• D. Randall Smith
  • D. Randall Smith
  • Ph.D. The John Hopkins University, 1978
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • D. Randall Smith, Professor Emeritus, spent his entire 43-year career at Rutgers, New Brunswick. His research and teaching were considerably more varied. 

    His early research focused on labor market mobility (with Andrew Abbott) and the latent structure of aging and religious participation (with Stephen Ainley). This was followed by a series of articles and federal grants that investigated delinquent careers, adult recidivism, sentencing, risk assessment, and school crime (with William Smith, Robert N. Parker and Elliot Noma). His methodological articles developed Centroid Scaling methods on sociometric data and arrest records (with Elliot Noma and William Smith). He also published papers on the structural factors leading to bias and inequality in performance evaluations (with Nancy DiTomaso and Corinne Post). 

    Dr. Smith’s later publications were in the Sociology of Sport subfield including racism in college sports (with multiple coauthors) and several papers on the Home Advantage in college and professional sport (one with three undergraduate students). More recently, Professor Smith studied the indirect effects of big-time sports on colleges and universities, including the outcomes of student quality, tuition rates, NCAA sanctions, and enrollment yield. 

    At the graduate level, Dr. Smith taught multivariate statistics and various courses in advanced quantitative methods. His undergraduate courses included research methods, introductory statistics, social psychology, sociology of sport (41 times!), education and society, and senior seminars in both the sociology of higher education and the sociology of intercollegiate athletics. He advised multiple undergraduate honors students and was an advisor to many participants in the University’s undergraduate research assistant program. In 2019 Dr. Smith received the School of Arts and Sciences award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.