Fredrickson Family Innovation Lab - Through a Different Lens: Innovation Lab Lecture Series - Wednesday, October 21 at 8:00 PM

In this webinar, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University and former Director of the United States Census Bureau Kenneth Prewitt will talk about the importance of the decennial census in the context of critical social cleavages in American society. He will assess the multiple threats to the accuracy of the 2020 census, focusing on the relationship between the census and political polarization, threats to representation, and the fundamental ways we think about ourselves and society.

Prewitt is currently teaching at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. He served as the Director of the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Southern Methodist University, a Distinguished Service Award from the New School for Social Research, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany, the Charles E. Merriam Lifetime Career Award, American Political Science Association and a Lifetime National Associate of the NRC/NAS. Prewitt holds a BA from Southern Methodist University (1958); MA from Washington University (1959), Harvard Divinity School (1960) as a Danforth fellow and a PhD from Stanford University (1963). He has authored or coauthored another half-dozen books and more than 100 articles and book chapters. His most recent book is What Is "Your" Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans.