Christopher Jencks

Christopher Sandy Jencks (born October 22, 1936, Baltimore, Maryland) is an American social scientist.

Christopher Jencks
Born(1936-10-22)22 October 1936
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
NationalityUSA
Occupationsocial scientist

Career

Jencks is currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian, as a senior.[1] After Exeter, he received an A.B. in English literature from Harvard in 1958, followed by a M.Ed. in Harvard Graduate School of Education. During the year 1960-1961 he studied sociology at the London School of Economics. He has previously held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

His interests are in the study of education, social stratification, social mobility, poverty and the poor. His recent research concerns changes in family structure over the past generation, the costs and benefits of economic inequality, the extent to which economic advantages are inherited and the effects of welfare reform. Prior to his university career, he was an editor at The New Republic from 1961 to 1967 and a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC from 1963 to 1967. He served as an editor of The American Prospect.

Richwine controversy

Jencks was on the dissertation committee at Harvard's Kennedy School that awarded former member of The Heritage Foundation Jason Richwine with a Ph.D. for his thesis, "IQ and Immigration Policy". Criticized for the way it linked race to I.Q. levels, the thesis lost Richwine his job at the Foundation. Asked for comment by journalist and historian Jon Wiener on why he would consider such a dissertation worthy of a PhD, Jencks replied "Nope. But thanks for asking."[2] As Wiener noted, as "the author of important books, including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?, The Homeless and The Black White Test Score Gap . . . Christopher Jencks knows exactly what’s wrong with the studies purporting to link 'race' with 'IQ.'"[2]

Prizes, awards and honors

Selected bibliography
  • The Academic Revolution (with David Riesman, 1968, reissued 2001)
  • Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America (with seven co-authors, 1972)
  • Who Gets Ahead? (with eleven co-authors, 1979)
  • The Urban Underclass (with Paul Peterson, 1991)
  • Rethinking Social Policy (1992)
  • The Homeless (1994)
  • The Black-White Test Score Gap (with Meredith Phillips, 1998)

References
  1. http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/1957/11/9/the-exeter-man-rebel-without-a/
  2. http://www.thenation.com/blog/174291/why-did-harvard-give-phd-discredited-approach-race-and-iq
  • Postman, Neil; Weingartner, Charles (1973), The School Book, Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence

Sources
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.