Jennifer Hochschild

Jennifer Hochschild
Title	Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government Professor of African and African American Studies Harvard College Professor
Academic background
Alma mater	Oberlin College
Academic work
Institutions	Harvard University

Jennifer Lucy Hochschild (born September 17, 1950) is an American political scientist. She serves as the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. She is also a member of the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Education

Hochschild received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Career

Hochschild was the 2015–2016 President of the American Political Science Association.

In 2019, Hochschild was on the ad hoc committee involved in denying tenure to Lorgia García Peña, an Afro-Latina professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. According to a New Yorker article, Hochschild had characterized Peña's work as "not research, but activism."

In February 2022, Hochschild was one of 38 Harvard faculty to sign a letter to The Harvard Crimson defending professor John Comaroff after he was placed on unpaid leave for violating the university's sexual and professional conduct policies. After Harvard graduate students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's sexual harassment, Hochschild and other professors said they wished to retract their signatures.

In January 2024, after facing backlash from Harvard Extension School (HES) affiliates for remarks she made on X which were perceived as denigrating students at the school, Hochschild apologized. In a series of posts on X, Hochschild — a Government and African and African American Studies professor who teaches at Harvard and HES — suggested that conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, who emerged as a prominent critic of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, had misrepresented his master’s degree from the Extension School. Hochschild wrote on X that HES students were "great" but "not what we typically normally think of as Harvard graduate students." The Harvard Extension Student Association (HESA) published that it was "deeply concerned and disappointed" by Hochschild's remarks. HESA stated that although Hochschild attempted to backtrack on her statements, the initial message conveyed a different sentiment, one that undermines the value and reputation of Harvard Extension School, and further that generalizations that denigrate HES students do more than unjustly diminish individual achievements; they erode the foundational values of diversity, respect, and academic rigor that are essential to the fabric of Harvard University, and all of its degree-granting schools.

Works

• What’s Fair: American Beliefs and Distributive Justice (Harvard University Press, 1981)
• The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (Yale University Press, 1984)
• Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1995)
• ed. Social Policies for Children with Sara McLanahan and Irwin Garfinkel (Brookings Institution, 1996)
• The American Dream and the Public Schools with Nathan Scovronick (Oxford University Press, 2003)
• Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch (Princeton University Press, 2012)
• ed. Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation with Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Claudine Gay, and Michael Jones-Correa (Oxford University Press, 2013)