Introduction to J.
Gilmour Sherman and his
Fred Keller Memorial Lecture
Eastern Psychological Association Meetings, 2001
Howard F. Gallup
Emeritus Professor, Lafayette College
Welcome to the first Fred Keller Memorial Lecture. Three independent committees have been working to raise funds to endow annual lectures, all honoring past presidents of EPA: Fred Keller (1956-1957), Richard Solomon (1962-1963), and Virgina Sexton (1983-1984). My name is Howard Gallup, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Lafayette College, and the Chair of the Fred Keller Fund Raising Committee. Additional funds are still needed, so if today's event should make you feel generous, please send a contribution to EPA, earmarked for one of these funds.
Ludy Benjamin, EPA President in 1996-1997, asked me to select and chair the Fred Keller committee. Let me express thanks to my three colleagues for
their efforts over the past four years: Robert Allan, Lafayette College, William Buskist, Auburn University, and David Eckerman, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Thanks also to all of you who have contributed to these funds. Thanks are also due to the administration of Lafayette College for financing almost all of the expenses incurred by us in our solicitation efforts.
Let me begin my introduction of Gil sherman, today's speaker, with a short anecdote, not about him, but about a pair of Fred's. I met Fred Keller initially in 1957 when he and Frances brought their daughter, Anne, to Hobart and William Smith Colleges where I was on the faculty and would be her designated academic adviser. I met Fred Skinner initially in 1964 when I persuaded him to give a public talk at Lafayette College to which I had moved in 1958. I saw the two Fred's together only once. It was in the summer of 1976 when some 25 dedicated users of the Personalized System of Instruction, including Gil Sherman, met for a long weekend near Austin, Texas to write a book, PSI: The State of the Art. PSI is short for the Personalized System of Instruction, one of Fred Keller's major contributions to psychology and education.
The team to which I was assigned was busy drinking coffee and eating Danish early one morning, not yet working overtly on our chapter. We were on a screened porch with several large flies that had come in through holes in the screening, and I was busy getting rid of them. Flies always take off from a resting position by jumping upwards and backwards before they fly. All that is required to assassinate one of them is to slip up behind it and clap your hands four or five inches above and two or three inches behind it, and that is the end of the living fly. While I was thus engaged, the two Fred's walked in and, of course, had to know what I was doing. An explanation and demonstration of my skill were in order. When I finished, Fred Skinner thanked me very seriously for teaching him something about behavior that he had not known. Fred Keller said very simply: "Howard, before you eat any more Danish, don't you think you should wash your hands?"
J. Gilmour Sherman, our speaker today, is an avowed behaviorist who worked long and closely with Fred Keller on PSI and he was a strong leader in the rapid rise and development of it. Gil earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Columbia University in 1959. He was one of the original group of North Americans and Brazilians that developed PSI in Brazil in the early 1960's, having gone to Brazil on a Fullbright Appointment. He was awarded a medal by the Brazilian government for his contributions to education in that country. He was a professor at Georgetown University from 1969 to 1990, when he retired from academic life.
We, the committee members, consider Gil to be the right person to remind us of Fred Keller's importance in American psychology. He is especially
appropriate since academic psychology has all but washed it's hands of Behaviorism, the once dominant orientation in American psychology from 1912 until the middle of the 20th Century. And, academia in general, including academic psychology, has all but washed its hands of The Keller Method, despite the well documented superiority of PSI over every other method of instruction with which it has been compared in psychology and in other disciplines. The title of Gil Sherman's talk honoring Fred Keller is: "What Do You Say About A Legend?"