Daniel F. Chambliss is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor and chair of the Sociology Department at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Holder of master’s and PhD degrees from Yale University, his research interests are in the social psychology of organizations.
His 1996 book, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics, won the Eliot Freidson Prize in 1998 for the best book of the preceding two years in medical sociology from the American Sociological Association. He is also the winner of the ASA’s Theory Prize, in 1989, for his work on organizational excellence. Dan is the author of Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, which was named the 1991 Book of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and is co-author, with Russell Schutt, of Making Sense of the Social World, a research methods textbook now in its second edition.
Dan is currently director of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Project for the Assessment of Liberal Arts Education at Hamilton, and a member of the executive committee of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits over 500 colleges and universities in the eastern United States.
His recent research includes an eight-year longitudinal study of the process and outcomes of liberal arts education, using an array of interview, survey, objective assessment, archival and transcript data. With an extensive career in organizational consulting, including non-profit and corporate clients (Fortune 100 firms) both in the U.S. and the U.K, Dan specializes in finding and analyzing data for crafting solutions to organizational problems, and in the use of assessment data for improving educational policy and practice in higher education.
Dan recently wrote an article for the Center of Inquiry's web publication, LiberalArtsOnline, about the importance of gathering information from students when doing assessment work.