| 1 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan R. Cole | |
| Institution: | Columbia University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2005 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1942 | ||
Jonathan R. Cole currently is John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University. For fourteen years, from 1989-2003, he was Provost of Columbia University, and from 1994 until 2005, he also held the title of Dean of Faculties of the University. He has spent his entire academic career at Columbia. Majoring in American history at Columbia College (graduating in 1964), he participated also as a varsity athlete in baseball for four years and as a member of Columbia's freshman basketball team while an undergraduate. He turned to sociology after graduation in large part because of the influence of Robert K. Merton. As an undergraduate he studied with some of the great minds of Columbia in the early 1960s, including Merton, Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley, Meyer Schapiro, and Richard Hofstadter. Dr. Cole received his Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia's Department of Sociology in 1969. He has been teaching, conducting research, and been active in academic administration since receipt of his doctorate, which was entitled, "The Social Structure of Science." He served as the Director of the Center for the Social Sciences from 1979-87, when he became Vice President for Arts and Sciences. After two years, he was named Provost of the University and in 1994 he became Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia, a position that he has held until today. His scholarly work has focused principally on the development of the sociology of science as a research specialty. The Columbia University Program in the Sociology of Science, with Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole and Jonathan R. Cole as principal investigators, received support from the National Science Foundation for roughly 20 years. Faculty and student members of the program produced a substantial body of both theoretical and empirical work on a variety of themes. Jonathan and Stephen Cole collaborated on studies of the system of social stratification in science and on the reward system in science. They examined the extent to which the social system of science approximated a meritocracy. This work is seen in early-published papers and in their book, Social Stratification in Science (1973). In this early work, Jonathan and Stephen Cole developed the use of citations as a measure of scientific quality and impact. They were the first social scientists to use this measure extensively as an indicator of the impact of published work. Further questions of meritocracy were explored in a project that they conducted for the National Academy of Sciences on the peer review system in science. They focused on whether there was any force to the claim that the peer review system was an "old-boys" network of self-reinforcing elites. The study, which examined the system of grant reviews at the National Science Foundation, resulted in several published works, including Peer Review in the National Science Foundation: Phase One of a Study (1978, with Stephen Cole and Leonard Rubin) and Peer Review in the National Science Foundation: Phase Two of a Study (1981, with Stephen Cole and COPUP of the NAS). Concentrating still further on theoretical issues of fairness and meritocracy, Dr. Cole began to explore the place of women in science. His early work, Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community (1987) was one of the first major empirical works on the treatment of women in science and how their treatment could be assessed against the norm of universalism in science. Following the publication of this book, a series of studies of women in science were carried out in collaboration with Harriet Zuckerman. This NSF supported work, which produced extended interviews with hundreds of men and women scientists (including recorded interviews with scores of many of the most eminent female scientists in the United States), resulted in many published papers and the volume The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community (1991, with Harriet Zuckerman and John Bruer, editors). These papers explored, for example, the relationship between marriage, family, and scientific productivity. It tried to explain the "productivity puzzle" of increasing differences in the scientific publication rates of men and women scientists. It compares the careers and scientific productivity of matched samples of men and women in various fields of science. The last of these papers, "A Theory of Limited Differences: Explaining the Productivity Puzzle in Science," (with Burton Singer) is published in The Outer Circle. Dr. Cole's interest in science has extended to work on the relationship between science and the media. He has published on the "social construction of medical facts," which deal with the presentation by journalists of highly problematic scientific findings as "facts." His focus is on the sociological relationships between scientists and the media that lead to these distortions. In recent years, Jonathan R. Cole has turned his scholarly attention to issues in higher education, particularly focusing on problems facing the great American research universities, as with his 2010 book, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. His edited book (with Elinor Barber and Stephen R. Graubard), The Research University in a Time of Discontent (1994), contains essays by prominent educators, including his own opening chapter, "Balancing Acts: Dilemmas of Choice Facing Research Universities." More recently, he has been focusing attention on questions of scientific and technological literacy, on intellectual property and the new digital media, and on current problems facing research universities. Jonathan R. Cole has taught courses to both undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia in the Department of Sociology. Among the courses he has offered are: The History of Sociological Theory; The Sociology of Science; The Sociology of Law; and Evidence and Inference in Social Research. He has also taught in Columbia College's core curriculum, offering sections in "Contemporary Civilization." He is currently working with members of the science faculty at Columbia on a new core curriculum course that focuses on major science concepts, while exploring features of various scientific disciplines. When it is introduced, this course will be required of all Columbia College undergraduates and will be the first science course that all College students will be required to take. Jonathan Cole was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1975-76. In the same year, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He spent the 1986-87 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1992, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and several major foundations have supported his scholarly work. The years since 1987 have been spent in academic administration. After two years as Vice President for Arts and Sciences, Jonathan R. Cole was Columbia's chief academic officer for the past 14 years - the second longest tenure as Provost in the University's 250-year history. During those years, he has served three University presidents and has been a chief architect in building still further the academic quality of the university. | |||