David Lancaster Crawford, a former adjunct professor of statistics in the Wharton School and a former faculty member in the department of economics in the School of Arts and Sciences, passed away on May 27. He was 71. 

Born in Danville, Kentucky, Dr. Crawford received his BA with honors in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MS and PhD, also in economics, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1976, he joined Penn’s faculty as an assistant professor of economics in the School of Arts and Sciences, a position he held until 1981. Three years later, he returned to Penn as an adjunct professor of management in the Wharton School. For the next thirty years, he taught economics, human resource management, and statistics to students in the executive MPA, Wharton MBA, executive MBA, executive MSE, and undergraduate programs at Wharton, as well as in the Fels Institute of Government and the Annenberg School for Communication. Dr. Crawford received seven teaching awards at Penn during the 1980s and 1990s, and joined Penn’s 25-Year Club in 2009. He retired from Penn in 2013, but remained at Penn as a senior fellow in the Center for Human Resources in the management department at Wharton. 

Outside of Penn, Dr. Crawford also taught at Rutgers University and the Pennsylvania Bar Institute. He was the founding president of Econsult Corporation, a role in which he served as a consultant and expert witness on economic and statistical issues for private firms and government agencies. He testified in more than seventy cases in Federal District Courts and the state courts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Dr. Crawford consulted extensively on human resource management issues and racked up an extensive record of political service with the Democratic party in the Philadelphia area and suburbs. In 2012, he was elected a Burlington County (NJ) Democratic Committeeman and also served as a senior advisor to the Philadelphia Mayor’s Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity. He was an advisor to Michael Nutter’s 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign; several local elections in Medford, NJ; the Philadelphia City Council; the Philadelphia Tax Reform Commission; and the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

Dr. Crawford is survived by his wife, Kathleen Duffy; and son, Charles Crawford. A memorial service will be held at a later time. To honor his memory, donations may be made to Food Bank of South Jersey or the American Humanist Association. To share a memory of David, please write to Kathy or Charlie at kathyduffy2022@gmail.com.