Stephen M. Gavazzi

Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Human Sciences in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. With West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee as a co-author, his newest book is "What’s Public About Public Higher Ed? Halting Higher Education’s Decline in the Court of Public Opinion" published in 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Gavazzi and Gee also are co-authors on the 2018 book "Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good," also published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dr. Gavazzi is a trained marriage and family therapist whose scholarship for the past thirty years has surrounded the impact that family dynamics have on adolescent development and behavior. He has written a book for parents entitled “Strong Families, Successful Students” that was released in 2010, and a textbook entitled “Families with Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps Between Theory, Research, and Practice” that was published in 2011 by Springer Press. A second edition of the Springer Press textbook is planned for release in 2023.

Professor Gavazzi’s more recent scholarship centers on the establishment and maintenance of healthy campus-community relationships. His work on town-gown issues makes ample use of his marriage and family therapy background, and has given rise to the development of a typology described in his 2016 book -- The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage -- that draws parallels between campus-community relationships and marriages. This work has led to the creation of the Optimal College Town Assessment (OCTA), which has been used in several recent studies to measure town-gown relationship quality.