A memorial to Kenneth G. Lutterman, PhD

Abstract

In the sudden death of Dr. Kenneth G. Lutterman, December 1, 2001, social work lost one of its best friends and most ardent protagonists. Ken Lutterman had a distinguished career through his 31-year service as Associate Director of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and his brief tenure as Assistant Dean for Research at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. I was privileged to have known Ken well, to have benefited from his wisdom, and to have shared with him a decade-long partnership in working to advance mental health research in social work. As I so enjoyed recalling with him, I met Ken one August weekend in late July 1991, and the course of my professional life was indelibly changed. The pivotal event was a meeting in Berkeley, California, that Ken convened to inform social work deans and doctoral program chairs about a forthcoming NIMH grant program to establish research development centers in schools of social work. I was captivated by the possibility of this exciting new venture, for it provided an avenue for our school to fulfill its long-standing desire to strengthen our research in the area of mental health. The person of Ken Lutterman captivated me even more. Never before had I met a public servant so passionate, so persuasive, and so genuine. Ken's commitment to quality mental health services was personal, and he pursued it selflessly. Although mental health was the focus of Ken's career and provided the context for our work with him, his lessons to us and the rewards of our work with him extend profession-wide. Ken persistently and fervently called attention to the gap between what we, as a profession, did and what we could. He saw social work--the largest mental health profession--practicing on the basis of knowledge developed by other disciplines and challenged us to pose our own meaningful research questions and to grow a larger store of our own knowledge. He saw social work producing too few researchers (only about half the number needed for available faculty positions each year), and challenged us to develop a pipeline for early research career development. He saw that social work stipends for doctoral students were thousands of dollars lower than those offered by other disciplines and showed us how to prepare successful training grants to provide not only competitive stipends but also focused and rigorous programs of study. …