People

Director of the Centre for the Study of Canadian & International Higher Education

I am the William G. Davis Chair of Community College Leadership in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto; Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California-Berkeley; and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have substantive, theoretical, and methodological lines of research. Substantively, I focus on whether and how structural factors maintain inequality, reduce educational opportunity, constitute discrimination, and threaten human rights. Methodologically, I devise new, theoretically-grounded measures of social phenomena; study and assess logics of case selection; and critically evaluate new methods. Theoretically, I have two lines of research. One concerns the theory of effectively maintained inequality, which was based on analyses of socioeconomic inequality in education in the United States and has been replicated in Canada and several other countries. Another line of research uses critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical legal theory to conceptualize discrimination as a damaged social relation. My work in that domain began in Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice, a book that was banned from the United States Naval Academy Library by officials of the Trump Administration in April 2025.

I am currently recruiting doctoral and masters students interested in learning and using quantitative methods to study inequality in education, especially inequality in some way connected to postsecondary education, and/or interested in learning and using quantitative methods to study race, sex, and other forms of discrimination and discrimination effects. If you are interested, please apply to the program in Higher Education within the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education, and mention my name in your application.