Vol. 19, No. 2 - Winter 2003

Linking up with emeriti faculty: Bill Hartup, child development

Perhaps it was because he did it without a plan, but when Willard (Bill) Hartup retired from the Institute of Child Development five years ago, he didn’t really retire. Instead he’s pursuing research and writing with a new level of freedom.

“The things I’m involved in I do out of no sense of obligation. My motives are personal,” says the Regents professor emeritus of child development. “I’m a person of limited hobbies and after I retired it became obvious that work was necessary to my feelings of self-worth. I’m interested in these issues and ideas I’m working on. I think I have something to give.”

Hartup, one of only three faculty in the college ever honored as a University Regents professor, says one of his priorities in retirement has been his research with Dutch colleagues involving the incidence and significance of children and adolescents who have mutual enemies or animosities among one another.

“In 1998, I and one of my last Ph.D. students, Maurissa Abecassis (now a professor at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire) began looking at the topic of mutual antipathies because it had been completely untouched,” Hartup says. “This work has turned out to be quite interesting to others and, since our initial papers, many others have begun looking at the topic.”

What the research is showing, Hartup says, is that children who are involved in several mutual antipathic relationships carry predictions of such social mal-adjustments as risky behavior, social withdrawal, substance abuse, and aggressiveness.

Retirement also has allowed Hartup the time to cowrite, with ICD colleague Richard Weinberg, a history of the Institute published in 2000 for its 75th anniversary. He has written historical research review papers and has edited a book with a “look backward-look forward” nature, Growing Points in Developmental Science.

Since 1999, Hartup has served as chair of the steering committee of the National Institute of Child Health and Development’s (NICHD) study of the effects of early child care on child and youth development. “Seventy papers have come from this study to date,” he says. “I serve as the independent scholar outside of the study who acts as a coordinator of all of these activities. It’s a way for me to give back to the field where I got my start.”