Sam Richards

Samuel Martell "Sam" Richards (born September 3, 1960) is a sociologist working at the Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on race and ethnicity.

Richards began teaching at Pennsylvania State University in 1990. He is a senior lecturer at The Pennsylvania State University and teaches the largest race relations course in the United States. This course, Sociology 119 – Race and Ethnic Relations, enrolls 725 students each semester. As a professor, he is well known on campus and his iconoclasm landed him in "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," a book published by David Horowitz that critiques the dominance of liberal thinking in the academy. This video is a trailer for Sociology 119.

Along with Dr. Laurie Mulvey, Dr. Richards serves as the co-director of the World In Conversation Center for Public Diplomacy at Penn State. As a 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow, Richards created the organization website www.worldinconversation.org.

Richard's TEDx Talk called a "Radical Experiment in Empathy" was the third most-widely viewed TEDx talk in the world as of May 2011.

At age 24, Richards was hired to teach a cybernetics course called “Cybernetics and Human Ecology” at the University of Toledo. The first class session was starting only fifteen minutes after he signed the contract – and he didn’t even know what cybernetics was. So the first thing he did when class started is to ask if anyone knew. Today he still recalls that as one of the most amazing teaching experiences of his life.