David J. Menefee-Libey

David Menefee-Libey is the William A. Johnson Professor of Government and professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he has taught since 1989.

Before joining the Pomona College faculty, he worked for the Community Renewal Society in Chicago, was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and worked as a policy researcher for the RAND Corporation.

He's won the Wig Distinguished Teaching Award seven times, chaired the Politics Department, and served as coordinator of the program in Public Policy Analysis. In 1999-2000, he was a visiting Fulbright professor at the University of Limerick in Ireland.

Prof. Menefee-Libey has long been engaged in community life at The Claremont Colleges and the surrounding area. He was a faculty resident at Pomona College from 1996-99. In the 1990s and 2000s, he both refereed and coached youth soccer in Claremont. He has served since 2012 on the governing council of the Napier Initiative, a partnership between the local Pilgrim Place retirement community and the five undergraduate Claremont Colleges to sustain intergenerational mentoring and encourage leadership for social change. He taught for several summers in the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS).

From 1984 through 2006, he conducted research on U.S. campaigns and elections, and his publications included The Triumph of Campaign Centered Politics (CQ Press, 2000). For several years he frequently analyzed and commentated on national politics for KPCC (the station now known as LAist), a National Public Radio affiliate serving the Los Angeles region.

Since 1987, he's also investigated elementary and secondary education policy in the United States. He published several books and reports with his long-time colleague Charles Kerchner, including Learning from LA: Institutional Change in American Public Education (Harvard Education Press, 2008). He has also published work on the politics of reform in Chicago Public Schools, including a chapter in Katrina Bulkley, Jeffrey Henig, and Henry Levin’s edited volume Between Public and Private (Harvard Education Press, 2010).

In the 2010s, he published research on civic education and textbooks in the United States, and their selective blindness toward the role of business corporations in American politics.

His teaching has recently turned toward the challenges of building and sustaining liberal democracy and the rule of law in the United States amid political polarization, and large and growing economic inequality.

His current research compares and contrasts public and private institutions in K-12 education, including the interplay between traditional public schools and charter schools.

He lives in Claremont, California with his family.