Sam Richards (sociologist)

Early years

Growing up in a working class household with no expectations by family or teachers to attend college, Richards reluctantly enrolled in classes at his local university but after two-and-a-half years he still had not achieve sophomore status. “I was busy working and trying to be a rock star,” he claims. But midway through his third year he contracted a fever to learn and directed all of his energies toward his studies, deciding that sociology would offer the “greatest flexibility to learn everything about anything.”

Education

Richards received his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Toledo, both in sociology. He also received a PhD from Rutgers University in Sociology and the socioeconomic development of Latin America and Africa.

University of Toledo

At age 24, Richards was hired to teach a cybernetics course called “Cybernetics and Human Ecology” at the University of Toledo. The first class session was starting only fifteen minutes after he signed the contract – and he didn’t even know what cybernetics was. So the first thing he did when class started is to ask if anyone knew. Today he still recalls that as one of the most amazing teaching experiences of his life.

Pennsylvania State University

Richards began teaching at Pennsylvania State University in 1990. He is a senior lecturer at The Pennsylvania State University and teaches the largest race relations course in the United States. This course, Sociology 119 – Race and Ethnic Relations, enrolls 725 students each semester. As a professor, he is well known on campus and his iconoclasm landed him in "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," a book published by David Horowitz that critiques the dominance of liberal thinking in the academy—which is ironic given that he is a registered Libertarian. This video is a trailer for Sociology 119.

World In Conversation

Along with Dr. Laurie Mulvey, Dr. Richards serves as the co-director of the World In Conversation Center for Public Diplomacy at Penn State. As a 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow, Richards created the organization website www.worldinconversation.org.

TEDx

Richard's TEDx Talk called a "Radical Experiment in Empathy" was the third most-widely viewed TEDx talk in the world as of May 2011.

Travel

Richards has traveled to a wide range of destinations including Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Turkey, Central America, Kuwait, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, the Netherlands, Japan, France, Ireland, England, Poland, Czech Republic and throughout the United States.