Manfred Kuechler

 


E-Mail: mkuechle@hunter.cuny.edu

Manfred Kuechler received his Ph.D. from the University of Bielefeld in (West) Germany in 1971. He was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and also served as Program Director (later Executive Director) of the Center for Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) at Mannheim, which later became part of GESIS (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences). He came to the United States in 1985 when he accepted a joint appointment as professor in the departments of Sociology and of Political Science at Florida State University, Tallahassee.

He joined the Hunter faculty in 1988 and was appointed to the doctoral faculty in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center (GC) shortly thereafter. For a number of years, he was very active in professional organizations including two four year terms first as Secretary, then as President of the Research Committee for Logic and Methodology of the International Sociological Association. His main research interests are in the areas of political sociology, public opinion, voting behavior, and social movements. He has numerous publications in scholarly journals and edited volumes both in Germany and in the United States. He is co-editor (with Russell Dalton) and contributor to Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (Oxford, 1990) which was also published in Spanish. Work published since 1990 is focused on xenophobia, immigration, and naturalization (in Germany and within the European Union). In late spring of 1997, he joined an interdisciplinary (law, economics, social sciences) research team of scholars from Korea, Germany, and the United States which developed a handbook on Korean Unification drawing in part on the lessons learned from the German experience (preprint of chapter on "Political Culture and Mass Sentiment").

At Hunter, he taught  Social Statistics, Introduction to Research Methods, Population Dynamics,  and Social Movements -- as well as innovative courses focused on the changes brought about by the ever expanding Internet but also providing training in Internet related skills on both the undergraduate and graduate level. Starting in 1995, he used course web sites (for the most part open to "guests") to supplement regular classroom sessions and he increasingly used technology to support  teaching and learning.  In an attempt to involve students (including undergraduates) in primary empirical, but not necessarily quantitative research he developed the concept of the "Internet Research Paper", which became the core of a required course in the graduate program (GSR 716) for some time.  In spring 2013, he taught a course in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program: "Demography: Fertility, Mortality, Migration in a Changing World" -- the last course he taught at Hunter before going on retirement leave in fall 2013.

From July 2008 to May 2010, he served as the  (first) "Acting Associate Provost for Instructional Technology" at Hunter College while maintaining his status as active faculty member teaching one course per semester.  In his administrative role, he led the  "Technology Teaching and Learning Group (TTLG)", directed the Presidential "Faculty Innovations in Teaching with Technology (FITT) " initiative, and coordinated support for academic technologies  including Blackboard.  In November 2012, he returned to the Provost Office to help with the implementation of the "Campus Solution" module of CUNYfirst (otherwise known as Oracle/PeopleSoft) at Hunter, a comprehensive integrated administrative system to support all student and course related functions as well as similar projects like to the online collections of teaching evaluations.  As to the latter, results had been online since 2008, but Hunter also started data collection in fall 2012.

He retired in early 2014 and has been given the title of "Professor Emeritus" effective February 1, 2014. Former students seeking a letter of recommendation and/or general advice about graduate studies shall contact him via e-mail.

Curriculum vitae
Selected publications

Last update: 7/24/2017