2005 Charles Merriam Award

Presented biennially to "a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research."

Award Committee:  John H. Mollenkopf, Chair, CUNY Graduate Center, Geoffrey M. Garrett, University of California, Los Angeles, Bo Rothstein, Goteborg University

Recipient:  Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Citation:  Like Charles Merriam, Kenneth Prewitt has chaired the political science department at the University of Chicago, served as President of the Social Science Research Council, and advised the federal government, in his case leading the 2000 decennial Census.  (Though he has not yet, like Merriam, served as a city council member, he did study them!)

Born in Alton, Illinois, Kenneth Prewitt received his BA at Southern Methodist University, an MA from Washington University, was a Danforth Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1963, where he worked under Heinz Eulau's guidance to carry out a study of city council members in the Bay Area, published as Labyrinths of Democracy.  He also began to think about institutional racism, a theme to which he has returned in his current work.  From 1965 to 1982, he taught at the University of Chicago, becoming chair of the department and director of the National Opinion Research Center.  There, he applied the tools of survey research and attitudinal analysis to a wide variety of problems, including the recruitment of political leaders and the problems of state-building in African nations.  

In 1979, Prewitt was called to the Social Science Research Council, serving as its president until 1985, when he became Senior Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation, leading its international science-based development program for ten years in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 1995, he returned to SSRC for another three years, before being named Director of the Census Bureau by President Clinton.  In this capacity, he carried out the largest, most costly, and most difficult data-collection effort ever undertaken by the federal government, showing great skill at dealing with a variety of political cross-currents about how we should define and measure our population.  Subsequently he became Dean of the Graduate Faculty of the New School University and now Carnegie Professor of Public Policy at Columbia, where he is doing seminal work on the implications of different ways of defining and measuring race for public policy.

In each of his three domains, Ken Prewitt has made critical contributions to the development of knowledge that informs, and sometimes even enlightens, public policy.  As a professor, department chair, and survey research director at Chicago, he built one of the profession's strongest departments and augmented the knowledge on which that profession relies.  These accomplishments enabled him to lead the Social Science Research Council through two pivotal periods in its development, strengthening not only political science but the allied disciplines.  At Rockefeller, he guided philanthropy towards applying social science insights to global development.  Finally, as Census Bureau Director, Prewitt fought to create perhaps the highest quality Census ever conducted while preserving the integrity of the Bureau against its challengers.  As scholar, builder of social science infrastructure, and leader of the Census Bureau, he has dedicated himself to showing how social scientists can wrestle with, and help to resolve, the basic dilemmas of racial division, economic and social inequality, and democratic governance.  This makes him a most worthy recipient of the Merriam Award.