Professor Goldstein is a distinguished American journalism educator, education administrator and author. For 15 years, he served as dean of the journalism schools at Columbia and at Berkeley—the only universities in the United States where journalism is taught exclusively at the graduate level.

Born in Buffalo, New York, he is a graduate of Yale University, where he majored in English, and the Columbia University Law School as well as its Graduate School of Journalism.

Early in his career, while still in law school, he edited a new magazine called Juris Doctor. He then worked for Newsday (on Long Island), the Wall Street Journal (in New York City), the Associated Press (in New York City) and the New York Times (in New York City), where he covered legal issues for six years. While at the New York Times, he began teaching part-time at the graduate program at New York University.

Over the years, Professor Goldstein had the honor of holding five “named” chairs—at the University of Florida at Gainesville (1983-84), the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1994), the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia (July 2000-June 2002), Stanford University (Fall 2002), and Arizona State University (2003 and 2004).