Rollin Kent

rkent@puebla.megared.net.mx

Date of birth: September 28, 1949

Universidad Autónoma de Puebla

After receiving a B.A. in history from Dartmouth College (1971), I carried out Master’s level studies in Sociology at UNAM (1973-1976) and later received an M.A. (1988) and a Ph.D. (1995) in Educational Research from the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados (Center for Advanced Studies, Mexico). I taught sociology and Latin American politics at UNAM (National University of Mexico) from 1974 to 1984. During the following four years I developed higher education research at the University of Puebla, Mexico, where I was Director of the Center for University Studies. Since 1988 I have held a post of Full Professor at the CINVESTAV.
My initial research interest was the emergence of the Mexican university professoriate. During the 1990’s I have done work on comparative higher education policy in Mexico and Latin America, with the research team coordinated initially by José Joaquín Brunner and later by Jorge Balán with support from the Ford Foundation. Since 1996 I have been studying institutional responses to policy change in Mexican universities, with an emphasis on changes in funding, management and academic organization.
Currently my research team is doing a comparative study of disciplinary and organizational change in the social sciences in five provincial universities in Mexico, with support from Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología in Mexico. The members of this working group are: Germán Alvarez (Assoc. Professor, DIE), Mario González (PhD candidate) and Rosalba Ramírez (Assist. Researcher, DIE). This working group has also been contracted by the Assistant Secretary for Educational Planning in Mexico (Subsecretaría de Planeación y Coordinación, S.E.P.) to develop a new set of funding indicators for Mexican education. This is a year-long project starting in May 1998.
Between 1993 and 1996 I was co-editor of the higher education journal Universidad Futura, published by Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico D.F.). I was President of Consejo Mexicano de Investigación Educativa (the Mexican Educational Research Association) between 1996 and early 1998. I am currently a member of the editorial board of Higher Education Policy (IAU, Paris) and a founding member of the Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa. I was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education during the Spring term of 1995 as a member of the Fellows Program on Latin American Higher Education, funded by the Ford Foundation and coordinated by LASPAU.

Some recent publications

  • I edited Los Temas Críticos de la Educación Superior en América Latina, a two-volume comparative study of contemporary issues in Latin American higher education policy, published by Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico, 1996.

  • I co-authored with Peter Ewell Policy Approaches to Evaluation and Incentive Funding in U.S. and Mexican Higher Education, a Working Paper published by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, 1995.

  • “Modernity on the Periphery: Expansion and Cultural Change in Mexican Public Universities”, a chapter in Comparative Perspectives on the Social Role of Higher Education, edited by William Tierney and Ken Kempner for Garland Press, 1996.

  • Institutional Reform in Mexican Higher Education: Conflict and Renewal in Three Public Universities, a technical study published by the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, D.C., 1998.

  • Co-author with Wietse de Vries, Sylvie Didou and Rosalba Ramírez: El Financiamiento de la Educación Superior en México: Modelos de Asignación en una Generación, México: Asociación Nacional de Universidades e Instituciones de Educación Superior (in press).