James Q. Wilson was born in Denver, Colorado. In 1952, he received a B.A. degree from the University of Redlands. In 1957 he received a M.A. degree in political science from the University of Chicago, followed by a Ph.D. degree in 1959. In 1961, he became the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University. During this time, he contributed to several government policy bodies, including the White House Task Force on Crime in 1966, the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention in 1972, the Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime in 1981, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1985 to 1990.
In 1987, he relocated and became the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at UCLA. In 1998, he became the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy. He is currently a professor and senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College.
