It is a pleasure and an honor for me to introduce the Charles C. Spiker Memorial Lecture. If you think that the days, weeks, and months pass quickly in your lives, let me warn you that your perception of the passage of time will seem to increase geometrically with each passing year. I find it almost impossible to believe that Charlie Spiker retired 9 years ago, that I myself have been retired for 8 years, and that Charlie died nearly 6 years ago. But it is all true, and with so many new faces out there, I think it is important that I tell you a little bit about this remarkable man whose memory is being honored here today.

Spiker was a pioneer in the field of Experimental Child Psychology. He received his doctoral training here at Iowa in the Child Welfare Research Station, later renamed the Institute of Child Behavior and Development. He immediately became a faculty member in the Station, later served as its Director for 11 years, eventually joined the Psychology faculty, and remained at Iowa for his entire career. He established one of the first doctoral programs in experimental child psychology, and began a brilliant research career directed at investigating the basic nature of learning in children. His ingenious experiments were done within the theoretical context of Hull-Spence theory. He made important extensions of the theory, quantified its axioms, and was highly successful in using parameter estimation techniques to fit theoretical learning curves to his data.

Spiker was not only a brilliant researcher, but also a remarkable teacher. His doctoral students populated the country with centers of excellence in experimental work with children. In 1986, he was honored by his students and colleagues with a festschrift volume, a good deal of which was concerned with describing what Glenn Terrell called the "Spiker Effect" on their careers. I think the fastest way to give you a sense of Spiker as a teacher is to read a few brief quotes from this volume.

• "...most important about Charlie Spiker as professor is his enormous talent to teach, both in the classroom and in scholarly advisory situations…. Gentle, patient, articulate, but demanding, Charlie is persuasive as he leads you around to the only possible way to look at an issue profitably…." - Lewis Lipsitt
• "Classes were intellectual journeys guided by the clarity of Charlie’s analyses….The result was a kind of intellectual exhilaration that I always hoped I might impart to my students." - Degen Horowitz
• "Charlie is an inspiring teacher. He creates an atmosphere in which the student is caught up in the thrill of new theoretical ideas and the excitement of creating an empirical test of those ideas." Here is how I expressed it: "Charlie also served as an outstanding role model for young professors. We learned by his example that a good professor is both a teacher and a scholar, and is one who cooperates rather than competes with his colleagues. No one I have known is more willing to share his time and expertise with those around him. His love of teaching, coupled with his own unquenchable thirst for new knowledge, provides his students and colleagues with an unending opportunity to learn along with him, and to be a part of the intellectual excitement that surrounds him" - David Palermo
• "Simply stated, Charlie made all of us think. One way or another, he made us think about what we were saying and why, what we were writing and why, and even on occasion, what we were doing and why. He did this…within the bounds of honesty, to produce in his students a highly disciplined and thoughtful approach to psychology. Always the standards of performance for himself and for his students were extraordinarily high." - Glenn Terrell

Following Charlie’s death, his students and colleagues endowed this memorial lectureship to honor all that he stood for. It’s purpose is to bring to Iowa some of the outstanding minds in child psychology today, so that all of us can hear about the best cutting-edge research in the field.