Political scientist and social welfare and civil rights activist Michael Lipsky, was born in New York City on April 13, 1940. He attended Oberlin College, receiving a B.A. in 1961, and Princeton University from which he received an M.P.A. and an M.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967. While at Princeton, Lipsky became involved in student activism and the civil rights movement. In 1963 he traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to help publish the Mississippi Free Press, a civil rights movement-oriented newspaper. On his return he volunteered to be adult advisor to the Princeton student organization Friends of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). In 1964 he was a volunteer at the freedom school in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he worked in voter registration and citizen education. During 1965-1966 Lipsky was a Brookings Institute research fellow, and in 1966 he became a consultant for Education Associates, Inc., a firm that served in turn as consultants to the Office of Economic Opportunity for the Upward Bound program.
Lipsky's activism both at Princeton and in the South led to a research interest in the struggle of the disadvantaged, especially African-Americans in northern cities, and his dissertation was entitled “Rent Strikes in New York City: Protest Politics and the Power of the Poor.” Prior to the completion of his dissertation (1967), Lipsky was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught in this capacity from 1966 to 1969. While at the University he was also a staff associate of the Institute for Research on Poverty and he served as special assistant to the chancellor for the University's equal opportunity program. In this capacity Lipsky was primarily responsible for developing a program to increase minority enrollment.
During his years at Wisconsin, Lipsky began a research collaboration with graduate student David J. Olson which continued even after Olson graduated in 1971. This collaboration concerned the political responses of state and national officials to the urban race riots of 1967 and 1968. Part of this research became the basis of Olson's dissertation, “Racial Violence and City Politics: the Political Response to Civil Disorders in Three American Cities.” It also became a 1977 book written jointly by Lipsky and Olson, Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America.
Michael Lipsky joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, and taught there until 1991, when he became associated with the Peace and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation in New York City.
After graduation from the University of Wisconsin, David J. Olson went on to teach Political Science at Indiana University and later at the University of Washington.
