Bonnie McCay

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Bonnie McCay, born October 6, 1941, is an American anthropologist and a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at Rutgers University. She studies how communities manage shared resources, especially fisheries, and how people relate to marine environments. She criticized the idea that common resources inevitably fail when many people use them, a critique that came before Elinor Ostrom’s well-known work.

McCay studied at Valparaiso University (1959–1960) and at the University of California, Berkeley (1960–1962). She earned a BA in anthropology from Portland State University in 1969. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 1976 under advisor Andrew P. Vayda, who later moved to Rutgers. McCay joined Rutgers in 1974, first as an instructor at Cook College, then as a tenure-track faculty member starting in 1975.

She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990 and a fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1996. In 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.