Rensis Likert served as vice president of the American Statistical Association from 1953 to 1955 and was president of the ASA in 1959. His service to the ASA, however, hardly begins to indicate the breadth of the achievements of his long and vigorous career.
Likert was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1903. After living with his parents in several states, he entered the University of Michigan in 1922. There, he concentrated on civil engineering for a couple of years, until he took a course in sociology. Robert Angell recalls him from that class as his brightest engineering student. The respect was mutual, and Likert found that his scientific interests were more in people than in things. He transferred in his senior year from the college of engineering and took his bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1926.
Likert went from Michigan to Union Theological Seminary for one year, then to the Columbia University Department of Psychology, where he took his PhD in 1932. At Columbia, Likert gradually moved from traditional fields of psychology to the new social psychology. In this, he was influenced by Gardner Murphy, who served as chair for his dissertation committee. His doctoral research dealt with a wide-ranging set of attitudes, interrelating student attitudes toward race and international affairs; it was published in 1932 as “A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes.”
Engineering, sociology, psychology, ethics, and statistics. Likert maintained throughout his life an energetic appreciation of concepts and values from all these areas. He was always curious about how things work[ed] and how to fix them when they did not. His strong feel for structures and measurements also showed in his quantitative and pragmatic approaches to social problems and social measurements. The year at Union Theological Seminary was reflected in his openness, his optimism, and both his desire and his ability to do good.