Professor Lisa Saunders – In Memoriam

Lisa received her undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Old Dominion University and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California Berkeley in 1987. She joined the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she was promoted to tenured Associate Professor and remained until she retired in 2021, becoming Professor Emerita. She also held visiting appointments at the University of Minnesota and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
 
Lisa set an outstanding example for how to use research and teaching to make economics a better and more inclusive discipline and to make the world more just. She was devoted to students, teaching courses on the political economy of women and political economy of racism that inspired some students to become economists and encouraged all students to think more critically about economics and the economy. She also taught courses on labor, microeconomics, and research methods and writing in economics. She set high standards for all of her students and especially enjoyed working with students in the Honors Program. She was always interested in discussing pedagogy and willing to offer advice to colleagues on teaching matters. On the wall in her office was a sign saying “assume nothing,” a reminder to her students and herself to keep an open mind about other people. She encouraged her students to practice “step forward, step back”: to speak up if they had been silent in class and allow others a chance to speak if they had already contributed. She also reached out to a wider community through the Center for Popular Economics, where she taught activists, educators, media makers, and others. She was selected to participate in the Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellows Program in 1988-89 and received a TIDE (Teaching for Inclusiveness, Diversity, and Equity) Faculty Fellowship award for 2018-19.
 
Lisa’s doctoral dissertation studied the airline industry, and she kept her interest in transportation throughout her career as she moved into research on racial gaps in economic outcomes. She argued that racial gaps, such as lower wages or longer commuting times for Black workers, might reflect discrimination or other unfair treatment. For example, commuting times might be longer because housing segregation means Black people are farther from available jobs and must take longer trips on public transportation. Her work showed that better access to transportation might mean access to better jobs, but transportation alone is not enough to end racial inequality. She also showed how important manufacturing industries were for Black workers.  Her study of the Detroit labor market found higher wages and a lower wage gap in manufacturing jobs for Black workers in the 1980s and 1990s. For the US as a whole, Lisa showed that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s hurt the wages of Black men much more than White men. She argued that to reduce racial inequality, policy needed to be “race-conscious” to target efforts that would ensure Black Americans had better opportunities for training, education, and benefits. She encouraged economists to take an active role in advising policymakers and advocating for equality.
 
Lisa supported junior faculty in her own department and elsewhere and worked hard to make the economics profession and the University of Massachusetts Amherst more welcoming to women and people of color. She was an advocate for diversity and equality in much of her professional service. She was an Executive Board Member of the National Economic Association, an Editorial Advisory Board Member for Feminist Economics, an Executive Board Member and Vice President of IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics), and a member of the AEA (American Economic Association) Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession.  She was active in the AEA Mentoring Program for minority group doctoral students.  She was a Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation and worked with the National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Fellowship Program seeking to increase the ethnic and racial diversity of U.S. college and university faculties. She was an Advisory Board Member and consultant/trainer for an NSF (National Science Foundation) grant on Sustaining Economics Education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She was active in university governance, serving for many years in the Faculty Senate and on the bargaining team for the MSP (Massachusetts Society of Professors) for the 2001-2004 contract, which first brought paid parental leave to the UMass Amherst and UMass Boston campuses.