Robert Jackson Alexander (November 26, 1918 – April 27, 2010) was an American political activist, writer, and academic who spent most of his professional career at Rutgers University.
His family moved to Leonia, New Jersey in 1922, when his father, Ralph S. Alexander accepted a teaching position at Columbia University.
While there, he received a grant from the Office of International Exchange of Persons of the State Department to work on his Ph.D. dissertation on labor relations in Chile, where he conducted hundreds of interviews in virtually all the major factories of the country.
Alexander would later go on six missions to Latin America for Lovestone, first under the auspices of the Free Trade Union Committee, then under the direction of the AFL-CIO International Department.
[3] In 1961, he was named by president-elect John F. Kennedy to the Task Force on Latin America, which recommended the establishment of the Alliance for Progress.
Although Alexander was a member of the Economics department at Rutgers, he was an interdisciplinary scholar, working extensively in the fields of political science and history.
[1] Alexander was a founding member of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS), and served as the group's president from 1987 to 1988.