Activist
Robert W. Blum ’69 Still Fighting
for Change
BLUM IS CO-AUTHOR OF LARGEST STUDY ON ADOLESCENT HEALTH
By Laurie Lowenstein
As a student activist at Lafayette in the tumultuous 1960s, Robert W. Blum ’69 helped organize protests
against mandatory ROTC service, campus visitation policies, and
the Vietnam War.
“What appealed to me at the time was being a part of making change happen and those experiences have had a profound effect on me that continues to this day,” he says. “They created in me the capacity, the interest, the will to work as a change agent.”
Today Blum remains an agent for change. He is an internationally recognized adolescent health authority and co-author of the largest study on that subject ever conducted in the United States. Until two years ago, he was a professor of pediatrics and director of the University of Minnesota’s Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, where Blum testified before Congress and served on the advisory boards of the World Health Organization and National Academy of Sciences. Today, he continues that work nationally and internationally as the William H. Gates Sr. Professor and chair of the department of population and family health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“From those experiences at Lafayette—in the classroom and in people’s homes—I learned the skills needed to make change,” he says. “Those skills were not a clinched fist or parade down High Street but negotiation ... knowing when to fold up and when to draw the line.”
Since then, Blum’s research, teaching, and public advocacy efforts have focused on adolescent health. Blum had been co-investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), an examination of 20,000 teens originally in seventh through twelfth grades and now in their mid-20s. Add Health was mandated by Congress in 1992 and measures the social settings of adolescent lives, the ways in which adolescents connect to their social world, and the influence of these social settings and connections on health.
“There is a vast amount of attention in this country on the problems that young people face, such as drugs and violence,” Blum says. “This study goes beyond that to try to find things that protect young people from harm. If we can understand why some kids who are truly at risk for negative life outcomes still wind up okay, maybe we can implement programs to help other kids.”
One protective factor that Blum and his colleagues have seen surface over and over again is the power of connections in adolescent lives—connections with parents, schools, the community.
“We have a mythology in this country that after early childhood, parents don’t matter—it’s all in your friends or your genes,” he says. “What this research clearly shows is this is simply not true. The impact of the family, for better or worse, remains as potent at age 15 as at age five. It changes in the way it presents itself, but we have to stop kidding ourselves that it doesn’t matter.”
As a consultant to the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank, and UNICEF, Blum has observed health systems across the globe. His department has projects in more than 20 developing countries and he himself has active projects in Vietnam as well as domestically on Indian reservations and with Add Health.
Blum received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Medical Student Association last year. He was the 1997 American Public Health Association’s Needleman Award recipient for “scientific research and courageous advocacy for children.”
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