The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference of eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. It participates in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I, and in football, in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The term Ivy League is used more broadly to refer to the eight schools that belong to the league, which are globally-renowned as elite colleges associated with academic excellence, highly selective admissions, and social elitism. The term was used as early as 1933, and it became official in 1954 following the formation of the Ivy League athletic conference.
In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) is a sociological term which is often used to describe white Protestant Americans of British descent, who are generally part of the white dominant culture or upper-class and historically often the Mainline Protestant elite. Historically or most consistently, WASPs are of British descent, though the definition of WASP varies in this respect. It was seen to be in exclusionary contrast to Catholics, Jews, Irish, immigrants, southern or eastern Europeans, and the non-White. WASPs have dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of the history of the United States. Critics have disparaged them as "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, a professor at Harvard University, and an 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 and mathematician. 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.
Leon Botstein is a Swiss-born American conductor, educator, and scholar serving as the President of Bard College.
St. Paul's School is a 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 serves 540 students, who come from 37 states and 28 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 "the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a 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.
Public Culture is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal of cultural studies published by Duke University Press. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Social privilege is an advantage or entitlement that benefits individuals belonging to certain groups, often to the detriment of others. Privileged groups can be advantaged based on social class, wealth, education, caste, age, height, skin color, physical fitness, nationality, geographic location, cultural differences, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, neurodiversity, physical disability, sexual orientation, religion, and other differentiating factors. Individuals can be privileged in one area, such as education, and not privileged in another area, such as health. The amount of privilege any individual has may change over time, such as when a person becomes disabled, or when a child becomes a young adult.
Located within Butler Library, the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research is the oldest oral history program. Pulitzer Prize winner Allan Nevins founded the program in 1948. There is an extensive list of projects belonging to the center, both current and completed. Currently the office holds 8,000 taped memoirs and 1,000,000 pages of transcripts.
Alice Goffman is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author mostly known for the fierce controversy that resulted from the publication of her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. She was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pomona College. Though once considered a "star" in the field, Goffman was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin in 2019 and left academia.
Dana R. Fisher is an American sociologist, professor of sociology, public speaker, and author. She is the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her areas of research and expertise are activism, democracy, the climate crisis, 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.
