Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Gerald Platt worked his way through Brooklyn College as a stevedore at the Navy Yard and went on to earn a PhD in Sociology under Ralph Turner at UCLA in 1963. Interdisciplinary in approach from the outset of his career, Platt became known for linking psychoanalytic theory and sociology in analyzing large-scale events, such as revolutions and mass social movements. After beginning his academic career at Harvard, he joined the Sociology Department at UMass Amherst in1970. He was the author of two noted works in psychoanalytic sociology, The Wish to Be Free: Society, Psyche and Value Change, with Fred Weinstein (1969) and Advances in Psychoanalytic Sociology, with Jerome Rabow and Marion Goldman (1987), and was co-author with Talcott Parsons of The American University (1973). Platt died of complications of Alzheimers disease on May 7, 2015.

Active in his academic field and in departmental and university administration, Platt left a substantial record of his years on faculty at UMass Amherst. His collection includes substantial professional correspondence, research materials on his study of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and other topics, grant applications, and annual reports. As chair of the Department, Platt also left a body of materials relating to his administrative duties, including work on university committees.