Click here to download a PDF of Bill Wickersham’s “Reflections of a University of Missouri Peace Activist: 1962-1970”
Bill Wickersham is an educational psychologist and peace educator whose post-doctoral work in peace psychology was under the directon of Dr. Theodore F. Lentz, at the Peace Research Lab, St. Louis, Missouri. His military service was in the U.S. Army, where he served as an enlisted man, and was a graduate of the Army’s Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia.
He was a University of Missouri – Columbia staff and faculty member from 1959 to 1970, serving as Program Director of the Memorial Student Union, as Assistant Director of the Community Action Training Center, and as Professor of Extension Education. He also taught for the School of Social and Community Services, and for the College of Education.
After being fired from the University in 1970 for non-violent anti-war activities concerning the U.S. war in Vietnam, he served as an assistant to former U.S. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania who was President of the World Federalists, U.S.A., and founder of the bipartisan Congressional caucus known as Members of Congress for Peace Through Law. He was also a founding supporter of the Center for Defense Information. Other teaching assignments were at the Universities of Iowa and Southern Illinois (Carbondale), and at Prescott College in Arizona. At Iowa, he was College Program Coordinator for the College of Law’s Center for World Order Studies.
From 1981 to 1985, he was Executive Director of the World Federalist Association, Washington, DC, under the direction of the organization’s president, noted editor and peace advocate, Norman Cousins. From 1985 to 1994 he served as a national training manager for the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In the later 1990’s, Wickersham returned to the University of Missouri as an Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies, a position which he still holds today.
In 2001, he was awarded the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Peace Award from the Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Currently, he serves as an associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, as a member of Global Action to Prevent War, and as a member of Veterans for Peace.