Associate Professor of Sociology (by courtesy)
Director, Center for Advanced Research through Online Learning (CAROL)
My most recent book is Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era, coauthored with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami.
With Ben Gebre-Medhin (UC Berkeley) I developed a synthetic account of change in US higher education.
With Mike Kirst I edited a volume on the organizational ecology of US colleges and universities.
With Arik Lifchitz and Michael Sauder I developed a theory of sports and status in US higher education.
I co-convene a project on responsible use of student data in higher education.
Earlier work on college admissions, home education, and (with Wendy Espeland) quantification continues to inform my scholarly world view.
I am an organizational sociologist with longstanding interests in the quantification of educational processes, alternative educational forms, and the formal organization of knowledge.
"A great inheritance of the twentieth century is that the rest of the world still admires [the United States'] great universities. Everywhere, people dream of sending their children to our campuses. They want tastes of our academic banquet through online courses. They court our experts to consider their local affairs specifically, on site. Worldwide, governments are building new universities and growing existing ones, often hiring US consultants to help them approximate an American academic ideal. What will our most ambitious students have to offer these new patrons, in what languages, and on whose terms? Facing these questions squarely might transform parochial social sciences into truly global endeavors."
- from Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Princeton, 2018), pp. 117-118
since 2009
2010-2017: Director, Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR)
2003-2009: Associate Professor, New York University
1995-2003: Assistant to Associate Professor, Hamilton College
Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (w/ Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami). Princeton University Press, 2018.
"From Soldiers to Students: The Tests of General Educational Development as Diplomatic Measurement" (w/ Ethan Hutt), Social Science History 41 (2017):731-755.
"Association, Service, Market: Higher Education in American Political Development" (w/ Ben Gebre-Medhin), Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016):121-142.
"Football as a Status System in US Higher Education" (w/ Arik Lifschitz and Michael Sauder), Sociology of Education 87 (2014):204-219.
"A Sociology of Quantification" (w/ Wendy Nelson Espeland), European Journal of Sociology XLIX (2008):401-436.
"Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education" (w/ Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Richard Arum), Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008):127-151.
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