In addition to his position in educational policy and administration, Dr. Weidman holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology.  He is also a faculty member in the African Studies Program, Asian Studies Center, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, and the Center for West European Studies. In 2004, he assumed the directorship of the Institute for International Studies in Education.

     Much of his research and consulting is focused on issues of comparative education reform, with an emphasis on policy and finance in nations undergoing the transition to a market economy. He began this work in the summer of 1993, when he completed a comprehensive study of the higher education system in Mongolia as a consultant on a project funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Since 1997, he has worked on ADB technical assistance (TA) projects in Mongolia as Team Co-Leader and Higher Education Academic Program Management Expert (ADB TA No. 2719-MON: Institutional Strengthening of the Education Sector), as Higher Education Accreditation Expert (ADB Loan No. 1508-MON SF), and as General Education Expert on the 1999 Education Sector Study and Strategy for 2000-05 (ADB TA 3174-MON). The "sector wide" approach used in this sector study is described in the May, 2001, issue of Current Issues in Comparative Education.  This work was expanded to include five Central Asian countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) in 2002 during the course of an Asian Development Bank project on the management of education reform following the demise of the Soviet Union and resulted in a report entitled, Education Reforms in Countries in Transition: Policies and Processes.  In the summer of 2005, he worked as the Education Policy Specialist on an ADB project to design the Third Education Sector Development Project and a new 10-year Master Plan for the education system of Mongolia.

     In the fall of 1993, he helped to design a Centre for Research on Higher Education (CEREHIED) at Maseno University College in Kenya during my term as holder of a UNESCO Chair. A paper of his contrasting higher education funding patterns in Kenya and Mongolia has been published in Education Policy Analysis Archives.  During 2000-2002, he worked on the Tertiary Education Linkages Project (TELP) funded by the US Agency for International Development (AID) in South Africa, providing technical assistance in institutional planning and management to the University of the North and the University of Durban-Westville.  In 2003, he received funding from ALO/USAID for a linkage project with Moi University in Kenya focused on revitalizing institutional strategic planning capacity.

     He has also studied education reform in Laos.  In the fall of 1995 and spring of 1996, he was the organizational and institutional development expert and team leader on ADB TA 2097-LAO: Private Sector Education Development Project. His team provided technical assistance to the Ministry of Education in establishing a new department responsible for private education and on implementation of the 1995 enabling decree (No. 64/PM) for promoting and developing the entire spectrum of private education, from pre-school through postsecondary.

     Domestically, he has a longstanding interest in the socialization of students at both the secondary and tertiary  levels of education.

 

Website: http://www.pitt.edu/~weidman/