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SIPA Faculty
Kenneth Prewitt
International Affairs Building, Room 1314A
Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-1746
kenneth.prewitt@sipa.columbia.edu
kp2058@columbia.edu
Biography:
Kenneth Prewitt
is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs and is Special Advisor to the University’s President. He taught Political Science at the University of Chicago from 1965-1982, and for shorter stints was on the faculty of Stanford University, Washington University, the University of Nairobi, Makerere University and the Graduate Faculty at the New School University (where he was also Dean).
Prewitt's professional career also includes: Director of the United States Census Bureau, Director of the National Opinion Research Center, President of the Social Science Research Council, and Senior Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Russell-Sage Foundation, and member of other professional associations, including the Council on Foreign Relations. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Southern Methodist University, a Distinguished Service Award from the New School for Social Research, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany, the Charles E. Merriam Lifetime Career Award, American Political Science Association. He serves on a number of Boards & Advisory Committees, and is current Chair of the Advisory Board to Division of Social & Behavioral Sciences, National Research Council.
His recent publications include The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization (2006); Politics and Science in Census Taking (2003); and The Legitimacy of Foundations (2006). He has authored or coauthored another half-dozen books and more than 100 articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of the recent National Academy Report on “Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy,” and author of What is Your Race? The Flawed Effort of the Census to Classify Americans, Princeton U. Press, Spring, 2013.
Prewitt holds a BA from Southern Methodist University (1958); MA from Washington University (1959), Harvard Divinity School (1960) as a Danforth fellow; PhD from Stanford University(1963).
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