David Goslin

David Alexander Goslin was born in New York City on October 27, 1936, grew up after his father's death in Berkeley, California, graduated in psychology from Swarthmore College in 1958 and took his doctorate in sociology at Yale University in 1962. He joined the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, "held adjunct teaching positions at six different universities and published five books in the field of sociology over a 13-year period," moved to Washington, D.C. in 1974 and "spent 13 years as Executive Director of the Commission of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the National Research Council," the commission under which the 1988 report Enhancing Human Performance was produced. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982. In 1987 he became the fourth president and chief executive of the American Institutes for Research, serving until 2001; in his tenure AIR ran "a large-scale personnel evaluation of the U.S. Army that tracked the careers of more than 3 million Army personnel" and in 1994 acquired Pelavin Associates. He died on December 28, 2024.¹

In 1995, after the National Research Council declined the CIA's request for a review of Star Gate, the CIA met "with president and representatives of American Institutes of Research (AIR)" on May 10 and signed a contract on June 12 (1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate); the report records that "Dr. David A. Goslin, President of AIR, served as coordinator." Edwin May's commentary of 1996 objected that Goslin had also administered the NRC's 1988 report.³