Kenneth Prewitt, 1936–2026: At the Nexus of Academe, Policy and Philanthropy
Political scientist Kenneth Prewitt, a keen observer of the role of social science in the larger world who used his observations to head organizations like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Social Science Research Council and the National Opinion Research Center, died on June 5. The Carnegie Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs was 90.
Prewitt’s name at the top of so many institutions – including the presidency of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and senior vice presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation – reflected his determination to put into practice what his ideas on the use, value and even the occasional shortcomings of social science told him.
Hailed by no less than Senator Patrick Moynihan as “one of the most distinguished social scientists in our nation” when nominated to head the Census, Prewitt routinely strove to advance social impact of the sciences. In its encomium to Prewitt, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) noted that “In 1980, amid mounting scrutiny of federal funding for research, Prewitt testified before the House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology on the value of social science, citing how government agencies and private companies relied on concepts and knowledge derived from the social sciences. The following year, as the incoming administration proposed deep cuts to social science funding, Prewitt helped transform the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) into an active coalition defending public investment in social research.”
In the last decades of his life he leveraged the gravitas and credibility he’d earned in the academic, policy and philanthropic worlds to create networks and write thought pieces advancing. Writing in 2016 for the SSRC’s Items in a piece titled “Can Social Science Matter?” – Prewitt said “social science would do well to set aside the “basic versus applied” dichotomy, and replace it with a much more telling dichotomy: science being used and science waiting to be used.”
Three years later, in the fall 2019 edition of the National Academies of Sciences’ journal Issues in Science and Technology, he called explicitly for retrofitting social science:
Despite what, at the end of his life, looks like a concerted effort to mold the American social science enterprise through his good example, Prewitt suggested otherwise. “My career, however it might be characterized,” he told Andy Peytchev in a 2008 interview for Survey Practice, “is more an accident than a plan. I see myself as an academic who happened to do some other things in foundations, scientific organizations, and the government.”
Carl Kenneth Prewitt Jr. was born March 16, 1936, in Alton, Illinois, a small city on the banks of the Mississippi River. He grew up there and started college at DePauw University before transferring in 1955 to Southern Methodist University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1958. The next year he earned a master’s at Washington University, just south of Alton in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a Danforth Fellowship – granted to young St. Louis-area scholars in fields outside religion to take graduate study in religion – and spent a year at the Harvard Divinity School. He then went on to earn a doctorate in political science at Stanford University in 1963; his graduate thesis was “Career patterns and role-orientations: an inquiry into the political behavior of city councilmen.”
As a newly minted Ph.D he taught at both Washington and Stanford before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1965. He spent 17 years there, rising from assistant to full professor in the school’s Department of Political Science.
Prewitt was the chair of the department in 1976 when has was asked to direct the National Opinion Research Center, an independent entity affiliated with the university, and a pre-eminent survey research institute.
As noted in its remembrance of Prewitt, NORC noted that under Prewitt NORC launched two of the largest and most prestigious longitudinal studies in the United States: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, and High School & Beyond, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. “Ken brought academic knowledge, deep intellectual curiosity, and enormous passion and energy to his role as director of NORC, said NORC’s current president and CEO, Dan Gaylin, “and later as vice chair of our board for nine years.”
While at Chicago, from 1979 to 1985 Prewitt served the first two terms as president of the Social Science Research Council, a role he repeated from 1995 to 1998. “Ken has long been an inspiration to so many who care about data and the social sciences, myself included,” said Daniel Goroff, the incoming president of the SSRC. “The SSRC today is building on ideas he pursued with unusual grace, dedication, and insight. Concerning our work on social measurement in particular, I recall how Ken said that you can’t run a modern society without denominators.”
In 1998, he was tapped by President Bill Clinton to head the Census Bureau, in part because of his work at NORC. As he later told Peytchev, “The Clinton administration was looking for someone who at least on paper had the right credential – and my earlier role at NORC provided that credential. It allowed the Democratic administration to present me to a Republican Congress (the position requires Senate confirmation) as a nonpartisan academic with relevant experience in scientific management.”
Prewitt strongly advocated for the Census and of improvements to its methodology, with a particular focus on America’s fraught system of racial and ethnic classifications. As he explained in a video at the time, “I think the census is a cornerstone of democracy because it is the starting point for what is representational democracy… The census is a moment in American political life, when the entire population simultaneously does something to show their loyalty, their responsibility, their obligation to the workings of our democracy.”
Many of his later books dealt with issues about or informed by the Census, such as 2013’s What is Your Race? The Flawed Effort of the Census to Classify Americans, 2006’s The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization, and 2003’s Politics and Science in Census Taking.
In 2002, after leaving the Census Bureau, Prewitt joined Columbia University, becoming Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs and special advisor to the university president. He was also a fellow at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. He also was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), Guggenheim, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (and received the third-ever Sage-CASBS Award). Among other honors, he received a Lifetime Career Award from the American Political Science Association.
In 2015, Prewitt started a six-year run as president of the AAPSS. “Ken Prewitt,” said AAPSS Executive Director Tom Kecskemethy, “had a genius for understanding the scientific enterprise in its broadest terms and then applying that knowledge to public works and intellectual projects that benefit society.”
