James M. and Cathleen D. Stone, whose gift will support a new postdoctoral scholars program (photo credit: John Werner)
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation awarded a gift of $1.2 million to the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, based at The Graduate Center, to launch a new postdoctoral scholars program. The new gift highlights the foundation’s continuing commitment to expand scholarship on inequality at The Graduate Center.
“An excess of wealth concentration, what I call ‘sequestering of wealth’ at the top, is an increasing issue for society’s coherence and for democracy,” said James Stone. “We welcome the opportunity to support a cohort of scholars at the postdoctoral level who will tackle crucial questions related to income and wealth disparities. The GC’s Stone Center is an excellent home base for this new program.”
Each scholar will spend two years in the program, producing empirical research on topics such as earnings, income, and wealth inequality. The gift will support two scholars starting in the 2019-2020 academic year and two starting in the 2020-2021 year. In addition to salaries, scholars will receive funding for out-of-pocket research expenses and for hiring Graduate Center students as research assistants. The gift also helps support the costs of the Stone Center’s administrative and communications work.
“My colleagues and I are absolutely thrilled by this new gift,” said Professor Janet C. Gornick (Political Science, Sociology), director of the Stone Center. “We have long hoped to have the resources to add a postdoc program so that we could integrate a group of early-career scholars into the center. Our future postdocs will expand our research agenda, and we look forward to offering them options for collaboration and mentoring.”
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, which renamed and expanded The Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Center, was launched in 2016 with a $2.5 million gift from the Stone Foundation. The foundation also funds inequality projects at Harvard Kennedy School, Brown University, and INSEAD, a business school based in France.
The Stone Center’s mission is to build and disseminate knowledge related to the causes, nature, and consequences of multiple forms of socioeconomic inequality. Although its six core faculty members and affiliated students have diverse interests and utilize a range of methods, all share a commitment to scholarship that is quantitative, data-driven, interdisciplinary, and policy-oriented, and that addresses questions that are cross-nationally comparative or global in scope.