Dear Colleagues,

The campus community mourns the passing of Douglas K. Candland, 88, who died on Sunday, April 16, 2023. Doug retired as professor emeritus of psychology in 2002 after 41 years of service to Bucknell, leaving an indelible impact on the University community. 

A model teacher-scholar, Doug had countless accomplishments during his career here and is perhaps best known for founding Bucknell’s program in animal behavior. His guidance and mentorship were deeply appreciated by generations of students, and the Douglas K. Candland Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences position is named in his honor.

Colleagues who worked with Doug, and even those who joined the University after his retirement, remember him for his support and encouragement of both his students and his fellow faculty members. He reached out to junior faculty to offer mentorship and took pride in the achievements of all his colleagues. In retirement, Doug impressed many with his continued engagement in numerous intellectual and educational endeavors, exemplifying a devotion to lifelong learning that we hope to instill at Bucknell.

Included below is the complete text of the obituary, as provided by the family. 

I encourage you to visit our In Memoriam site to share personal notes of sympathy and remembrance with others.

On behalf of our entire University community, I extend our deepest sympathies to Doug’s family, as well as to all who knew him at Bucknell.

John C. Bravman
President

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Douglas Keith Candland died peacefully on Sunday morning, April 16, 2023, at Evangelical Community Hospital with his sons at his side. Known principally as a teacher, Doug was also known for establishing both a degree program in Animal Behavior and one in Environmental Science at Bucknell University, where he taught for 42 years. Doug was a recipient of both the annual distinguished teaching award from the American Psychological Foundation and a similar award from the Animal Behavior Society. After retiring from classroom teaching, he edited the Review of General Psychology for twelve years, gave television commentary in Africa, Europe, and the United States, and reviewed books for Phi Beta Kappa’s Key Reporter and the American Psychological Association’s PsycCritiques.

Doug’s paternal great-grandparents, born in England, were early converts to the Mormon church, travelling to church headquarters in Illinois in 1842 and moving with the church to what would become Salt Lake City with the church’s westward trek. Doug’s parents, upon marrying in 1926, sought both a more salubrious climate and greater opportunity by moving to Venice, California, in 1926 and then to Long Beach, California, where, on July 9, 1934, Doug was born. He would be their only child. Both parents completed eighth grade in Utah, finishing their formal schooling, as was the custom, to help their families financially.

With the encouragement of high school teachers, Doug sought financial aid when pressed by them to apply to colleges. Needing full funding, he received offers of only half that and was therefore working with the Civilian Conservation Corps (with day-release prisoners, from whom he claims to have learned much) when Pomona College called with news from the director of admissions, Bill Wheaten, that an unexpected scholarship had arrived. Would he care to try college, even though the term was well underway?

Now with full funding, Doug promptly travelled by bus to Pomona, California, only to learn that Pomona College lay elsewhere, actually in Claremont, California. Geography and intellectual ideas were somewhat unsettled for him, but in time he settled on some assortment of psychology, philosophy, and history. Doug retained a life-long sensitivity to scholarship students.

Continuing onward and eastward, he arrived at Princeton University 1956 and, in 1959, received his Ph.D. degree and married Mary Elizabeth Homrighausen, daughter of the Dean of Princeton Seminary. Three sons (Kevin, Christopher, and Ian) were born to the marriage which was interrupted by her death in March, 2021.

After a postdoctoral year at the University of Virginia, Doug and his wife accepted a position at Bucknell University where he remained all of his teaching life. At Bucknell, he initiated a degree program in Animal Behavior in 1968. A number of currently working professors and field workers trace their lineage to this program. Doug’s years at Bucknell were interspersed by visiting professorships at Delta Primate Center of Tulane, Stirling (Scotland), Cambridge (UK), Pennsylvania State, the University of California Berkeley, and Mysore (India).

The Animal Behavior laboratories built by Bucknell in 1968 and rebuilt in 1988 gave Doug an opportunity to work with socially-housed, indoor-outdoor facilities for various primate species. These long-term residents continue to give undergraduate students a unique opportunity to study primate behavior. Among his colleagues with whom he published were, for 17 years, Alan Leshner, former director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, later, Nancy Caine now at California San Marcos. Doug’s 100 or so published papers were almost always with these colleagues and undergraduate students at Bucknell. He remarked that by housing social groups of rare and sometimes threatened species, students were fortunate to observe behavior previously undocumented. Among the primate guests over nearly half of a century were Japanese snow monkeys, famed for their transmission of culture to offspring; Hamadryas baboons, the first allowed outside their home country; Gelada baboons from Ethiopia; a species of Macaca from India, studied first in South India by Doug and students; and squirrel monkeys.

For a ten-year period, he assisted students who had invented the idea of a special house for elderly and themselves with the idea of each sharing knowledge and skills. Known as the Cross-Generational Project, the program attracted wide-spread attention and some imitation during a time when ‘communes’ were seen as answers to societal problems.

Doug wrote several books. The first, Psychology: The Experimental Approach, (McGraw-Hill 1968) served as the text for schools featuring experimental psychology until the coverage became outdated. A revised edition was published ten years later. The book Emotion (Wadsworth 1977, 2003) contained essays by most of the members of Bucknell’s psychology department on aspects of the topic. Doug considered his monograph on the history of studies of emotion contained in this volume to be his finest scholarship.

Feral Children and Clever Animals (Oxford 1993) found a larger audience outside of academics and led, surprisingly, to a ten-year TV career in which Doug interviewed and commented on presumed feral children, primate behavior, and animal rights. This, in turn, led to other TV appearances commenting on children from unusual environments. His TV work was for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic, Discovery Channel, ABC, CBS, Russian TV, Italian TV, French TV, and Australian PBS. He was especially proud of his TV work for BBC and French TV on animal rights. His favorite was a two-hour BBC production on the history of human obligations toward animals. His final book-length work An Archeopsychology of the Modern Mind (2012) is available in print and an e-book edition.

Selected in 2002 to edit the Review of General Psychology, he retired from teaching. Following the end of his editorship in 2014, Doug became a frequent author of commissioned book reviews. His last contribution was a lecture on feral children made for the University of California television and available on YouTube.

In April 2021, Glen Tullman, Bucknell ’81, made a significant gift to the university’s endowment naming three purposes: to establish and endow a chair, named for Doug, to the holder of the office of Dean of Arts and Sciences; to endow civic engagement between students, faculty, and the community; and to endow operating costs for the Program in Animal Behavior. In reflective conversation, Doug would say that his most long-lasting and satisfying contribution to Bucknell was his work with the small group who designed and implemented the Weis Center: Janet Weis, Jackson Hill, Ralph Rees, and John Zeller.

In sport and hobby, Doug was regarded as a B squash player and an online grandmaster at Cribbage.

At his request, there is to be no public service. He will rest in the Lewisburg cemetery next to his wife, son, and father.

He is survived by his sons Kevin and Christopher; daughters-in-law Katie and Nurjanah, and grand-daughters Emma, Fiona, and Ajeng.