John H. Bunzel
Senior Research Fellow

Expertise: Race and race relations in the United States, higher education, U.S. politics and elections

John H. Bunzel, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, specializes in current political and educational problems and frequently writes and lectures on issues of public policy. He is a former commissioner of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

He is an expert in the field of civil rights, race relations, higher education, U.S. politics, and elections. His current research centers on race and race relations in U.S. society, with a focus on affirmative action, multiculturalism, and diversity in higher education as well as U.S. politics and elections.

From 1970 to 1978, when he joined the Hoover Institution, he was president of San Jose State University.

Bunzel's most recent book is Race Relations on Campus: Stanford Students Speak. He has also published Political Passages: Journeys of Change through Two Decades, 1968–1988; The American Small Businessman; Issues of American Public Policy; Anti-Politics in America; New Force on the Left: Tom Hayden and the Campaign against Corporate America; and Challenge to American Schools: The Case for Standards and Values.

In 1990, he received from the Policies Studies Organization the eighth annual Hubert Humphrey Award for his years of service as "an outstanding public policy practitioner." He holds an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of Santa Clara and in 1969 received the Presidential Award from the Northern California Political Science Association. In 1974, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors awarded him its Certificate of Honor for "unswerving devotion to the highest ideals of brotherhood and service to mankind and dedicated efforts looking to the elimination of racial and religious bigotry and discrimination."

He is past president of the Northern California Political Science Association, past director of the Northern California Citizenship Clearing House, and a member of the American Political Science Association. In the last three presidential elections, he has served as a political analyst for CBS radio in San Francisco.

He also has written numerous articles on trade unions and collective bargaining, discrimination and affirmative action, and the relationship between quality and equality in education. Bunzel was a member of the California Attorney General's Advisory Committee on Constitutional Rights from 1960 to 1962. He was a delegate from California to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

He has taught at San Francisco State College (1953–56, 1965–70), Michigan State University (1956–57), and Stanford University (1956–63). The American Voter, his 1964 weekly television program on KPIX (CBS affiliate) in San Francisco, won a national award.

He received an A.B. in political science from Princeton University, an M.A. in sociology from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1943 to 1946, he served in the U.S. Army.