As the skit began, says Skocpol, "[Wilson] sat in the audience looking serious, Al Gore-like, as he always does."

The skit featured a student playing Wilson as he went out into the inner-city to study poverty. Skocpol says the student playing Wilson knocked on a door in the ghetto and said, "Hello! I'm Bill Wilson, the Lucy Flower University Professor from the University of Chicago. And I have been given a million dollars by a prestigious foundation to study...YOU!"

"Well, [Wilson] watched this all very seriously, with everyone surreptitiously watching to see how he would react to the obvious teasing about all the money he was getting to study the desperately poor," says Skocpol. "And then, suddenly, just as the 'YOU' and the handshake occurred...[Wilson] broke out into a huge smile, one of the biggest I have ever seen him give."

Those who work with Wilson, who is in his early 60s, have nothing but praise for the sociologist.

"I have never known anyone...who does not like Bill Wilson as a person, which is pretty unusual for someone as prominent as he is," Skocpol says.

"[Wilson] is someone who is modest and very willing to listen to other people's opinions," says Edward Walker, Wilson's personal assistant. "He doesn't assert all the time that he is right."

But Wilson does travel extensively around the country to speak about his research. And he has become a valued adviser to the Clinton administration.

"It's odd that the man I spend my life working for," says Walker, "I frequently don't get to see."

"He's one of those people who has a terrible time saying 'no.' So he's terribly overcommitted" Jencks says. "Actually, he may say 'no' 80 percent of the time, and he's still terribly overcommitted."

Wilson's students say he is a valued adviser--though he is at times remote because of his busy schedule.

"He's not the kind of mentor who's there all the time," says Mignon R. Moore, a fifth-year graduate student at Chicago. "But if you ask him to read something or consider some ideas you have, he'll get back to you. He's very encouraging and motivating."

Affecting Social Policy

Wilson's move to Harvard marks a major turn in his career. No longer will he be in a sociology department; in fact, now he is a government school professor.

But Wilson, as independent in action as he is in thought, wants this. When Wilson announced his decision to come to Harvard last February, he told reporters that he wanted to join a faculty where he could affect social policy.

Wilson resisted the recruiting efforts of Gates, the Kennedy School and Harvard presidents for years. Only in the last two years or so was there any hint that Wilson might be thinking of leaving Chicago.