David Baker receives University of Ghent’s Sarton Chair and Medal

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — David P. Baker, Penn State professor of sociology, education, and demography, has been awarded the 2023-24 George Sarton Chair and Medal in the history of science by the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Named for George Sarton (1884-1956), who is considered the founder of the history of science as an academic discipline, the Sarton Chair and Medal distinguishes excellence in scholarship on the history, philosophy and sociology of science. The award recognizes Baker’s “intellectual leadership of an international team of sociologists conducting a socio-historical project on the causes of growth of global mega-science and the scientization of world culture from 1900 to present.”

Baker will travel to the University of Ghent in October to be honored at a formal academic ceremony and to present two lectures to the history, philosophy and social science faculty and assorted guests. Both lectures will be published in the journal Sartoniana.

“Originally, Sarton and a long list of past distinguished recipients forged the modern historical study of science, so it’s a humbling honor to be recognized among them,” said Baker, who also serves as director of the graduate sociology program in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts.

"I am so pleased that Dave has been honored with the George Sarton Chair and Medal,” said Michelle Frisco, professor of sociology and demography and head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology. “It’s a well-deserved honor and recognizes his international reputation and scientific contributions to knowledge about the history, philosophy and sociology of science. The department is very proud.”

The award recognizes Baker’s unique contributions to demonstrating how a parallel century-long global revolution in education development, particularly at universities, had the somewhat unintentional consequence of raising the world’s capacity for unprecedented levels of scientific research. His team’s research combines traditional historical approaches with large-data analyses of the timing and working locations of scientists as they published millions of research journal articles from 1900 to present.

“This approach showed what had been missed by earlier, popular but ultimately incorrect, ‘end-of-growth of science’ predictions,” Baker said.

Baker’s scholarship on science is part of his broader study of how the worldwide education revolution has influenced the historical rise of the social institutions of postindustrial society, and, more theoretically, on how human society sustains itself. In addition to global education development’s impact on the knowledge society and science productivity, he has closely examined the impact of education on epidemics, trends in population health, the pending population implosion and new patterns of social inequality, among other topics.

In recent years, he has collaborated with students and colleagues on research projects exploring the effects of education on everything from the increasing cognitive skills of populations to the transformation of occupations to health risk behaviors.

Baker has written several books, including the forthcoming “Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaborations and Knowledge Production,” to be published by Stanford University Press in 2024, which he co-wrote with Justin J.W. Powell of the University of Luxembourg.

The modern university concept can be traced to 19th century Germany. From there, it spread to the United States, which “turbocharged” the concept and spread it to Asia and, ultimately, the rest of the world, Baker said. Today, the vast majority of scientific research continues to be done at universities.

“Universities are great for collaboration — I can call up someone anywhere in the world and collaborate with them on a project,” Baker said. “I think the value of our work is that we’re showing that the growth of the university, which is part of what we call the education revolution expansion of education everywhere, has been the platform for what we call global mega-science. And when people tell me that the growth is going to end, I say, ‘Not any time soon because there’s still a lot of capacity in the world.’ More and more of the world is using the same university science model to boost their research capacity. The pie continues to grow, and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the future.”

Baker also is the author of “The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture,” published in 2015, which received the American Education Research Association’s Outstanding Book of the Year; and co-author of “The Century of Science: The Global Triumph of the Research University,” published in 2017. In addition, he’s written a series of related technical papers in Scientometrics; Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy; Change: The Magazine of Higher Education; Die Hochschule; and Higher Education Policy.

Besides his duties at Penn State, Baker is a visiting professor for the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg, and a non-residential fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.