Ethan Ris

Ethan Ris, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a historian of higher education. His current book project, Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform focuses on the effect of activist philanthropy on American undergraduate education in the first half of the twentieth century. Using archival methods, he shows how early philanthropic foundations' efforts to impose efficiency-minded reforms on colleges and universities fell short, before they embraced the ethos of student development and institutional autonomy by the mid-century. He holds a P.D from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.