Charles Zachary Wilson is an American economist who is Professor Emeritus at UCLA's Graduate School of Education. He was the first Black individual to serve as an Academic Vice-Chancellor in the

University of California System The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

, and was among the founders of the

National Economic Association The National Economic Association (NEA) is a learned society established in 1969, focused on initiatives in the field of economics. The purposes of the Association are "to promote the professional lives of minorities within the profession. In a ...

Education and early life

Born in the

Mississippi Delta The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo ...

, Wilson earned a B.S. (1952) and PhD (1956) in Economics and Statistics from the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

, completed post-doctoral training in Engineering Economics at the

Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...

in 1959, and later trained in Family Counseling at

California State University, Northridge California State University, Northridge (CSUN or Cal State Northridge) is a public university in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. With a total enrollment of 38,551 students (as of Fall 2021), it has the second largest un ...

and Management for Entrepreneurs at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

Career

Wilson taught at

DePaul University DePaul University is a private university, private, Catholic higher education, Catholic research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded by the Congregation of the Mission, Vincentians in 1898, the university takes its name from the 17th-centu ...

's School of Business and then at

SUNY-Binghamton The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public university, public research university with campuses in Binghamton, New York, Binghamton, Vestal, New York, Vestal, and Johnson City, New Yor ...

, where he became the first Black full professor on that faculty. He joined UCLA in 1968 as a professor in the Graduate School of Education. In 1970, he became Vice-Chancellor of Academic Programs, where he served until 1984. From 1985 to 1996 he was Publisher of Central News-Wave Publications, Inc, one of the largest black newspapers in the United States.

Selected works

* Wilson, Charles Z., and Marcus Alexis. "Basic frameworks for decisions." Academy of Management Journal 5, no. 2 (1962): 150–164. * Alexis, Marcus, Thaddeus Spratlen, and Charles Z. Wilson. "Robert Browne and the Caucus of black economics." The Review of Black Political Economy 35, no. 2-3 (2008): 61–66. * Wilson, Charles Z. "Organization Theory: A Survey of Three Views." The Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 1 (1961). * Wilson, Charles Z., and Marcus Alexis. "Organizational Decision-Making" * Wilson, Charles Z., "Crossing Organizational Boundaries By Choice"

References

American economists African-American economists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) DePaul University faculty Binghamton University faculty UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies faculty American newspaper publishers (people) Presidents of the National Economic Association 21st-century African-American academics 21st-century American academics 20th-century African-American academics 20th-century American academics {{US-economist-stub