James A. Gross | |
---|---|
Born | 1933 (age 90–91) |
Nationality | American |
Education | BS, La Salle University; MA, Temple University; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Occupation | Professor |
Years active | 1960–present |
James A. Gross (born 1933) is an American educator and historian who teaches United States labor law and labor history at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.[1] He is the author of a highly regarded three-volume history of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and is considered the leading historian of the NLRB.[2]
James Gross was born in 1933 and raised near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[3] He played baseball as a youth, and for many years pursued a career as a major league ball player.[3] He graduated from La Salle University with a Bachelor of Science in 1956.[3][4][5]
He entered the United States Army after college.[3] But after only a short time on active duty he left the military and enrolled at Temple University, where he received a Master of Arts in 1957.[3][4][5] Although he still wanted to play professional baseball, at the urging of friends he enrolled in the graduate doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[3] Dissatisfied with the degree program, he decided to leave and take a job with the Continental Can Company in New York City.[3] But the university offered him a teaching assistant position, and he stayed in school.[3] Although he almost left again, he was asked to teach a class (which gave him more money to live on) and discovered that he very much enjoyed teaching.[3] Gross received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1962.[3][4][5]
Gross taught as an assistant professor at Holy Cross College from 1960 to 1966 before joining the faculty at Cornell.[3] He was named an associate professor in 1968 and a full professor in 1975.
His three-volume history[6] of the National Labor Relations Board has been called "authoritative"[7] and "exhaustive".[8] The second volume in the trilogy, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947, won the prestigious Philip Taft Labor History Book Award in 1983.[9]
Gross is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators, the American Arbitration Association, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.[3][4] He has also worked as a labor relations mediator for the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball.[2][3][10]
Gross is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,[11] and in 2007 was Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility at McGill University in Canada.