Harriet Zuckerman
Harriet Zuckerman is Professor Emerita at Columbia University and the former Senior Vice President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She earned an A.B. from Vassar College (1958) and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University (1965) and spent the following 27 years on the Columbia faculty (four of them as chairman) and then 21 years as the Mellon Foundation’s Senior Vice President. She was the first woman her department hired as a regular faculty member and the first woman to get tenure.
She was among the early sociologists to examine the behavior of scientists and science as a social institution rather than depicting science as a sequence of individual discoveries. Her research addressed stratification in science, scientific misconduct, the emergence of specialties, careers of men and women scientists, intellectual property rights, and the refereeing of new contributions. Her publications on these subjects include books such as Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States and The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community, co-edited with Jonathan R. Cole and John T. Bruer, and journal articles on the organization of scientific work.
At the Mellon Foundation, she oversaw its grant portfolios for universities and the humanities, the support of scholars and graduate students, research institutes and research libraries, and assisting the development of new lines of inquiry. She also supervised the Foundation’s external research on higher education and studied the effectiveness of Mellon's own programs. In Educating Scholars (with Ronald Ehrenberg, Jeffrey Groen, and Sharon Brucker), she assessed Mellon’s efforts to increase completion rates and to reduce time-to-degree in the humanities. Their research showed that poor financial support failed to explain low completion rates or long times-to-degree but that institutional factors such as complex requirements for the degree and faculty expectations for polished dissertations could extend completion timelines. Her subsequent work examined time-to-degree among disciplines, the employment of PhDs, and career outcomes, including their tenure prospects. More recently, she has focused on sociological semantics—how changes in language signal the emergence and decline of social phenomena in the academy.
Professor Zuckerman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, where she served as a Vice President and chaired the committee on the nomination of officers. She has honorary degrees from Eötvös Loránd University, the University of Budapest, and the University of Warwick and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
She has been on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's Committee on Selection, the boards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Social Science Research Council; and has been a trustee of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She has also been a board member of Annual Reviews, Inc., on the MIT Corporation’s Visiting Committee in the Humanities, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee of Columbia University Press.
Upon her retirement, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation established a fellowship in her name at Columbia University for doctoral students in the sociology, history and philosophy of science.