Sociology Department Unveils Two Prestigious New Awards

Prior to Lois B. DeFleur becoming the first female president of the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1990, she spent her early career at Washington State University. Her influential career also included time as provost at the University of Missouri. She has a doctorate in sociology from the University of Illinois, where she studied juvenile delinquency in Latin America and has done extensive work in the fields of deviant behavior and occupational socialization.

Presently, Lois has committed to funding graduate students in the Department of Sociology with a gift of $25,000. This unrestricted gift will allow the Department of Sociology to provide student support for such things, including but not limited to, tuition and fees, subsistence, research expenses, and other educationally related costs. Unrestricted gifts such as this can provide necessary resources for both recruitment and retention of talented graduate students from around the world, who will come to make their own influence in the study of sociology in today’s societies. 

You can read more about Lois’s career in her co-authored book, We Few, We Academic Sisters: How We Persevered and Excelled in Higher Education. The book shares Lois’s and two other female colleagues’ trailblazing stories of navigating careers in higher education during the late 60s and early 70s. They are among the few women of their time who worked at a university willing to hire married couples. Their autobiographies tell us how far academic women have come, though they still have far to go.