| Troy S. Duster | |
| Birth Name: | Troy Smith Duster |
| Birth Date: | July 11, 1936 |
| Birth Place: | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Mother: | Alfreda Duster |
| Relatives: | Ida B. Wells (grandmother), Ferdinand Lee Barnett (grandfather) |
| Fields: | Sociology |
| Workplaces: | University of California, Berkeley New York University |
| Alma Mater: | Northwestern University (BA, PhD) University of California, Los Angeles (MA) |
| Thesis Title: | The Social Response to Abnormality |
| Thesis Url: | https://search.library.northwestern.edu/permalink/01NWU_INST/h04e76/alma9912735874202441 |
| Thesis Year: | 1962 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Raymond Mack |
| Awards: | Guggenheim Fellowship |
Troy Smith Duster (born July 11, 1936) is an American sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. Duster is on the faculty advisor boards of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.[1]
In 1970, Duster published The Legislation of Morality in which he showed how hundreds of thousands of previously law-abiding drug addicts became associated with the deviant and criminal segment of society after the United States Supreme Court in Webb v. United States interpreted the Harrison Narcotic Law (1914) to prohibit physician prescriptions for the maintenance of existing physical opiate dependance.[2] It was easier, Duster concluded, for middle America to direct its moral hostility "toward a young, lower-class Negro male than toward a middle-aged white female".[3] More recently he contributed to the book (2005).
From 2004–2005, Duster served as president of the American Sociological Association. He was also a contributing member of the International HapMap Project, an organization that worked to develop the first haplotype map of the human genome.[4]
He is the grandson of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells.
Troy Duster is the son of Alfreda Duster (née Barnett) and Benjamin C. Duster Jr. and grandson of Ida B. Wells. He was able to attend university through the Pullman Foundation Scholarship, a scholarship for minority and impoverished students. With this scholarship Troy Duster attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology 1957.
Duster then went to the University of California, Los Angeles, for graduate school, earning a master's degree in Sociology in 1959. He then returned to Northwestern and received a PhD in Sociology in 1962.