Weidman addresses both curricular and dispositional aspects of the graduate and professional students' experiences in higher education as well as processes through which individual students are socialized. This report provides historical background on the study of professional socialization, compares and contrasts models of professional preparation, and addresses implications for the organization and administration of graduate and professional education programs.
John C. Weidman grew up in the "Pennsylvania Dutch Country" of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he attended public schools. Later he studied at Princeton University (AB, "cum laude" in sociology; Certificate in American Studies "with distinction," 1967), and the University of Chicago where he earned a doctoral degree in the sociology of education in 1974. His first international experience was as a "Werkstudent" in Germany while an undergraduate.
After a stint as a faculty member in the Social Foundations of Education at the University of Minnesota, he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked for 18 months in a non-profit, policy research organization, the Bureau of Social Science Research, primarily on the evaluation of demonstrating manpower training programs. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in January of 1979, serving as chair of the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies in 1986-1993 and 2007-2010.
In 1986-87, as a Visiting Fulbright Professor of the Sociology of Education at Augsburg University in Germany he began his first international research, focusing on the German "dual system" of vocational training. A colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Seth Spaulding, was relentless in urging him to spread his comparative wings, drawing him into a UNESCO forum on higher education research in developing countries that was piggy-backed onto the 1991 CIES Conference in Pittsburgh. In 1993, Spaulding pulled him into a project on higher education reform in Mongolia that has continued in several manifestations over the past decade and led to a number of publications. Because of Mongolia's social and political links to the Newly Independent States of Central Asia, it also led to project work and two pending publications on educational reform in that region. In 1993, Weidman was also introduced to higher education in Kenya through appointment to a UNESCO Chair in Higher Education Research at what has become Maseno University. This, too, resulted in a series of projects and research on higher education reform in both Kenya and South Africa.
In the Fall Semester of 2011, he was a Visiting Research Fellow (Professor) in the Graduate School of International Development at Nagoya University where he continued research on the field of comparative and international development that evolved as he co-edited a volume in honor of Rolland Paulston's contributions, Beyond the Comparative.
Weidman takes his work with students very seriously and prides himself on having mentored a number of both domestic and international scholars. With former graduate students, he has co-edited a book on higher education in Korea and co-authored a monograph on the socialization of graduate and professional students in higher education. He is Co-Editor of Pittsburgh Studies in Comparative and International Education from Sense Publishers, Co-Editor of the journal, Excellence in Higher Education, Assistant Editor of the Comparative Education Review, and a Consulting Editor for the Journal of Higher Education.
