About

David John Frank is a Professor and Chair of Sociology and Courtesy Professor of Education and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He also serves as Faculty Co-Director of LIFTED, UCI's in-prison BA-degree completion program. His research analyzes the cultural underpinnings of world society, focusing on three primary domains: the rise of global environmentalism; trends in the criminal regulation of sex; and the expansion of the university and the knowledge society. His current projects include work on new and enduring challenges to global environmentalism, the worldwide wave of regulations protecting children from sexual exploitation, and historical and contemporary attacks on the university. Frank's teaching covers the same core areas as his research, including world society, environment and society, sex and society, and the university and society. In addition to teaching at UCI's main campus, he also teaches at the Robert J. Donovan Correctional Facility for LIFTED (Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees). He holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University. Prior to joining the University of California, Irvine in 2002, he was on the sociology faculty at Harvard University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Media studies
• Social Science
• Political economy
• Gender studies
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Public administration

Selected publications

• The University: Exalted Institution and Ruined Organization

  Minerva · 2025-10-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The university has risen over nearly a thousand years, growing from a tiny Western outcrop between church and state into a great global behemoth—key to culture, action, and stratification. Even as it has grown and flourished, the university has been shadowed by relentless attacks. We seek here to explain the seeming paradox. Our starting point is a distinction between institution and organization. The university institution is defined by religious-like cultural claims regarding the comprehensibility of the universe and the comprehending capacities of the humans within it; university organizations represent manifestations of those commitments in the real world. The institution is buffered from attacks: it shares a cultural base with Western and now world society, and its claims transcend scuffles with everyday forms of understanding. University organizations are exposed to attacks: each instance of the great institution fails to fulfill its magnificent promises, especially as those promises aggrandize over the Modern Period under decentralized conditions. The attacks reasonably call attention to the gulf between myth and reality, clustering around students and professors, who operationalize the promise of comprehending capacities, and research and teaching, which operationalize the promise of comprehensibility. But they are often hyperbolic in tone, as a series of exhibits from Europe and the U.S. over several centuries shows. The exhibits underscore two main themes: attacks focus on specific organizational failures, not on the overall institution of the university; and attacks focus on those aspects of university organization that link most directly to the great institution, i.e., the sediments of comprehensibility and comprehension—students, professors, teaching, research. The exhibits furthermore suggest common determinants of attack—grand claims, lax standards, and multitudinous interpreters. In aggregate, the attacks convey a profound sense of crisis; but one by one, they reveal exaggeration and embellishment. Notwithstanding its millennium in the rising sun, the university as an institution is not inviolable. It has been challenged before in times of revolution, and its triumph is contingent on the endurance and extension of the Western-origin cultural mantle. Were that mantle to crumble—as may be happening now—the thunder of attacks might be the clamorous prelude to the silence of demise.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ecology and Economy

  The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology · 2025-10-29

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The ecology–economy relationship is relatively new to the social – and sociological – agenda. In the early twentieth century, the relationship was defined primarily in terms of natural resources – a one‐way flow of goods from the ecology to the economy. In the latter twentieth century, the relationship was defined primarily in terms of environmental protection – a one‐way flow of bads from the economy to the ecology. Now, the relationship is increasingly defined in terms of sustainability – mutual flows of goods between economic development and ecological well‐being.

  PublisherDOI

• On university competition

  Studies in Higher Education · 2024-07-31 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Universities are specific local entities, and as such are in competition with one another for resources and prestige. The general tone of the literature—which sees universities mainly as specific organizations—is quite negative, with competition leading to destructive market and political forces. The tone is surprising, given the extraordinary worldwide university expansion over the last seven or eight decades. This inconsistency is resolved with the perspective of neo-institutional theory: the university is a stunningly successful global institution from which specific cases derive their accredited standing and legitimacy. The enlarged and grand institutional canopy has supported thousands of expanded and rationalized organizations, which then suffer from competition. But in their struggles, the contending organizations produce further elaborations of the domain of the overall institution. The university grows, though the instances it flowers may sometimes suffer.

  PublisherDOI

• Higher Education: Institutional Effects

  2023-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

  American Sociological Review · 2023-12-30 · 57 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.

  PublisherDOI

• Higher Education for Democracy: The Role of the University in Civil Society

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2023 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education

  PublisherDOI

• The University: Global Institution and National Organization

  Global Perspectives · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the following essay, we respond to the Douglass book on Neo-Nationalism and Universities (2021) and the Global Perspectives Review Symposium: Universities between Inter- and Renationalization. We see the university’s extraordinary success as a transcendent global institution fomenting tensions with specific instances of the university in national (and neo-nationalist) contexts. Attacks tend to be on organizational issues in local cases, rather than on The University as a powerful but inchoate global institution.

  PublisherDOI

• Animals in world society: Constitutional and legislative incorporation, 1972–2020

  International Journal of Comparative Sociology · 2022-07-26 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article analyzes cross-national and longitudinal variations in the incorporation of nonhuman animals into country constitutions and legislation. We argue that incorporation follows from the scientific rationalization and human rights-based ontological elaboration of nonhuman animals in world society, carried by a growing number of intergovernmental agreements and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). To test our ideas, we use event-history analyses on original data from 195 countries for the period 1972–2020. The models of constitutional incorporation show mixed results, with positive effects from human rights and INGOs but negative effects from science and intergovernmental agreements. The models of legislative incorporation show consistent positive effects from world factors, even when controlling for a range of domestic factors. Legal incorporation suggests an extension of the boundaries of “society,” driven by the rising prominence of highly rationalized and elaborated models of nonhuman animals, replete with dignity, sentience, and even tentative forms of rights and personhood.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Expanded Education and Global Integration: Solidarity and Conflict

  On Education Journal for Research and Debate · 2021-04-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The dramatic expansion and rising social significance of education integrates the world’s populations and elites under a common ontological frame and on the basis of common human identities rooted in educational status and cultural content. Education-based integration supports institutions of solidarity – large-scale organizational structures in national and global societies, and common cognitive and normative cultural materials. It also creates expanded grounds for conflict. In this essay, we review the matter.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Women’s participation and challenges to the liberal script: A global perspective

  International Sociology · 2021 · 59 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Existing scholarship documents large worldwide increases in women’s participation in the public sphere over recent decades, for example, in education, politics, and the labor force. Some scholars have argued that these changes follow broader trends in world society, especially its growing liberalism, which increasingly has reconfigured social life around the choices of empowered and rights-bearing individuals, regardless of gender. Very recently, however, a variety of populisms and nationalisms have emerged to present alternatives to liberalism, including in the international arena. We explore here their implications for women’s participation in public life. We use cross-national data to analyze changes in women’s participation in higher education, the polity, and the economy 1970–2017. We find that women’s participation on average continues to expand over this period, but there is evidence of a growing cross-national divergence. In most domains, women’s participation tends to be lower in countries linked to illiberal international organizations, especially in the recent-most period.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John W. Meyer

  Stanford University

  31 shared

• Evan Schofer

  University of California, Irvine

  12 shared

• Jay Gabler

  7 shared

• Ann Hironaka

  University of California, Irvine

  6 shared

• Karen Jeong Robinson

  5 shared

• Steven A. Boutcher

  3 shared

• Julia C. Lerch

  3 shared

• Francisco O. Ramírez

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Stanford University

  1995

Awards & honors

• Coleman Award for Best Article Honorable Mention, ASA Sectio…
• American Bar Foundation Visiting Scholar (2017)
• International Centre for Higher Education Research Visiting…
• American Bar Foundation Visiting Scholar (2014-15)
• Best Scholarly Article Award, ASA Section on Global and Tran…