JOHN C. WEIDMAN, Ph.D.
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HIGHER AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS, ORGANIZATIONS & POLICY

 Email: weidman@pitt.edu

 

 

In addition to my faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh, I have served (1986-1993; 2007-2010) as chairperson of the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies and director (2004-2007) of the Institute for International Studies in Education. International positions include Visiting Research Fellow (Professor) in the Graduate School of International Development at Nagoya University, Japan (Fall Semester, 2011); Guest Professor at Beijing Normal University, China (2007-2012); UNESCO Chair of Higher Education Research in the Institute of Research and Postgraduate Studies at Maseno University, Kenya (Fall Semester, 1993); Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of the Sociology of Education in the Philosophical Faculty I of Augsburg University, Germany (Winter Semester, 1986-87); and Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the School of Education at Tel-Aviv University, Israel (February, 1987).

 

The primary focus of my international research and consulting is comparative education reform, initially with an emphasis on policy and finance in nations undergoing the transition to a market economy. I began this work in the summer of 1993, when I completed a comprehensive study of the higher education system in Mongolia as a consultant on a project funded by the Asian Development Bank that resulted in the 1994 Education and Human Resource Master Plan.  Subsequently, I worked on preparing the 2000-2005 Mongolia Education Sector Strategy and the Master Plan to Develop Education of Mongolia in 2006-2015. The "sector wide" approach used for the 2000-2005 sector strategy is described in Current Issues in Comparative Education.  This work was expanded to include five Central Asian countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) in 2002 during the course of an Asian Development Bank project on the management of education reform following the break-up of the Soviet Union and resulted in a report entitled, Education Reforms in Countries in Transition: Policies and Processes.  In 2023, I published a chapter discussing the complexity of global educational policy formulation, “Conceptualizing Global Educational Policy Making in a (Post) COVID-19 World: The Past as Prologue?”

 

In Africa, I worked (2000-2002) on the Tertiary Education Linkages Project (TELP) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in South Africa, providing technical assistance in institutional planning and management to the University of the North (Limpopo) and the University of Durban-Westville (KwaZulu-Natal).  In 2003, I received funding from ALO/USAID for a linkage project with Moi University in Kenya focused on revitalizing institutional strategic planning capacity.  I returned to Moi University in 2016 to assess the impact of this work.

 

I have a longstanding record of publications conceptualizing the socialization of students in higher education, both domestic and international.  Included among them are Socialization of Graduate and Professional Students: A Perilous Passage (2001), “Conceptualizing Socialization of Graduate Students of Color: Revisiting the Weidman-Twale-Stein Framework” (2016), “Conceptualizing Student Socialization in Higher Education: An Intellectual Journey” (2020), and “Toward a 21^st Century Socialization Model of Higher Education’s Impact on Students” (2020).  For a detailed description of my experience and publications, interested readers are invited to browse my Curriculum Vitae.