Noah D. Drezner
Noah D. Drezner is an Associate Professor of Higher Education and Program Director of the Higher and Postsecondary Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, founding editor of Philanthropy & Education (Indiana University Press), and Visiting Professor of Education and Philanthropic Studies at Beijing Normal University. He is internationally known as a leading researcher on educational philanthropy.
His research interests include philanthropy and fundraising as it pertains to colleges and universities, including higher education's role in the cultivation of prosocial behaviors. Currently, Drezner’s work is based in identity-based philanthropy. In other words, he is researching how a person’s social identities affect their giving to higher education and how colleges and universities can engage their alumni in more inclusive ways. He is the co-PI for the National Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Alumni, a multi-institutional mixed methods project, and recently completed a population-based survey experiment, The National Alumni Giving Experiment, that evaluates how a person’s social identities affect their propensity to donate and at what level when exposed to different types of fundraising solicitations.
Drezner has published numerous articles and six books and given several international presentations on related topics. Drezner’s edited a volume Expanding the Donor Base in Higher Education: Engaging Non-Traditional Donors (2013) to wide acclaim, including winning the Association of Fundraising Professional’s (AFP) 2014 Skystone Partners Prize for Research on Fundraising and Philanthropy. He was also named the inaugural AFP Early Career Emerging Scholar in 2014. In 2015 his research was awarded the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) John Grenzebach Award for Outstanding Research in Philanthropy for Educational Advancement. He was awarded the Barbara Townsend Memorial Lecture at the 2015 Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference, on his most recent book, Fundraising and institutional advancement: Theory, practice, and new paradigms (with Frances Huehls). And, in 2016 he was awarded the Penn GSE Alumni Recent Alumni/Early Career Award of Merit for making “significant contributions to his field.”
He holds his B.S. from the University of Rochester, a graduate certificate in non-profit leadership from Roberts Wesleyan College, and his M.S. in Education and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Drezner is an active member of his communities and serves on numerous volunteer boards. Currently, Noah is president of the Hillel at the University of Rochester Board of Directors, co-chair of the University of Rochester Metro-New York City Alumni Network, and as a member of the board of the Justice Policy Institute. Prior to returning to graduate school, Drezner was an advancement officer at the University of Rochester, where he gained the practitioner experience that informs his research. Most recently, he was an Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Maryland. In 2011, Drezner was named one of 13 university professors to the inaugural cohort of Honors College faculty at the University of Maryland.
