Kenneth Prewitt
Kenneth Prewitt is the Vice President for the Office of Global Centers and the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, with appointments in the Political Science Department and SIPA. He joined the university in 2002 and took up his Global Centers position in 2009.
Career prior to Columbia
He earned his BA from Southern Methodist University in 1958. He received an MA from Washington University in 1959, and attended Harvard Divinity School in 1960. In 1963 he earned his PhD in political science from Stanford University. From 1965 to 1982 he taught at University of Chicago as an Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. His other academic appointments include the Dean of the Graduate Faculty at the New School University (2001-2002) and faculty positions at Stanford, Washington, the University of Nairobi, and Makerere University (Uganda).
Prewitt also has had a long professional career outside the classroom, as director of the U.S. Census Bureau (1998-2001), 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, and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Other awards include honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Southern Methodist University; in 1990 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany.
