| Birth Name: | Carl Kenneth Prewitt Jr. |
| Birth Date: | 16 March 1936 |
| Birth Place: | Alton, Illinois |
| Office: | 20th Director of the U.S. Census Bureau |
| President: | Bill Clinton |
| Term Start: | 1998 |
| Term End: | 2001 |
| Preceded: | Martha Farnsworth Riche |
| Succeeded: | C. Louis Kincannon |
| Alma Mater: |
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Kenneth Prewitt (born March 16, 1936) an American academic who is the Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs,[1] where he is also director of the Scholarly Knowledge Project. He was Director of the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001.
Prewitt was born March 16, 1936, in Alton, Illinois. He graduated from Alton High School in 1954 and then attended DePauw University for one year before transferring to Southern Methodist University.[2] Prewitt received a B.A. in 1958 from Southern Methodist; a M.A. in 1959 from Washington University in St. Louis, and a 1963 Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University with a thesis "Career patterns and role-orientations: an inquiry into the political behavior of city councilmen"[3] and was a Danforth Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School from 1959 to 1960.[2]
He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago in 1965, rising to the rank of first Associate and then Full Professor. From 1998 to 2000 he was the Director of the Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001[4] and Director of the National Opinion Research Center. He has also served as president of the Social Science Research Council, as senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and as Dean of the Graduate School at the New School University. Since 2015, he has been the president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Prewitt has two children by his first marriage, and is now married to Susan Mullin Vogel, an art historian, museum curator and leader, and filmmaker.
He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a Lifetime Career Award from the American Political Science Association,. He also has received honorary degrees from Southern Methodist University and from Carnegie Mellon University.
He has also published 100 articles and book chapters.