Walter Dummer Fisher; Economist, Quit UC Post Over Loyalty Oath

Walter Dummer Fisher, 78, an economist who furthered the understanding of econometrics and who was one of many professors in California to resign rather than sign a state loyalty oath. Fisher wrote two books, “Clustering and Aggregation in Economics” and “Statistics Economized,” which dealt with the branch of economics concerned with statistics. He was a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1967 to 1983, a visiting professor of economics at the University of Louvain in Belgium and an econometrics teacher in India. In 1951, Fisher was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, but resigned rather than sign a loyalty oath. He went to Kansas State University, where he taught and conducted research until 1967, when he joined the Northwestern University faculty. He retired in 1985. In Evanston, Ill., on Friday.