Julian Stanley
(1918-2005)
ulian Stanley started his career as a high school math teacher, after getting his bachelors from the Georgia Southern University. He went on to get his doctorate in education from Harvard in 1950, as well as two honorary doctorates from North Texas and the State University of West Georgia. After receiving his doctorate, he taught at Vanderbilt, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and finally Johns Hopkins. He spent decades working for gifted children to help provide an outlet for their advanced intellect and at the age of 87, had made more of a positive impact in our nation's gifted youth than just about anyone.
His most notable work, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research on Teaching, has remained a benchmark in educational psychology since its publication in 1963. In 1971, he began the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youths to help identify young students with highly advanced intellect. Eight years later, he created the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University where students 13 and younger with incredible skills in mathematics could participate in college level programs, some achieving their doctorate when normal students would be graduating from college. He believed that students were often not allowed a means of utilizing their extreme talents, and the center helped provide them with an outlet for this talent.
After such an incredibly dedicated career, Stanley was awarded the Mensa Lifetime Achievement Award for his work. His name was also added to the distinguished lecture of the Henry B. & Jocelyn Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development, hosted by the University of Iowa to bring together researchers devoted to highly gifted students, and the educators facilitating their learning needs as Stanley so graciously did. While he may no longer be with us, his research lives on in the many centers that were created based upon his work.
A Kind and Compassionate Intellectual Giant
Julian Stanley and I met in 1991, at the University of Iowa's first Wallace Symposium. Our friendship was immediate and we began corresponding and talking on the phone almost weekly with a few visits sprinkled in. We spent many enjoyable hours together over the years, and he became one of my teachers.
Julian was as impressive interpersonally as he was scientifically. He loved to talk, with his personal charm being every bit as distinctive as his methodological acumen and scientific integrity. His wisdom can be experienced in his advice to graduate students (Stanley, 1995) and in how it shaped his educational philosophy on the importance of appropriate developmental placement, which should be required reading for all educational psychologists and policy makers (Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Stanley, 2000). Julian believed that all children have the right to learn something new every day, and that educators have a responsibility of ensuring that they do (Colangelo et al., 2004).
In 1992, Camilla Persson Benbow and I organized a symposium to celebrate this great man's extraordinary career: high school teacher, world class methodologist, creator of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), and mentor of intellectually talented students and developing scientists. Knowing how busy the contributors we sought were, we invited twice as many speakers as we hoped to secure. How we underestimated how strongly people felt about Julian and his contributions! All but two agreed to come and we had a spectacular event! Over the course of 14 hours, 8:30 AM to 10:30 PM, on Easter Sunday and during Passover, stopping only for meals, 22 distinguished speakers presented scientific papers on education, genetics, learning, and measurement that had been influenced by Julian's work (Benbow & Lubinski, 1996). Lee J. Cronbach captured the participants' sentiments best: "In 100 years, when the history of gifted education is written, Lewis Terman and Julian Stanley are the two names that will be remembered."
Ten years later, the Wallace Symposium, the ultimate research conference on giftedness, established a Julian C. Stanley Distinguished Lecture to acknowledge his contributions. I was deeply honored to deliver the first lecture (with Julian in the audience), where I provided empirical support for Julian's forecasts about the educational and career accomplishments of gifted youth whose needs have been met by drawing on data provided by the SMPY longitudinal study (Benbow et al., 2000; Lubinski et al., 2001). More recently, in a 20-year follow-up, and the last manuscript of ours to profit from Julian's insights and notorious red pen (Lubinski, Benbow et al., in press), the level of creative accomplishments of profoundly gifted youth, identified before age 13 and served subsequently, surpassed even Julian's expectations. In future extensions of his work, I suspect that Julian's expectations for himself will be surpassed as well.
Julian shone light on individual differences in learning rates and how tailoring the pace of the curriculum toward the individuality of each student engenders more learning for all even if individual differences in achievement increase. Although through his research we learned that one size will never fit all, and how powerful the effects of talent development can be, Julian's mentoring and teaching offered something for everyone.
I will forever miss his brilliance, friendship, and wisdom. I also will miss the traces of his pen.
— David Lubinski
Vanderbilt University
Tribute to Julian
Julian loved his work. He loved ideas, he loved methodology, he loved research questions. He was never too tired to talk about issues in gifted education, about individual differences, about the imperative to understand the uniqueness of each child and then respond to that uniqueness. If you sent Julian a research manuscript for his comments, you would receive comments in the margins in his unique handwriting. His comments were hard to read, but easy to understand. Julian was not just astute, he was courageous. He believed in honesty, both as a scientist and as a man. It was always refreshing to be around Julian. And he loved movies!
I think Julian will always be connected to the concept of above-level testing. He believed that well-formulated tests of mathematics and verbal reasoning could tell us a lot about the academic potential of a child. He certainly understood and respected that tests had their limits and could never capture the whole child, but he also believed strongly that tests could and did provide rich and valid information that had academic relevance. Julian never stood down when it came to defending tests, and it would have been easy to "just give in a bit." Above-level testing and talent search are part of the lexicon of gifted education today and will be for many years to come. Julian's insight about above-level testing has produced the most powerful model we have today in the identification of exceptional mathematics and verbal abilities. The talent search reaches hundreds of thousands of students every year. I know of nothing else in the field that approaches that impact. In my estimation, Julian Stanley will be viewed as one of the most—if not the most—influential people in gifted education.
I started this tribute with Julian's love for his work. I am saving the most important for last. The most defining aspect of Julian was his love for people. He was a friend and mentor to so many in the field. It seems everyone who knew Julian was greatly influenced. Every student Julian met was special to him and that is his legacy.
For me, Julian was a friend and mentor. Establishing the Julian C. Stanley Distinguished Lecture as part of the Wallace Research Symposium is a genuine tribute to this wonderful man.
— Nicholas Colangelo
University of Iowa
Forever Improving
In the mid-1970s, Julian Stanley, a friend of my husband Hal, accepted our invitation to visit us at the University of Washington as a distraction after the death of his first wife.
During that visit, Julian spoke with infectious enthusiasm about the several very young students who were thriving at Johns Hopkins. Julian was so inspiring that Hal said, "If Julian can do it, we can do it," and proceeded to develop a program of radical acceleration to college for very young students on our own campus.