburg-based Seriti Institute with Dr. Gavin Andersson. In South Africa, too, he teaches in the Executive MBA Program at the University of Cape Town. He is also co-chair of the Chilean group Repensar Ia Economía (Re-thinking the Economy).
Law practice
Richards was the first volunteer attorney for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers of America, protecting the union's funds against grower lawsuits. In 1983 he became member of the American Bankruptcy Institute. In 1989 he started practicing law in Santa Barbara, joining the Legal Aid Foundation and specializing in bankruptcy, In 1990 he also was a voluntary attorney at the Los Angeles Free Clinic, a practice he wound up in 2004, when he moved back to Limache, Chile.
Major works and ideas
Other books and articles
Richards has also published fourteen other books some in English and some in Spanish, among the latter, Richards, 1987, Ética y Economía (Ethics and Economics), and González Meyer & Richards (2012) Hacia otras Economias. Critica al paradigma dominante (Towards other Economies - Critique of the dominant Paradigm). A list of Richards' other books, articles, conferences and speeches (e.g. Howard Richards, 1995 Nehru Lectures) can be found on HR Professor of Peace and Global Studies (up to 2010), HR Bibliography, HR website and the more recent Unbounded Organization webpage.
Personal life
Richards married Caroline Higgins in July 1965. They have two daughters.