David Lempert

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David Howard Lempert is an anthropologist, author, social entrepreneur, and development consultant.

Though his work crosses many fields, he is known primarily as an educational innovator in the field of experiential education, and is seen as a modern Alexis de Tocqueville for his ethnographic work on legal and political systems that includes field work as the first U.S. anthropologist in urban Russia (coining the term Pepsi-stroika, and as a modern James Madison for his creative constitutional amendments that offer new ways of thinking about democracy in industrial societies. His work on demographics and politics places him among modern neo-Malthusian social theorists.

He is a third cousin of the actors Fred Savage, Ben Savage, and Kayla Savage, a cousin of California Assemblyman Ted Lempert, and policy analyst Robert Lempert, and older sibling of sisters Marci Lempert Riley and Cheryl Lempert Cohen.

Lempert was born in New York City on February 12, 1959, the 150th birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, to parents of Polish-Ukrainian-Moldovan-Jewish and Hungarian-Lithuanian-Jewish descent. His first published piece, a quip in "Out of the Mouths of Babes", appeared in a national magazine when he was five. After starting school a year early and attending the Kinerit Day School for first grade, a private school teaching Hebrew and English, his family moved to Hartsdale, New York and he attended the Ardsley Schools. He graduated from Ardsley High School in 1976, with the highest grades remembered in the history of the school. His 90+ page senior thesis, Morals and Mortals, is also believed to be the longest paper ever written at the school, and before graduating high school he had published in the New York Times and won a national science essay award.

As an undergraduate at Yale University, Lempert continued to attain national recognition. Senator William Proxmire, Democrat, Wisconsin, for whom he worked as in intern and speechwriter in 1978, heralded his work on promoting U.S. signing of the United Nations Genocide Convention by mentioning it on the floor of the U.S. Senate and printing one of his articles in the Congressional Record. An undergaduate project of his at Yale, to meet everyone in his Yale class, was also featured in The New York Times. His undergraduate thesis on “The Survival of Democracy in Mauritius: A Demographic-Economic Explanation of Political Stability”, won Yale's C.W. Clarke Prize in Comparative Politics and was entered into competition with Doctoral Thesis for other awards. The thesis was one of the first attempts to link economic and demographic factors in predicting political violence and stability, and appeared simultaneously with work by senior scholars such as Jack Goldstone and Ted Gurr. The paper was later published in the Eastern Africa Economic Review, in 1987. At graduation, Lempert was selected by his classmates as the Yale 1980 Class Orator and he gave a speech alongside Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. During the summer after graduation, Lempert traveled to Mauritius to meet with the Prime Minister, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. Though only 21, his visit was publicized in several of Mauritius’ newspapers and he appeared in one in a cartoon with the Prime Minister.

After graduating Yale, Lempert went to Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he simultaneously earned law and business degrees. He was also encouraged by Kennell Jackson, who hired him as a Resident Advisor in Stanford's Branner Hall, to develop new educational initiatives. Lempert developed the new undergraduate specials course, The Unseen America that later sparked the creation of an NGO by the same name.

After passing the California Bar and working as an attorney, Lempert entered the University of California, Berkeley to work on a Ph.D. in anthropology, that he completed in 1992. While there, as a graduate student, he continued to develop the Unseen America field classes. In 1989, he led students from Harvard and Brown Universities to Ecuador to test a summer program whereby college students would write a national development plan. At the end of the summer, the students had written a book length development plan, in Spanish, that they presented in person to Ecuadorian President Rodrigo Borja and defended on national television and in newspapers in Ecuador. The plan was later published in English as a textbook in development studies, A Model Development Plan: New Ideas and Perspectives. With the success of these approaches in democratic experiential education and while still a graduate student, Lempert and other students at Stanford and Berkeley founded an NGO called Unseen America Projects, Inc. They later published a book describing their approach and several new curricula they developed, Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education.

Also while still a graduate student, Lempert began work on a series of books and articles to develop a new participatory democracy model. The trilogy of books he began as a graduate student at Berkeley, including A Return to Democracy and A Return to Community, earned him an invitation to lecture before the Yale Law School faculty. The ideas are also published in several shorter articles on model constitutions for developing and developed countries.

For his doctoral research, Lempert won a fellowship to become the first American anthropologist to conduct fieldwork in the urban Soviet Union in 1989. He traveled to the U.S.S.R. and began fieldwork for what later became a two-volume, 1,800 page study and the first ever ethnography of urban Russia and the Russian legal-political system entitled, Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy. It is in this work that Lempert also coined the phrase, “Pepsi-stroika” (a pun on the word, “perestroika”) to describe changes in Russia. Lempert's research earned him a visiting fellowship to the Harvard University Russian Research Center in 1990 as the Center's first anthropologist to do work on Russia since its founder, Clyde Klukhohn and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Since the early 1990s, Lempert has worked full time as a consultant in education, government reform, sustainable development, cultural and minority protections and to develop new methodologies in several of these fields. He has consulted in more than 20 countries for governments, universities, and NGOs and has worked for UNICEF, UNHCR, the ILO, UNDP, the World Bank, the European Union, for several international European donors, for CARE, WWF, IUCN, and for foundations such as the Soros Foundation. His work on human rights for the UN has generated some of the most advanced measures of human rights impacts and guidelines for programming, viewing rights as long-term benefits with economic and social outcome measures, rather than of “moral” value. He has also spearheaded a movement for a Red Book of Endangered Cultures, to promote cultural diversity, similar to the approach taken by environmentalists to promote bio-diversity, has written and promoted ethics codes for development professionals, and has advocated for new institutions to monitor development aid and donor activities in developing countries.

In 1999, he became the second U.S. Fulbright professor ever to visit unified Vietnam.

Lempert sometimes goes by a nickname classmates gave him at Yale, “Superlemp”.

[edit] Published books

  • Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy, Columbia University Press/ Eastern European Monographs, 1996
  • Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education, Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers/ Simon & Schuster, 1995
  • A Model Development Plan: New Ideas, New Strategies, New Perspectives, Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Press, 1995 (Hardback), 1998 (Paperback)

[edit] Other book manuscripts

  • A Theory of Democracy and Proposals for Return
  • A Return to Democracy: The Modern Democracy Amendments
  • A Return to Community: The New Federalist Amendments
  • Escape from Professional School: Redesigning Professional Education
  • Copycat Pirates of "Indo-China": The Vietnamese Identity through Time
  • Modern Sparta: Daily Life of the Kinh Vietnamese: The Hanoi Hillbillies
  • Southeast Asian History and Culture on Two Wheels (Seven Volumes),Written with Nguyen Nhu Hue
  • The Making (And Unmaking) of an American Diplomat
  • "Pepsi"-Stroika: Building "Democracy" in Russia
  • Russian Justice for Sale: Legal Chaos in Russia in the 1990's
  • Life and Death in a Russian City
  • "The School for Useless Things": Perestroika in a Russian Law School
  • Reflections In a Prism
  • Golem Ink: The Power Of Trust.
  • Where's My Warranty?: Advice in Growing Up for Two Year Olds --
  • Subverse Universe
  • Untitled (Songs)