Hawkins, David, 1913-2002

David Hawkins (1913-2002) grew up in New Mexico and went to Stanford University where he migrated from chemistry to physics to philosophy as an undergraduate before receiving a B.A. and M.A. in 1934 and 1936. While at Stanford, he met Frances Pockman. They married in 1937. At the University of California, Berkeley, as a Ph. D. graduate student in philosophy in 1940 and then an instructor in philosophy, Hawkins had friends among the students of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Through those students, he met Oppenheimer and, in April 1943, Oppenheimer, who was at work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, offered Hawkins a job as an administrative aide at Los Alamos. Hawkins' first job was mostly diplomacy as two cultures, military and academic, built Los Alamos and the program to build the atomic bomb. He was soon busy getting young physicists deferred from the draft with impressive-sounding misinformation about their jobs. He also attended Governing Board meetings, gaining some grasp of the evolving program. After a year or so, Hawkins was given the job of writing the wartime history of Project Y, the development of the atomic bomb. He had free access to all the top people involved, including project director J. Robert Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller. In effect, he was chronicling developments as they happened. David Hawkins left Los Alamos in August 1946, and his history remained classified until 1961. From 1946 to 1947, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. In the fall of 1947, he returned to the West when he accepted a position in the Dept. of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. At the University of Colorado, Hawkins was in charge of a physical science course for non-science students, from 1947 to 1961. Controversy arose over Hawkins in 1951 when his previous membership in the communist party at Berkeley became front-page news. He testified before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs on December 20, 1950, stating that he had been a member of the communist party, but had left it prior to going to Los Alamos. The University's Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure investigated the Hawkins Case, and found him to be a valuable member of the faculty at the University of Colorado. David Hawkins was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists, a winner of the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and a visiting professor at a number of colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada and Italy. He served as a consultant to the National Institute of Education and the National Science Foundation. From 1962 on, David and Frances Hawkins, a leader in early childhood education, took a special interest in improving science education for elementary school children. First they established the Elementary Science Advisory Center to improve the standard of science teaching in elementary schools. The scale of their efforts increased in 1970 with the Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, funded with a grant from the Ford Foundation and university money. He and Frances became known internationally for their writings whose central goal was to find and create rich, diversified environments for learning.

From the description of David Hawkins papers, 1863-2001. (Denver Public Library). WorldCat record id: 316067843

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