The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The conference's headquarters are located in Princeton, New Jersey. The term Ivy League is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight schools as a group of elite colleges with connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism. Its members are Princeton University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs is a sociological term which is often used to describe white Protestant Americans who are generally part of the white upper-class, historically mostly Mainline Protestant elite, though definitions may vary; typically or most consistently, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are of British descent. WASPs have dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of the history of the United States. From the 1950s, the New Left criticized the WASP hegemony and disparaged them as part of "The Establishment". Although the social influence of wealthy WASPs has declined since the 1960s, the group continues to play a central role in American finance, politics and philanthropy.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.
St. Paul's School is a highly selective college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school's 2,000-acre (8.1 km2), or 3.125 square mile, campus currently serves 539 students, who come from 40 states and 18 countries.
Fazlur Rahman Khan was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer and architect, who initiated important structural systems for skyscrapers. Considered the "father of tubular designs" for high-rises, Khan was also a pioneer in computer-aided design (CAD). He was the designer of the Sears Tower, since renamed Willis Tower, the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998, and the 100-story John Hancock Center.
In political and sociological theory, the elite are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "those people or organizations that are considered the best or most powerful compared to others of a similar type."
Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer is an American sociologist and the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is an economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of cultural and moral meaning to the economy. A constant theme in her work is economic valuation of the sacred, as found in such contexts as life insurance settlements and economic transactions between sexual intimates. In 2006 she was elected to the PEN American Center and in 2007 she was elected to both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Peter Shawn Bearman is an American sociologist, notable for his contributions to the fields of adolescent health, research design, structural analysis, textual analysis, oral history and social networks. He is the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, the President of the American Assembly at Columbia University, as well as the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). He is also the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and co-founding director of Columbia's Oral History Master of Arts Program, the first oral history masters program in the country. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Edward Digby Baltzell Jr. was an American sociologist, academic and author. He studied the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment and is credited with popularizing the acronym WASP. He was also a best-selling author whose books were popular with both scholars and the general public.
Harriet Anne Zuckerman is an American sociologist and professor emerita of Columbia University.
Social privilege is a theory of special advantage or entitlement, which benefits one person, often to the detriment of others. Privileged groups can be advantaged based on education, social class, caste, age, height, weight, nationality, geographic location, disability, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, neurology, sexual orientation, physical attractiveness, religion, and other differentiating factors. It is generally considered to be a theoretical concept used in a variety of subjects and often linked to social inequality. Privilege is also linked to social and cultural forms of power. It began as an academic concept, but has since been invoked more widely, outside of academia.
Alice Goffman is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pomona College.
Dana R. Fisher is an American sociologist, professor of sociology, and public speaker and author. Her most recent book is American Resistance: from the Women’s March to the Blue Wave (2019). She is a professor at the University of Maryland who speaks and writes about activism, democracy and environmental policy.
Matthew Jeffrey Salganik is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at Princeton University with a special interest on social networks and computational social science.
Alessandra Casella is an economist, researcher, professor, and author. Currently, she is an Economics and Political Science professor at Columbia University.
Suzanne Infeld Keller was an American sociologist. She was the first female faculty member to be granted tenure at Princeton University.
Frederick Wherry is an American sociologist. He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, the 2021 president-elect of the Eastern Sociological Society, and is also the Director of the Dignity and Debt Network, a partnership between the Social Science Research Council and Princeton.
Lacy Crawford is an American author, journalist, novelist, and memoirist. She has published a novel, Early Decision, and a memoir, Notes on a Silencing.
