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As a student activist at Lafayette in the tumultuous 1960s, Robert W. Blum ’69 helped organize protests against mandatory ROTC service, campus visitation policies, and the Vietnam War.
“What appealed to me at the time was being a part of making change happen and those experiences have had a profound effect on me that continues to this day,” he says. “They created in me the capacity, the interest, the will to work as a change agent.”
Today Blum remains an agent for change. He is an internationally recognized adolescent health authority and the co-author of the largest study on that subject ever conducted in the United States. As professor of pediatrics and director of the University of Minnesota’s Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, Blum testifies before Congress and serves on the advisory boards of the World Health Organization and National Academy of Sciences. He traveled to Uganda as a member of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services delegation looking at that country’s HIV-AIDS prevention strategies.
“From those experiences at Lafayette — in the classroom and in people’s homes — I learned the skills needed to make change,” he says. “Those skills were not a clinched fist or parade down High Street but negotiation knowing when to fold up and when to draw the line.
“Learning those lessons at Lafayette had a significant impact on me,” he continues. “My world and work since then has been at an interface between medicine and public health policy. A lot of the issues we debated in the 1960s are still vibrant and very much alive.”
What Blum didn’t acquire at Lafayette was his interest in medicine — he had decided on that long before. “When I graduated from medical school, my parents gave me a laminated plaque of a paper I wrote in third grade titled ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Doctor,'” he says with a laugh.
Still, Blum’s years at Lafayette strengthened his early resolve.
“First, Lafayette allowed me to major in English and yet take all the requirements I needed for pre-med,” he says. “James Lusardi (the late Frances March Professor of English) had a tremendous impact on me. And Lafayette had a wonderful, superior biology department that gave me a very firm grounding.”
Additionally, Blum lived at McKelvy House for two years when James Crawford, the late mathematics professor, was housemaster. “It was intellectually simulating and I had the chance to get to know students who were very different from me,” he says. “Jim Crawford was another person who had a tremendous influence on me.”
Blum went on to earn a medical degree at Howard University College of Medicine. While a resident at University of Minnesota Hospital, Blum began taking public health courses and, still in his 20s, completed a doctorate in that field.
Since then, Blum’s research, teaching and public advocacy efforts have focused on adolescent health. Blum is co-investigator of the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (Add Health), an examination of 20,000 teens in seventh through 12th grades. Add Health was mandated by Congress in 1992 and measures the social settings of adolescent lives, the ways in which adolescents connect to their social world and the influence of these social settings and connections on health. It is the largest single study of its kind ever undertaken in the United States.
“There is a vast amount of attention in this country on the problems that young people face, such as drugs and violence,” Blum says. “This study goes beyond that to try to find things that protect young people from harm. If we can understand why some kids who are truly at risk for negative life outcomes still wind up okay, maybe we can implement programs to help other kids.”
One protective factor that Blum and his colleagues have seen surface over and over again is the power of connections in adolescent lives — connections with parents, schools, the community.
“We have a mythology in this country that after early childhood, parents don’t matter — it’s all in your friends or your genes,” he says. “What this research clearly shows is this is simply not true. The impact of the family, for better or worse, remains as potent at age 15 as at age 5. It changes in the way it presents itself, but we have to stop kidding ourselves that it doesn’t matter.”
As a consultant to the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank, and UNICEF, Blum has observed health systems across the globe.
“In the U.S., for every project, we start with needing a grant,” he says. “In Latin America, it’s the other way around. It’s ‘Let’s do it! Maybe we’ll get paid; maybe we won’t.’ I see a level of dedication to the work that they do without one cent of personal gain.”
Back in Minnesota, Blum continues to care for teens in the clinic while retaining his global perspective and maintaining a balance between medicine and public health policy.
“I’ve always had a bias that you have to be able to sit down, one-on-one with kids if you’re really going to solve problems and set policies that effect thousands of others,” he says. “I’ve also had the bias that you can’t change the world one kid at a time. To me, the two have always gone together.”
Blum was the 1998 American Public Health Association’s Needleman Award recipient for “scientific research and courageous advocacy for children.”