Richard Alba : CUNY Profiles
By Erika Dreifus
Richard Alba’s 2008 appointment as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York marked the scholar’s return to his home city and to the University that gave him his first academic job. Born and raised in the Bronx, Professor Alba earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Columbia University before joining CUNY in 1974 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehman College and the Graduate Center.
Since leaving his first CUNY post in 1977, Professor Alba has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most respected and influential scholars on the subjects of race, ethnic identity, immigration, population studies, and demography. He has returned to CUNY from the State University of New York at Albany, where he held the rank of distinguished professor and directed both the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (which he also founded) and the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research.
Professor Alba arrived in sociology via a detour: The self-described “math kid” seemed well on his way to a career in computer programming before pursuing the graduate studies that would make him a sociologist. After earning his undergraduate degree, he worked as a programmer for the Service Bureau Corporation (IBM) and then for the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia. It was at the latter place, he says, that he became aware of the exciting work going on in sociology. However it happened, his decision to pursue sociology has had profound effects on his own life and on the field.
In fact, it’s a little difficult to keep up with his many scholarly engagements. He has authored or edited seven books (an eighth is on the way—more about that in a moment). Not surprisingly, these volumes cover a range of topics, from Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Prentice-Hall, 1985) to Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was co-authored with Victor Nee and won both the American Sociological Association’s Thomas & Znaniecki Book Award and the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mirra Komarovsky Award. In 2009, Harvard University Press will publish Professor Alba’s next book (“my Obama book,” he calls it during our conversation three weeks after the election of Barack Obama to the United States presidency). To be titled Blurring the Color Line: A New Chance for a More Integrated America, this text takes a forward-looking perspective to describe a more integrated society and ways to accelerate the process of integration and, says Professor Alba, is intended for both scholarly and general audiences.
Professor Alba has also pursued a prodigious (and prodigiously-funded) research agenda. His research reflects persistent concerns about inequality, whether in education or public health, whether in the United States or other countries. Both his concentration on comparative research and his sustained interest in what happens to the descendants of immigrants reflect and contribute to important trends in the field of sociology. Currently, for example, he is leading a large-scale project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine educational success among children of immigrants and in the United States and in several Western European countries. At the same time, he is also working with former Albany colleagues on a project supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the neighborhoods in which the children of immigrants are being raised in the United States.
Professor Alba’s return to CUNY signals a further strengthening of scholarly areas for which CUNY is already highly regarded. The professor says he hopes to contribute to “the extraordinary intellectual site” that is his new academic home; CUNY is confident that he will.
December 2008
