Professor Smith received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and has been at Winthrop since 1990.   In addition to being a professor of political science, he is a member of the African American studies committee, faculty advisor to Winthrop's Socialist Student Union, and coordinator of the William J. Blough Undergraduate Essay Contest sponsored by the department every spring.

Most of Professor Smith’s research deals with desegregation, education policy, and urban politics.  He also writes about the many problems involved in the use of the trendy term social capital and is beginning a comparative study of antiwar movements in U.S. history.  His book Boom for Whom? Desegregation, Education, and Development in Charlotte was published in 2004 by the State University of New York Press.  He served as an expert witness for the NAACP’s Legal Defense & Educational Fund in the 1999 trial of the reactivated Swann  (Charlotte school desegregation) case.  Professor Smith received Winthrop's Distinguished Professor Award in 2009.

Selected publications

• Development and the Politics of School Desegregation and Resegregation

• It May Be Social, but Why Is It Capital?  The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics of Language

• All That Glitters is Not Gold:  School Reform in Charlotte-Mecklenburg

• Boom For Whom?  Education, Desegregation and Development in Charlotte

• Electoral Structures, Venue Selection and the (New?) Politics of School Desegregation

• Your Father Works for My Father:  Race, Class, and the Politics of Voluntarily Mandated Desegregation

• Liberty, Equality and ... Social Capital?

• Still Swimming Against the Resegregation Tide?  A Suburban Southern School District in the Aftermath of Parents Involved