Richard Arum is a new professor within the Department of Sociology, but not a new face to the UCI campus. For the past five years, he served as dean of the School of Education. Splitting his time now between professorial posts in both education and sociology, Arum is excited to collaborate with campuswide colleagues to better understand student experiences, trajectories, and outcomes in higher education.

He's currently leading a large interdisciplinary research initiative to improve understanding of higher education, inform institutional improvement efforts and advance educational equity. He’s also engaged in a set of community-based research efforts with the Samueli Academy, Orangewood Foundation and others focused on workforce development, improving services to foster and housing insecure youth, and assessing the effectiveness of educational innovations. And he’s providing leadership for a statewide environmental climate change literacy project that brings the University of California and California State University systems together with community non-profit organizations to better prepare youth to understand and respond to the increasing environmental challenges confronting our planet. His work has been supported by multimillion dollar grants from the Templeton Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Google, and others.

An accomplished academic leader, scholar and community advocate, Arum will also be teaching sociological methods in the fall for the newly launched UCI Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees (LIFTED) Program for adults who are incarcerated.

Prior to coming to UCI, Arum spent 16 years on the faculty at New York University where he chaired the Department of Sociology and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions. He’s also been a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and served as director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council. He earned his bachelor’s in political science at Tufts University, his master of education in teaching and curriculum at Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in sociology at UC Berkeley.