Brief biographic summary for Michael Lipsky

Michael Lipsky is a Research Professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. He is also a Senior Program Director at Demos, a public policy and advocacy organization based in New York. At Demos he is primarily associated with Public Works: The Demos Center for the Public Sector.

From 1991 to 2003, Dr. Lipsky was a Senior Program Officer in Governance and Civil Society at the Ford Foundation. Prior to his appointment to the Ford Foundation staff, he was professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught courses in public policy, American politics, and social movements. He has also taught at the universities of Wisconsin and Washington, and at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

He is the author of many journal articles and several books, including Protest in City Politics (1970), the prize-winning Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service (1980) and Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (1993, with S.R. Smith). His articles have recently appeared in The American Prospect and the Chronicle on Philanthropy.

Dr. Lipsky received an M.P.A. and a Ph.D. (in Politics) from Princeton University. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.