In Memory

Donald "Don" Pearce Hayes - Class Of 1946 VIEW PROFILE

Donald Don Pearce Hayes

ITHACA - Donald Pearce Hayes, 78, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Cornell University, died peacefully at his home on October 17, 2006. He was the son of E. Pearce and Lily Hayes, Methodist missionaries working in the vicinity of Foochow (now called Fuzhou) in China. Donald Hayes was born in Baltimore while his parents were staying there on furlough leave. He lived in China to the age of eight, when the family's continued stay was made impossible by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. His father returned to China alone, and the rest of the family settled in South Pasadena, California, where he attended public schools. He graduated from Claremont High School in 1946 and enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving with the 88th Division on a peacekeeping mission at the Italian-Yugoslav border.

 

After the end of his service in 1948, he attended Pomona College, where he received his B.A. in 1952. Impressed with the science-oriented Sociology Graduate Program at the University of Washington, he enrolled there, completing his Ph.D. in 1959. He spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and a year at the University of California in Riverside, before joining the Sociology Department at Cornell in 1963. At Cornell, Professor Hayes served as Director of the Social Psychology Laboratory and in the Sociology Department as Director of Undergraduate Studies, as Director of Graduate Studies, and as Chair for seven years. In faculty recruitments during his terms as Chair, he advocated candidates with quantitative expertise and a natural science orientation, a direction continued in the department to this day.He also served the University in many capacities, including as Secretary of the Graduate Faculty and on the University Senate. He served on the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Admissions Committee for more than 20 years and the Human Subjects Committee for more than 25. He retired in 1997, but continued his research and committee work to near the end of his life.The project that dominated his research in later years and on into retirement was the development of LEX, a scientific measure of the lexical difficulty of texts. A major application was the use of LEX to investigate the richness of the vocabulary included in schoolbooks. He gathered schoolbooks from libraries and archives around the world and compared their LEX scores with verbal test scores over time. He concluded that simplification of schoolbook vocabulary over the decades has been harmful to students, reducing their vocabularies and general knowledge. He also applied LEX to other questions, including the intelligibility of scientific articles and the "motherese" hypothesis in child language acquisition.

He was married in 1950 to Florence ("Lolly") Colburn, whom he met while he was a freshman at Pomona College. He was extraordinarily proud of their children and grandchildren, and family gatherings and trips were a source of enormous pleasure to him. He and his wife traveled extensively throughout their marriage, most recently focusing on archaeological sites in the Mediterranean.His integrity and strong sense of responsibility were matched with warmth, generosity, humor, and a lively interest in the world. He never stopped exploring through his reading, travel, and conversations, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

Donald Hayes is survived by his beloved wife of 56 years, Florence; his children, Peggy (Dick Spellman) of Wellesley, MA, Bruce (Patricia Keating) of Los Angeles, Leslie (Norman Gross) of Haddonfield, NJ, Louise (David Tukey) of Philadelphia, and Judy (Jonathan Dawe) of Toronto; his sister, Ann (Milton Valois) of Phoenix; and sister-in-law, Dorothy Hayes of San Gabriel, CA; and grandchildren, Chris, Charlie, and Steve Spellman, Peter Hayes, Rachel and Naomi Gross, and Megan and Carter Dawe.

At his request, there will be no services. Friends are invited to send reminiscences for a Memory Book to the Hayes family at 411 Klinewoods Road, Ithaca, NY 14850. Memorials may be made to Hospicare, 172 East King Road, Ithaca, NY 14850; or to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network at www.pancan.org; or to the charity of one's choice. Arrangements are by the Bangs Funeral Home.





Click here to see Donald "Don" Pearce's last Profile entry.