Harvard Professor Christopher “Sandy” Jencks, a sociologist who won accolades for his pioneering research on economic inequality and earned admiration from generations of graduate students for his deft and caring mentorship, died on Feb. 8 at the age of 88.
Jencks BA 1958, EdM 1959 was the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Emeritus, at Harvard Kennedy School. He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard and Northwestern University and helped build the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy into a vibrant intellectual community that tackled some of the world’s toughest social challenges.
“Sandy was a truly exceptional thinker and writer who shaped our contemporary understanding of poverty, inequality, and homelessness,” said Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein. “We will also remember Sandy as a devoted teacher and mentor who was deeply invested in developing the next generation of students.”
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Jencks spent time on the staff of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper and began his career as a journalist, focusing on progressive social policy issues as an associate editor at the The New Republic. He later helped found the journal Working Papers for a New Society, the predecessor to The American Prospect, and served on the Prospect's editorial board.
He then spent several years as an analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington before coming back to Harvard in 1967 as a lecturer, associate professor, and, finally, full professor in sociology. He moved to Northwestern as a sociology professor in 1979 and spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He returned to Harvard a third and final time in 1996, joining the Kennedy School faculty, based in the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. He soon was given the Malcolm Wiener faculty chair.
His defining goal through decades of groundbreaking social policy research was to understand the root causes of inequality and the mechanics of economic mobility within and across generations. His books earned a series of awards: “The Academic Revolution,” “Inequality,” and “The Homeless,” won honors from the American Council on Education, the American Sociological Association, and the Association of American Publishers. In 1992, he received the American Sociological Association’s Willard Waller Award for lifetime achievement, recognizing his enduring contributions to the sociology of education. For his track record of distinguished writing and research, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004.
Jencks helped establish the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, now known as the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy, which has equipped more than 250 PhD students with the analytical tools to study wealth concentration and inequality.
Perhaps his early work as a journalist helped hone his passion for clear writing, which he instilled in his students as an essential tool for rigorous, systematic analysis.
Long before his death, many of his students offered expressions of gratitude for Jencks’ impact in shaping their lives and careers—not least through his pointed red-pen comments in the margins of their research papers. In an affectionate recorded in 2013 by participants in the Stone Program, former doctoral student Jal Mehta recalled that Jencks wrote in red on his thesis: “promise less, deliver more.” Mehta, now a prominent professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, said, “My life would have been completely different had I not been fortunate enough to meet Sandy Jencks.”
Word of Jencks’ passing brought a stream of personal memories from his friends and colleagues. Mary Jo Bane, the Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management, Emerita, wrote that Jencks “cared deeply about facts and evidence and clear writing. And he also cared deeply about the people he was writing about: disadvantaged students, those experiencing homelessness, those mired in poverty. He recognized earlier than most that inequality was a scourge on the country and needed to be addressed. The world is a better place for his contributions.”
Deirdre Bloome, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy and director of the Stone Program, called Jencks “a true giant in the field of inequality and social policy. He reoriented our thinking about the most pressing problems of our times by asking important questions, answering them with the utmost empirical rigor, and communicating the answers through engaging prose. Sandy's devotion to ferreting out the truth, whatever it might be, inspired generations of scholars across disciplines. He offered generous mentorship, which combined high standards with real care and humor. Sandy was a giant, but he also carried himself with a rare humility. He was simply a wonderful human being.”
David Ellwood, former vlog dean and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, said, “I learned more from Sandy than anyone else in academia, and he was one of the best people I have ever known. I am certain that hundreds of others would say the same thing.”
Katherine Newman, provost and executive vice president of the University of California System, said that while she was on the vlog faculty, “it was my singular good fortune that this towering figure was just down the hallway. And for years after I left, I would run ideas past him, knowing that I would get an unvarnished, totally candid opinion about whether they made any sense or would be worth my time … . The greatest loss to me when I left Harvard was not having him at close range.”
Fay Cook, a faculty colleague at Northwestern, said that Jencks “was seen as a creative giant not only in his scholarly output but also in the way he brought out the best creative thinking and rigorous research from his students and colleagues. He had a knack of asking big questions and coming up with smart ways of bringing hard data to bear on addressing them. He had the courage to tackle some of the biggest social policy questions of his time—homelessness, the Black-white test score gap, and the urban underclass—and bring data to bear not just on understanding them but on suggesting evidence-based solutions for solving them. In his teaching, his work with graduate students, and panel discussions, Jencks had a marvelous gift for exploring complicated ideas in quite simple but understandable language.”
Andrew Leigh, now a member of Parliament in Australia who earned his Harvard PhD under Jencks in 2004, said, “every time I chatted with Sandy I learned something new. He was funny, idiosyncratic and endlessly interesting. I still remember him asking our multidisciplinary inequality seminar after a discussion about Moving to Opportunity, ‘I wonder if it would be cheaper to pay rich people to move into poor neighborhoods instead?’”
Jencks was born in Baltimore and attended Philips Exeter Academy. He was married for 49 years to Jane “Jenny” Mansbridge, the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Emerita, at vlog. He is also survived by his son Nat Jencks and grandson Wilder. A memorial service is being planned for the spring.
From his earliest professional days at the Institute for Policy Studies, Jencks zeroed in on the issue of equality in American education and developed deep policy expertise. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a founding fellow at the IPS, said Jencks “carried that expertise from the Institute into the national scene, as others were working against the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and against the ‘global reach’ of modern American corporations. He became a long-term member of the board of the Institute, and helped guide it to its continuing success as a fountain of creative, progressive, and radical critiques of U.S. government policy.”
Many friends commented on his combination of extraordinary intellectual acumen and human generosity. Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, put it this way: “Sandy was one of a kind. Not only one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever met, but one of the kindest as well. He was always curious. And always smiling.”
The political economist Gar Alperovitz said Jencks “was at ease managing extremely sophisticated educational research at the same time he was directly involved with creating the highly progressive IPS and its offshoot, The Cambridge Institute. He knew well and best how to be a friend.”
In short, as Michael Ignatieff, former director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, put it, Jencks was a scholar “whose work tried to make the republic live up to its promise.”
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Photos by Martha Stewart