File:David Glass, c1970s (4303691460).jpg

Reader in Sociology 1943-48, Professor of Sociology 1948-1978

?David Victor Glass 1911-1978. David Glass died suddenly of a heart attack on September 23, 1978, exactly one week before he was due to retire from the Martin White Chair of Sociology, which he had occupied with great distinction since 1961. His entire academic career was spent at LSE. He arrived as an undergraduate in 1928 to read for the degree of B.Sc. (Econ) with Geography as a special subject and graduated in 1931. He remained at the school, working first as Research Assistant to Sir William Beveridge. In 1935 he published his first book The Town and Changing Civilization. However, largely as a result of his association with Professor Lancelot Hogben, who was Professor of Social Biology at the school from 1930-1937 and the group of workers in that department, Glass?s interests turned to the study of population problems. When Professor Carr-Saunders, himself a distinguished demographer, came to the School as Director in 1936 and the Population Investigation Committee was founded, David Glass became its first research secretary, and for most of the years before the war was the only member of its staff?Glass had gone to the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship when the war broke out. He was recruited as a Statistician to the British Ministry of Supply and served as such both in Washington and London. In 1944 he was appointed a member of both the Statistics Committee and the Biological and Medical Committee of the Royal Commission on Population?In the meantime, he had joined the School?s academic staff as Reader in Demography in 1945, and was appointed Professor of Sociology in 1948?Glass took part in undergraduate teaching at LSE, but his main contribution was in the graduate school. The number of research students he supervised was well above the norm?During the last ten years he developed and directed the M.Sc. course in Demography?He received honorary degrees from a number of British and foreign universities, he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and one of the very small number of men who became both Fellows of the Royal Society and of the British Academy?? From ?Obituaries,? LSE Magazine November 1978, No 56, p.11-12

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