Morris, Michael

(b. 1949, Washington, DC). Ph.D., M.A. Community-Social Psychology, B.A. Psychology, Boston College.

Morris is Professor of Psychology at the University of New Haven and serves as Evaluator for the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, New England Association of Schools and Colleges. He has worked as an organizational consultant in the human services, nonprofit, and public sector for many years.

Morris has contributed substantially to research on the ethics of evaluation. He conducted the first U.S. national survey of evaluators' encounters with ethical conflicts in their professional work. Morris built on this seminal investigation and follow-up study of the reasoning underlying evaluators' perceptions of behavior in evaluations as being either ethical or unethical. His interest and scholarship in ethics is manifest in the variety of his contributions to the profession. He is Former Chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Evaluation Association; Coeditor (with Jody Fitzpatrick) of a volume of New Directions for Evaluation, “Current and Emerging Ethical Challenges in Evaluation”; and Inaugural Editor of the Ethical Challenges section of the American Journal of Evaluation.

Morris' work has been influenced by William Ryan's book Blaming the Victim. While in college, Morris took the class in which Ryan first used this text, and the experience impressed on him the crucial roles social science—scientists—play in defining, perpetuating, and ameliorating social problems. Morris also gained an appreciation for the importance of “use” from Michael Q. Patton's Utilization-Focused Evaluation, and he learned much about organizational dynamics from Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn's The Social Psychology of Organizations. He credits the Katz and Kahn book with providing him with the “conceptual anchor” for his evaluation practice.

Morris is the recipient of the University Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of New Haven and has authored numerous publications in evaluation.