Last year, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American studies department, gathered the department's leading scholars for a dinner party at his home.

This was not a social gathering but a business meeting with one purpose: to convince renowned University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson to come to Harvard.

Harvard, in particular the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where Wilson this fall became Wiener professor of public policy, was after the scholar and author of The Truly Disadvantaged for years.

Provost Albert Carnesale, former dean of the Kennedy School, says the University was trying for at least 10 years to attract Wilson to Harvard before the sociologist finally decided to join the faculty in February.

"Previous deans of the Kennedy School Graham Allison and Robert Putnam had made attempts to entice Professor Wilson to come to Harvard," Carnesale says. "When I became dean, I simply followed in their footsteps."

Gates joined the pursuit of Wilson when he became chair of the Department of the Afro-American Studies in 1991.

To recruit Wilson, Gates flew to Chicago for an afternoon just so that they could have lunch together. As their meal ended, Gates "let the other shoe drop" and asked Wilson to come to Harvard.

"He smiled at me like I was a small boy," says Gates. "I felt like a little leaguer in the presence of Willie Mays."

Since the publication of his second book, The Declining Significance of Race, in 1978, the controversial Wilson, who refused to be interviewed for this article, has been playing in the big leagues.

Studying the Urban Poor

The man who The New York Times has called "one of the country's leading sociologists" has indeed become the Willie Mays--or perhaps more accurately the Jackie Robinson--of sociology by swirling academic dust clouds, never seeming afraid to stick his scholarly neck out.

"[Wilson's] work is unusual because it takes on major social issues courageously and lets the evidence fall where it may," says Professor of Government and of Sociology Theda Skocpol.

Wilson's most recent book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, is a case in point.

In a New York Times Magazine article adapted from the book, Wilson writes: "The disapperance of work in the ghetto cannot be ignored, isolated or played down. Employment in America is up. The economy has churned out tens of millions of new jobs in the last two decades. In that same period, joblessness among inner-city blacks has reached catastrophic proportions. Yet in this presidential election year the disappearance of work in the ghetto is not on either the Democratic or the Republican agenda. There is harsh talk about work instead or welfare but no talk of where to find it."

This most recent work, like Wilson's previous studies, draws on his research in Chicago's South Side neighborhood, practically in the back yard of the University of Chicago where Wilson taught for 24 years.

In his two previous books, The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson used his scrupulously collected data in much the same way and then called things as he saw them.