UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.— Penn State Professor of Sociology, of Education and of Demography David P. Baker has been appointed a Mercator Fellow by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), also known as the German Research Foundation.
Beginning this month, Baker will spend the next four years making regular trips to Germany’s Goethe University Frankfurt to conduct research as part of the prestigious fellowship, which is part of the German Collaborative Research Centres (CRC) and reserved for leading scholars whose work brings to a German-led scientific project “foundational intellectual direction, international visibility and comparative scope of the research program,” according to DFG. The award is named after the renowned 16th century cartographer Gerardus Mercator.
Baker was selected because of his influential research on how the worldwide education revolution over the past century has dramatically improved society and spurred an explosion of scientific discovery at universities, according to the foundation.
“Professor Baker’s appointment reflects his exceptional international standing and the pivotal relevance of his scholarship for the CRC’s objectives,” wrote Goethe University faculty members Merle Hummrich and Vera Moser in their announcement of Baker’s fellowship. “His groundbreaking research on the global expansion of education, educational governance, and the cultural and scientific consequences of schooling has fundamentally shaped international debates in educational sociology and policy studies. His work provides an indispensable macro-comparative and historically informed perspective on education as a global institution.”
Baker said the fellowship is deeply meaningful, given his most recent book, “Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaborations, and Knowledge Production,” published by Stanford University Press in 2024, credits the German university system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries for serving as the template for modern-day research universities like Penn State. He also spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Berlin’s Max-Planck Institute in the early 1980s.
“I got great additional training there; it really changed my professional trajectory,” Baker said. “The fellowship is a really nice honor, especially when you consider that the German Research Foundation is their version of our National Science Foundation. What’s also great for a sociologist is that the Frankfurt School of social thought and critical theory at this university was a major 20th century center of sociological theory and research. So, this award brings me full circle to Germany and its intellectual influences.”
Baker will collaborate with his counterparts from several German universities on a research study looking at the recent rise and fall of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at German and American universities.
“It is a very interesting subject and has gotten even more interesting in the last couple years,” Baker said. “Among other things, we’ll be looking at the benefits and importance of having big pushes to try to diversify universities in the U.S. and make them more inclusive. And equally important, the goal of bringing all kinds of perspectives to higher education that are reflective of a multicultural society. But we also want to look at some of the challenges of doing that — I don’t think it’s a big secret that there’s been some pushback to the approach. But I think in general our universities are much stronger for it. And I’ll be interested to see how the Germans have done things from their perspective.”
Meanwhile, Baker said he’ll also be using the fellowship to continue his wide-ranging research on “global mega-science” and the educated society.
“The world continues to get very educated, and we know that it’s beneficial to society,” Baker said. “But we know there are going to be challenges, too.”