The previous two postings (first and second postings here) were extracts taken from the Harvard Report on the Behavioral Sciences from 1954 to the Ford Foundation. Now we take a look at the Report prepared at the University of Chicago that was part of the same project involving five universities (Chicago, Harvard, Michigan, North Carolina and Stanford). Here I extract Appendix D from the Chicago Report by the University of Chicago historian, Richard J. Storr. This gives us a top-down narrative of where the department of political economy fits into the history of social sciences at Chicago. It provides a nice companion piece to the historical survey for Harvard in the Mason report.

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[p. 158]

Notes on the History of the Social Sciences at Chicago¹

No university becomes great unwittingly. Soon or late the members of a college nearing the great divide in higher education will awaken to the necessity of choosing their ground. If the faculty does not altogether recoil from the thought of offering graduate and professional courses, it may still feel so uncertain of the future that it lays its plans for expansion by bits and pieces. If it is more venturesome, it may begin with a large scheme, framed in one piece. When a university has been established, its officers will from time to time appraise the fruits of planning in the past and make new plans for the future. So the idea of a university is a palimpsest of designs, some ancient, some modern, some wise, some foolish, some brilliant, some pedestrian, but all the product of more or less conscious thought.

These notes are a commentary on certain ideas which have stood in the background of research in the social sciences at Chicago between 1888 and 1939. The information used here has been extracted, of necessity rather hastily, from sources on the general history of the University and from files pertaining to the departments of economics; history; political science; and sociology, with which anthropology was once united. Despite the importance of several other departments to the social sciences, they have been neglected because the materials from which their histories must be written could not be examined in time to be used in these notes. [p. 159] What is said here should be thought of as heuristic rather than definitive history.

In the Beginning

When John D. Rockefeller, Sr. , made his first gift to the American Baptist Education Society in the interest of a “University of Chicago”, he undoubtedly intended to accomplish more than the resurrection of the moribund Baptist college which had borne the name; but he deliberately refused to specify what the institution should be academically. Most of his advisers believed that university departments should be built up slowly upon a collegiate foundation, and one of Rockefeller’s friends emphatically insisted that Chicago was no place at all for a great Rockefeller university. Although the latter opinion was extreme, early caution was well warranted. The Founder’s princely gift of $600, 000 fell far short of the requirements of a university endowment, and when the Rockefeller benefactions became imperial, they did not overtake the needs of the University for years. From the beginning admiration for academic enterprise and for great enterprisers was tempered by a higher regard for gradualism then we may always realize. “The development of the university, ” wrote President Harry Pratt Judson in 1919, “has followed conservative lines, each new plan being studied with care in advance, and coming naturally from what has already been made permanent.” But this is jumping beyond the founding of the University. Early conservatism was all but shattered by the advent of William Rainey Harper as first president-elect. Before he had accepted office, Rockefeller made a second gift in part to finance the beginning of graduate work. The collegiate era of Chicago history was indeed brief. Harper quickly drafted a comprehensive university plan, which appeared in print as the famous Official Bulletins. They are sufficient evidence of Harper’s acute awareness of the institution as a university. The Founder’s second gift brought out in Harper the same academic evangelism which had swept the minds of older Americans when they contemplated the sight of a beloved [p. 160] nation without full means of intellectual grace. (It is perhaps no accident that Harper used the analogy of religion and its institutions to explain what a university is.) This fruit of an earlier anxiety over the inferiority of American education provided one seed of that corporate self-consciousness which is said to be a mark of the University of Chicago.

According to Harper’s original plan, the University was to have three divisions — namely, university extension, the university publications work, and the university proper. The last was to include academies, undergraduate colleges, several professional schools, and the graduate school. Unlike the John Hopkins and Clark University, Chicago did not play down collegiate activity despite the fact that research was encouraged from the beginning. Moreover, undergraduate study in the last two years was to be carried on in connection with graduate study. The work of the non-professional segment of the university proper was distributed between departments which were independent of each other, or so one must infer from the absence of any provision for the grouping of departments into “schools.” In this Chicago differed from Columbia where sociology, history, government, and economics belonged in a school of political science. True, the departments fall together in the Register; but there is no evidence that this grouping had an important intellectual, administrative, or budgetary role. Work in the departments was to supervised, in general, by a “head”; and instruction was to be given by a hierarchy of officers from head professor down to scholar through twelve grades (!). The “head” of each department was given special status, even above other professors. The heads were to conduct “the Club or Seminar” of each department and to edit any papers or journals to be published by the University. The Official Bulletins do not specify particular departments presumably because Harper did not wish to commit the University on this point; for as the Bulletins were appearing, he was negotiating with a number of prospective faculty members over possible departmental arrangements. Harper’s way of putting flesh on the skeleton of the University was to find men who had the intellectual power and [p. 161] administrative skill necessary to create departments. First and foremost he sought men — men of a particular type, which Harper himself exemplified. When he was born in 1856, there was an infinitesimal demand in the United States for “university” professors as distinguished from the “college” professors of the pastoral era of American academic life. The United States had its scholarly professors; but few of them were employed to do research or to train researchers. Even as late as 1870, the American university heavily committed to research was non-existent. Then, in the remarkably short interval in which Harper passed from boyhood to professorial status at the Morgan Park Theological Seminary, and later at Yale, fledgling universities began to appear and to appoint professors because of their achievements or promise as investigators and organizers of investigation. The latter qualification was as important as the former. The universities needed men who could not only explore on their own, but also found colonies of researchers. If possible, the professor ought to attract a lay following into the fields he opened. Just so, Harper brought new insight to Hebraic research, attracted a cluster of advanced students, edited a learned journal, and created popular interest by conducting summer and correspondence courses and by editing a semi-popular journal. Without the formal title, Harper was a “head professor” at Yale before he came to Chicago, where the appointment of such professors became a foundation stone of his academic policy.

The appointment of head professors had very real uses. Once it was decided to put the University at the top of American higher education on its first day, Harper had the labors of Hercules to perform. (At least he did not have to clear out an old stable.) So it must have been extremely convenient as well as entirely natural to find men to whom he could delegate the responsibility of creating departments with all that entailed in the way of finding instructors, awarding fellowships, deciding on courses to be offered, selecting books and equipment, etc. Like field officers, the head professors could relieve the commanding general of tasks which he could not have completed by himself in any event. If the system [p. 162] was to work, however, the heads had to be men who were more than administrative clerks; they had to be men of initiative and independent judgment, which meant that Harper’s lieutenants defended their own powers stoutly, even against Harper himself on occasion. This was all the more true because Harper wanted to build up the prestige of the University by appointing men who already had established reputations. These men were precisely those who could most easily go elsewhere to serve the University’s rivals if they fell out seriously with the President. It is not pure fantasy to compare the relationship between Harper and the head professors to the feudalism of the marches. These professors were barons on the frontiers of knowledge, bound to the central authority by a loyalty which was usually strong because the person who represented authority possessed a remarkable capacity for inspiring friendship for himself and confidence in the destiny of the institution. Men would resist particular acts of alleged interference on his part and yet find themselves willing to remain in his service. The price of loyalty was the assurance that each department would have autonomy.²

The appointment of head professors was accompanied by some risk, — not so much from the authoritarianism to be read into the head professors’ position as from the premium which was put upon the very autonomy which made the system work. There is little evidence that the “concentrated responsibility”³ of the head professors affected the individual instructor’s freedom adversely. Harper declared officially that no instructor would be asked to separate himself from the University because his [p. 163] views upon a particular question differed from those of another member of the same department, even though that member were the head; and the case of Thorstein Veblen supports the statement. Veblen’s approach to economics was vastly different from that of J. Laurence Laughlin, head of the department of political economy; so one might suppose that Veblen lived in constant danger of losing his post because of the head professor’s displeasure. Actually, Laughlin brought Veblen to the University and protected him from his critics. If Laughlin’s headship made any difference in what became a very delicate and painful situation, that difference worked in favor of the individual scholar.

No, the system of head professors was risky because it jeopardized the unity of spirit which Harper strove to create. For at the same time that he sought to release the energies of individuals, he tried to bring a sense of community into being. It was certainly endangered by the departmentalism which his method of building a university produced. The original departments appear to have been the institutional product of the head professors’ judgments on the needs and potentialities of the fields in which they were severally interested; for the heads were intellectual as well as administrative leaders. As the backgrounds and mentalities of the heads varied, so the departments differed from each other. The spectrum of diversity ran from the historian, von Hoist, who came from Germany where history had long been a distinct academic discipline, to Albion Small, whose field of sociology had yet to acquire academic prestige. (That it did is due perhaps more to Small’s academic statesmanship than to anything else.) Interestingly enough, Small and Laughlin as well as von Hoist had had intimate contact with historical scholarship. Small did his graduate work in a John Hopkins seminar which dealt with history as well as with political economy and government, and Laughlin wrote his thesis on Anglo-Saxon law for Henry Adams. The fact that somewhat similar training did not produce like-mindedness suggests the complexity of the situation.

Harper himself was fully aware of the shortcomings of departmental organization. It was convenient but far from perfect in its effects.

[p. 164] In these days, (said Harper in 1898) as a matter of fact, the distinction between Botany and Zoology, between Latin and Greek, between Political Science, Political Economy and History, is a distinction which is purely artificial. The best work is accomplished by the man who disregards all such artificial lines and deals with problems. Every important problem will carry the student of it into half a dozen departments and he must be free to work without hindrance. The time will come when these so-called distinctions of departments will disappear. . . There should be a better correlation of the work in closely allied departments. The separation of departments has been too greatly emphasized by some of the heads of departments. Certain divisions of work have been isolated to a greater or less extent from other divisions closely related. This is due to the fact that no sufficient effort has been made by the heads of closely related departments to work out together the plans of instruction.

The evil of poor correlation of departments appeared to the President to be greatest in the natural sciences; but harmony was imperfect in the social sciences. As far as one can see, none of the head professors insisted that his discipline was the only avenue to the truth. Although the word “interdisciplinary” was unknown, the idea behind it would surely have received a hearing from the several head professors. Yet integration of the disciplines lay far beyond the realm of possibility as the University was originally organized. To arrange perfect harmony, one would have had to perform a task as difficult as the consolidation of ethnic groups with diverse pasts and all the occasion for friction that propinquity makes frequent.

If the social science departments had developed slowly with the partition of a single course, perhaps the old moral philosophy, there might have been more unity in the University; but that condition was contrary to the facts of the University’s history. Had Harper appointed but one head professor to create a single school of social or political science like John W. Burgess’ school at Columbia, the departments within the school might have possessed a family resemblance; but obviously Harper made no such appointment and perhaps he never thought of trying to do so. If he had, perhaps the University’s life would have been less rich in sources of intellectual stimulation than it was. Conceivably, the several head professors might have been brought together in [p. 165] one seminar like the one at Hopkins; and assuredly the pyrotechnics would have been thrilling for the students. But the head professors were not brought together as teachers. A trace of interdepartmentalism does appear in the organization of the four departments as the “historical group” in 1899. It concerned itself with library problems and the correlation of courses.⁴

The salaries of the head professors corresponded in size to their preeminence in departmental affairs. A profile of salaries in a given department would have resembled a pyramid rather than a mesa. One reason for this situation was, of course, the necessity of paying premium prices if the University was to attract” very able men whose talents were appreciated elsewhere. In reaching for Albion Small, for instance, Harper was competing with Colby College for its president. Admittedly the competition was not purely mercenary. Harper offered a head professor not only high salary, but an opportunity to develop the resources of a learned or scientific field. At a time when research often lived on short rations, it must have been exhilarating to be approached by Harper with the news that the University of Chicago would pay handsomely for the direction of research. But other universities were also bidding for men like the head professors at Chicago. Herbert B. Adams declined an invitation to Chicago because he already had at the John Hopkins what the head professors were promised at Chicago. So, from the beginning, the University had to labor to get and keep the kind of men it wanted to lead the departments. It would appear indeed that Harper was occasionally led by his enthusiasm to say things which were understood by his hearers to be promises of research arrangements which could [p. 166] not be brought altogether into being. The early brilliance of the University is clouded by some disappointments and even bitterness.

Research as well as teaching, it appears, was paid for out of the general University income appropriated for salaries. Special University funds for research and outside grants were beyond the horizon of the future. Indeed, Mr. Rockefeller’s second gift and subsequent gifts were presumably made on the principle that research would be paid for out of general funds to supplement regular tuition income. It was the policy to ask all professors to carry a regular teaching load, but that part of his salary which was paid in consideration of his obligation to do research was in effect his research grant.

But what were the social science departments, so organized and financed, supposed to do? Harper cast a university in the role of servant to mankind and emphasized the contribution which a university ought to make to democracy as spokesman, mediator, and philosopher. Like prophets, members of the University were supposed to address not only their academic colleagues, but the mass of men as well; like priests they were supposed to live above the conflict of human interests but they were to be active in mitigating the strife which divides mankind; and like philosophers they were to seek the laws or principles of democracy. One might suppose that Harper had in mind a division of labor according to which one professor used university extension to address the world and another did “pure” research, for instance on the concentration of wealth, which Harper mentions. This supposition is supported by the partial specialization of duties which did become customary. Yet it never became complete. It is highly significant that Harper did not distinguish sharply between the extension and the diffusion of knowledge. He had that balance of mind which keeps a man from sniffing at popularization or sneering at erudition. He was neither academic demagogue nor prig. The root of his attitude very likely lay in depths of character which one cannot probe historically, but some explanation can be [p. 167] found in the nature of his own specialty, the elucidation of the Old Testament. The truth Harper sought as a scholar lay behind the barriers of a difficult language and complicated texts; but it was a truth which could be found out. Once discovered, however, it would fail of its purpose if all men did not have it to guide their daily lives for the good of their immortal souls. Harper did not, of course, make claims of the supernatural merit of democracy; but he did carry over into his view of mundane affairs not only a belief in the efficacy and availability of truth, but also the twofold conviction that learning was required if men were to have truth and that truth about society must be taken to the men and women who make up society. For the social scientist at the University of Chicago this meant that the President respected both pure research and practical activity and did not expect a professor to act as if the two were mutually exclusive.

After the Beginning

Ten years after the University opened, Harper felt that the first exciting work was finished. The task of the future was to keep the University strong and lively without an annual transfusion of the Founder’s wealth to meet current expenses. John D. Rockefeller continued to be deeply interested in the University, but he insisted that the deficits should disappear. The retrenchment of sanguine hopes, if not of actual operations, which this desire made necessary went against the grain of Harper’s nature. He had the genius of the great entrepreneur who dares to combine men and things in brilliant new constellations at a risk which dismays his well-wishers, but he had no gift for careful house-keeping. His successor, Harry Pratt Judson, did command that skill. In remarkably short order, he saved the University from the threat of acute embarassment and perhaps from collapse; and the Founder made his final gift of $10,000,000 payable over ten years. So the President could count upon an annual increase of receipts for the greater part of his administration.

[p. 168] Judson’s personal views on the organization of research are reflected in his response to certain queries put to him by President Hall of Clark, who raised the question among others of prescribing the problem of an investigation before-hand with appropriations for so much for such a purpose:

“We expect work in research to be done normally by all our staff, and to that end we try not to overburden them with teaching. In some cases we have given special inducements to carry on a particular piece of research, by way of relieving the officer in question of a part of his normal duties. We have found no difficulty on that head. I am not in favor of establishing research professorships, but rather of encouraging particular pieces of research when they seem warranted. . . I cannot say that I can forecast the future of research as between universities and special institutions. It must occur in both, and each, doubtless, has its field. It seems to me that investigation of particular value is a matter which cannot be determined by general rules or by departmental lines, but is something wholly personal in character, and dependent on the abilities and ambitions of certain individuals. It is only in that line that I look for a large measure of success.”

For the purpose of supporting research and publication, Judson advocated the creation of a research fund from gifts. No endowment devoted specifically to these matters existed, but such funds were needed. For pressing necessities of instruction or of other things tended to divert funds from research. This general theme was taken up by the Senate Committee on Research, which proposed the creation of a General University Research Foundation and of Special University Research Institutes. The Committee remarked on the establishment of endowed research institutes, separate from universities, as an indication that the typical university organization, such as Chicago’s, was not regarded as being capable of satisfying the research needs of the time. But separate institutes did not provide for a succession of researchers; nor did the separate institutes allow the investigators to maintain continuous organic contact with the entire body of knowledge as represented in a large university. The expression of these sentiments, however, did not lead immediately to much action except perhaps to the creation of the Norman Wait Harris Foundation.

[p. 169] Quite early in the Judson administration, the government of the departments was changed. In 1909, a faculty committee took a hard look at the system of departmental organization around heads of departments. (In 1899, the title “Head Professor” had become “Professor and Head of Department. “) The facts upon which the Committee based its recommendations are not specified; but conditions in the departments of political economy, political science, history, and sociology and anthropology suggest the situation which called for scrutiny. When the University opened, the principle of “concentrated responsibility” corresponded roughly with the differences in experience between the head professors and the other members of the departments. With possibly only one exception, no member of a department who was not a head professor had had such experience that he could claim that a top salary and standing was denied him unjustly. The special provision for head professors was not working hardship. By 1908-09, however, the rungs of the ladder just short of the top were filling up. Ten of the thirty-nine members of the four departments were full professors, which meant that six had gone as far as they could go and were still in an inferior position. This situation was, of course, the natural result of the growth of the departments and of promotions in the lower and middle rank; but the situation was nonetheless unsatisfactory in the eyes of the committee of 1909. It believed that with the growth of the University it was becoming increasingly important that the system of organization should make possible the securing and retaining of as many men of the first grade of ability as the needs of the fields and the resources of the University permitted, and that the system should be sufficiently flexible to favor the employment of each member of a department in the kind of work to which he was best suited. The existing system failed to meet the first condition because only one member of a department could attain the maximum rank and salary, and it failed to meet the second condition because maximum rank and salary seemed to be connected exclusively with administrative responsibilities. In the words of a second committee commissioned to rephrase the report of the [p. 170] first, the existing system, as it was commonly understood, operated “to make it difficult to secure or retain men of high ability and recognized eminence for those professorships which are regarded as subordinate.” The same committee pointed out that the policy of assigning one man a maximum salary and requiring him to perform as an administrator might be based on either of two grounds. The larger salary and the title might be accorded in recognition of general eminence. In that case the assignment of administrative duties to the head would seem to proceed on the presumption that the most eminent man is the person to administer the department. But the most eminent man might not be well adapted to administration, and even if he was capable in that direction, it might seem unwise for the University to use his time in that way rather than in research. Or if the larger salary might be attached to the position primarily as special compensation for administration, then that appeared to place an unduly high valuation upon administration as compared with research and teaching. The way which the University took to escape this dilemma was to replace heads of departments with chairmen and to grant whole departments a larger share in the determination of policy than they enjoyed before.

Although in some cases chairmanships actually differed less from head professorships than the reformers seem to have intended, the constitutional changes of 1909 raise the question, did each department cease gradually to be the lenthened shadow of a man, if that is not too strong a phrase to describe the original system? One of the nicest problems of all for the critic of university policy and organization is to discover how much of the influence of a professor of unusually great mind and force of personality is increased or curtailed by the formal system within which he works. We can all think of men who were “head professors” without benefit of title or special powers under the statutes. Without attempting to make a final judgment, one can hazard the suggestion that the reform in departmental organization did work to undermine the conditions which favored [p. 171] domination by a single man in each department but that it did so only indirectly. The new system no more prevented a vigorous man from influencing his colleagues than the old system had obligated the heads of departments to rule arbitrarily, but the reform did make room at the top of each department for as many men as the University could afford to pay at the highest rates. Had this not happened, the frustration of men just short of the top would have been immense as departments grew in size and more and more men were promoted through the middle ranks. Can anyone doubt that despair and resentment would have alienated the best men first? It was indeed hard enough as it was to keep good men in the face of retrenchment. Needless to say, however, the University did not lose all its very able men; and it managed in the course of time to increase their number. To say what this meant is to walk on the sands of conjecture. Increases in the number of first-rate scholars may have encouraged an intellectual eclecticism precluding the kind of leadership which one man may be able to exercise at the moment a department is organized.

But was something to replace the heads of departments as a source of stimulation as the old system disintegrated? As we have seen, Judson placed his confidence in the individual scholars’ abilities and ambitions; and it would appear that he usually let the organization of research rest there. In 1915 a Senate committee recommended a grouping of departments which may have prepared men’s minds a little for later inter-departmental activity; but the committee spoke only of the “administrative purposes” to be served by its recommendation. There was no mention of consultation on research or of cooperative sponsorship of research.

The emphasis on administration in the 1915 recommendations is typical of the Judson regime. The University ran smoothly and efficiently under the skillful guidance of the President; but it appears to have been propelled forward more by momentum than by the generation of new forces. The University was also more stable and more like other universities than it had been in [p. 172] Harper’s time. It was only natural that events would be less dramatic from day to day once the essential plan of the University had been put into effect than they had been when everything remained to be done. The longevity of heads of departments may also have had something to do with the tone of the Judson administration. History had three heads between 1892 and the time of Judson’s retirement, but political science and sociology retained their original heads of department until 1922 and 1924 respectively. Political economy had its original head of department until 1916. (Incidentally, political science had but two chief officers from 1892 to 1941 and sociology had but two from 1892 to 1940. The phenomenon of rapid turnover in chairmanship is recent.) Led as it was by veterans, Chicago was no longer a freshman university. Its virtues and its failings were those of settled maturity.

The Day Before Yesterday

The early Twenties was a time of protean discontent over the state of the University and of the social sciences. One cause of anxiety was the erosion of time for research. It will be recalled that Harper was decidedly interested in undergraduate education and that it was not entirely separated from graduate work at the University. It will also be recalled that instructors at all levels of the faculty were expected as a matter of policy to carry a regular teaching load. In theory, these policies did not inhibit the pursuit of knowledge; but in practice, they produced a reaction against collegiate instruction as its demands appeared to eat away the opportunity to do research. Also capable research men seemed to be falling prey to a mechanical application of the rules governing teaching assignments and to be carrying too much instruction of graduate students. Beyond this, salary schedules were comparatively low. This adversity sharpened awareness of research as a mission of a university just at the time when the growth of independent research institutes threw the future of university research into a state of uncertainty.

[p. 173] Albion Small, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature, was especially worried, both over the lack of needed stimulants within the graduate schools of the University and also over the aimlessness of the social sciences. The graduate schools, he said were “under-energizing” chiefly because they were amorphous groups of autonomous departments. The deans were little more than proctors. With a change in the constitution of the University, however, they might be given some opportunity to show initiative in the performance of cooperative and strategic functions. The departments would then be stimulated, Small asserted, by more direct contact through the dean with the entire economy of each graduate school. Turning to the departments of the social sciences in particular, Small observed there a spirit of “prophetic unrest”:

“Everyone believes that his department, and social science as a whole, has a mission; but at no time since the work of the University began has there been in the group such evident dissatisfaction with its own inability to define that mission in a way that will command general assent. . . We have not yet threshed out the question — What for? To what end? . . . Some of our own number, and many others both inside and outside the academic class, charge social scientists in general with wasting their time and resources upon futilities, instead of concentrating their abilities upon discovery of something worthwhile. We are under indictment for resting content with satisfying smug pedantic curiosities, instead of contributing to the world’s knowledge of the way of salvation. . . I report this [Small continued after further comment in the same vein] not in sorrow but with rejoicing. I regard it as a notably healthy situation. We are first of all unsatisfied with ourselves, and this disturbance is not likely to diminish until we can give a more coherent account of our reasons for existence than is possible at present.”

Other voices were raised on the same general subject. Charles E. Merriam called the President’s attention to the fact that the department of Political Science had languished for many years because of lack of a leader under the most distressing circumstances. Merriam had in the forefront of his mind the conception of a new study of politics. He thought in terms of investigation which called upon many disciplines, and he anticipated the development of cooperative activity. “Science,” he had [p. 174] written in 1921, “is a great cooperative enterprise in which many intelligences must labor together. There must always be wide scope for the spontaneous and unregimented activity of the individual, but the success of the expedition is conditioned upon some general plan of organization. Least of all can there be anarchy in social science, or chaos in the theory of political order.” Leon C. Marshall and William H. Spencer urged that the instructors in economics and business should intensively cultivate the borderlands between economics on one side and business, technology, psychology, the evolution of institutional life, law, and home economics on the other. Earlier a committee on the Harris Foundation had envisaged it as the beginning of an institute of international relations which would be the nucleus for a gathering of interested departments.

During his brief but energetic administration, President Ernest D. Burton mounted a frontal attack on the causes of discontent. He set his face against the abolition of undergraduate instruction; but he accepted the difference between undergraduate and graduate work as a fundamental principle. His policy was to develop each type of study according to its own character and requirements without seeking lines of compromise between the two. Clearly he did not intend to preside over the liquidation of the college or of research. He did see that both were in danger of death, the one from violence the other from malnutrition.

Through several years the college was studied and reorganized without much intermission until it reached a state where its social science courses were severed from those of the departments. So presently the members of the departments were relieved of the excessive burden of undergraduate teaching and of the teaching itself. At the same time, the rigors of an overly mechanical application of the rules on teaching loads appear to have been relaxed across the University while the endowment of distinguished service professorships further improved the lot of research men. A general fund campaign also held out promise of larger resources to feed research. It is worth notice that in [p. 175] building up the social sciences Burton preferred strengthening the departments to establishing the School of Politics which Merriam advocated.

These policies were variations of a tonic that the physicians of research had been prescribing for years: lots of fresh endowment money and frequent vacations from class-room duty. This was the classic remedy for languishing investigation, and it was one which the University had tried with great success in the past. A large part of the Rockefeller gifts consisted of additions to endowment without which, it seems safe to say, the University would have been quite incapable of attracting and holding the investigators who gave the University its reputation for erudition. When the last installment of the Founder’s final gift was paid in, the University had to rely very heavily upon other donors and upon the foundations, several of which were of course established by John D. Rockefeller. Large segments of his fortune were to come to the University, but not directly from him personally. It happened at this juncture that the foundations showed less inclination to give to endowment and more inclination to make project grants than they had earlier. The community was invited to contribute to research by the stipulation in some grants that funds would be released only when they had been matched by contributions from civic or other bodies with a particular problem to be studied.

The first of the project grants to the social sciences at the University came from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Its director was Beardsley Ruml, who had been at the University of Chicago from 1915 to 1917. Before his appointment as director of the newly founded Foundation, little Rockefeller money had been spent in direct support of research in the social sciences largely because Frederick Gates had no faith in its importance. Ruml, however, represented a very different point of view, and he set about to find what the historian of the Rockefeller Foundation has called “strategic undertakings for financial support as well as opportunities for dramatizing the importance of social studies.” The First World War had already forced men to see the need for all sorts of reliable statistics on the state of society, [p. 176] and organizations like the Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research were beginning to function.⁵

So in 1923, the Memorial offered support for study of the University’s local community. This area had by no means been ignored by the social scientists of the University. The sociologists had, for instance, spoken in 1894 of the city of Chicago as one of the most complete social laboratories in the world, and the economists had remarked on the opportunities which the city offered for the study of practical economic questions. When in the years after the first grant the interests of researchers led them beyond the limits of the local community, it was found possible to use part of the grants which followed the first to finance research having little or nothing to do with the city. So the University could accept project grants without departing from the field of its own interests. It could also enter heartily into the organization of interdepartmental agencies to administer research funds and to conduct joint investigations because the parochialism of some aspects of departmentalism had already been detected. In short, the grants did not work an unwanted revolution. Even if the change in finance and administration had been accepted only under duress, it would not have touched all investigation; for much research continued under the old dispensation. The grants did, however, alter the metabolism of the social sciences. The financial nutriment of much research came to the scholar through channels which were new.

The first of the new interdepartmental organizations was the Local Community Research Committee, set up to administer the grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Originally this committee, like an earlier one on the Harris Foundation, was composed of departmental representatives; but it presently ceased to be so composed when the principle of departmental representation was abandoned. As a series of grants materialized and as the concerns of the committee proliferated beyond local geographical limits, the phrase “Local Community Research” gave way to “Social Science Research” so that the name of the committee corresponded to its broadened charge. At this point, then, a general committee on research in the social sciences became a fixture of the University. In effect this committee related the departments to the general economy of study in the social sciences somewhat as Albion Small had hoped a dean would bring the departments into touch with the economy of the arts and literature side of the University. The creation of the Division of the Social Sciences with its own dean worked to the same end. The financing of research no longer lay wholly within the realms of departmental appropriations and of income derived from student fees and dividends from endowment. This, it should be noted, did not increase as speedily as it should have in order to satisfy the requirements of the theory that income in the form of temporary grants ought presently to be replaced by income from permanent capital.

With renewed concern for research came a need for more equipment and the in-gathering of research activities to one building. For years the departments in the “historical group” had a library of their own, but no building to themselves. Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1929, the social scientists of the University had the pleasure of attending the dedication of the Social Science Research Building. Today, when classes habitually meet in this building, one easily forgets that it was not intended for classrooms at all. Its opening was truly a dedication — to research. . Behind the thought that the building was a laboratory lay the conviction that social science had so expanded in the material which the investigator had to control that special and elaborate equipment was absolutely necessary, if social science was to live up to its ambition. The investigator also needed the assistance of technicians and stenographers, for whom provision was made in the planning of the building. Social science research was passing from the handicraft to the industrial stage.

But what of the individual scholar: could he ignore the shift of finance and organization with the serenity of the farmer who [p. 178] cultivates his own rich acres despite the tilting of continents? As no final answer can be extracted from such notes as these, suffice it here to review the record in its bearings on three of the conditions of productive intellectual labor — time, stimulation, and liberty to follow the subtle promptings of imagination.

Harper used the regular funds of the University to buy time for colonies of scholars. To be paid to investigate society must in itself have been enormously stimulating at a time when university appointments were still something of a novelty. The head professors were challenged by the terms of their office to open up new fields of knowledge; and their associates shared in the opportunity without losing their intellectual identity. Harper indeed had a gift for persuading even the most callow student that his mind really mattered, and Harper communicated to his colleagues a deep sense of the mission of a university in a democratic society. He was not wholly successful, however, in creating the spirit of unity which he thought a university should have. Like many other leaders, he faced the difficulties of arranging a working union of individualism and community life. The departments which he brought into being were more or less self-contained groups of men possessed of a vested interest in particular lines of endeavor. Once a colony of researchers occupies such a position and is given the right of self-perpetuation through autonomous action on appointments and promotions, it cannot easily be persuaded to change its course even when an outside observer may believe that it has already run that course. The compensating advantage of departmental permanence and autonomy lies in the security they provide the member of a department in his pursuit of knowledge according to his own lights. If a man’s investigations come into question, the jury is composed of his immediate associates and peers. Next to a private income, then, a tenure appointment in a stable department is the best guarantee of one’s right to follow curiosity wherever it leads.

This inheritance from the Harper administration was the center of the Judson policy. By stabilizing the University financially and by increasing its endowments, Judson built defenses [p. 179] around the security of the individual scholar, on whom he placed responsibility for initiating research. The reform of departmental organization and salary scales at least in theory relieved research men from administrative routine and gave the junior members of a department hope that the full incentives of premium salaries and prestige would not be denied them at the height of their careers. The growth of teaching obligations, however, put an unwelcome lien on the researcher’s time. Also Judson does not appear to have been able to provide by himself or to create agencies to provide the stimulation which had marked the Harper regime. The University by no means lost sight of research, but more than one of its members felt a sense of frustration on behalf of investigation by the end of the Judson administration.

In the Twenties and after, the allowance of time for research increased markedly; and the investigator received many varied stimulants. New money and new organizations appeared to facilitate the study of the social sciences. By the side of the old departments arose a cluster of interdepartmental committees as well as the office of the Dean. The Social Sciences Research Building served to house new colonies of researchers with their equipment. The groups supported by foundation and other grants were indeed reminiscent of the infancy of the departments. Here again were companies of men and women drawn together by a common interest in exploration under the leadership of seminal and enthusiastic minds. The new colonies did not, however, have a claim on the regular budget. Investigation might be immensely stimulating while it lasted; but the investigators could not assume that funds would continue to materialize. Also there is evidence that the deference to the needs of the community which was associated with some projects inclined some individuals away from established interests. Personal scholarship lay in some danger of being overshadowed; but not all projects constituted such a threat and not all research by any means was supported by grants. The economy of the social sciences had become decidedly mixed.

[p. 180] Superficially the conduct of research was much more complicated and unstable after the first World War than it had been in other days. It would be a mistake, however, to create a myth of an Arcadian age when the life of the investigator was altogether simple and secure. Each period of the history of the social sciences at Chicago has had its tensions, and each has produced a balance of policies and practices which can be reduced to no single formula. One task of self-study, therefore, is to ascertain how the balance has shifted through the years.

[NOTES]

1. This document was prepared by Richard J. Storr of the Department of History at the request of the Self Study Committee. The author wishes to express his thanks to his assistants, Mrs. Vera Laska, Mr. William R. Usellis, and Mr. James S. Counelis, for the special trouble to which they have gone for the sake of this paper.
2. Professor George Pierson has pointed out that the government of Yale College at the turn of the century was baronial, William G. Sumner being the best known of the barons. Before one concludes, however, that Yale and Chicago were alike, one should , note that such esprit de corps as Yale had probably differed from the spirit at Chicago. The President of Yale could assume that many members of his faculty would unite at least as loyal alumni of the institution. He had respect for tradition on his side. Harper could draw only on the sense of unity which a common future rather than a common past may inspire.
3. Andrew C. MacLaughlin’s phrase.
4. In 1902, the phrase “Social Sciences” appears in the group’s name. The acceptance of the earlier name has an interesting — and for the academic politician, an instructive — history. The report of the organizing committee of 1899 was approved without change except for one clause, the proposal that the unit be called the ‘”historical group.” No alternative name, however, received official sanction so that the secretary of the committee continued to use the offensive label, presumably because he had to call the group something. By default, then, “historical group” came into common usage.
5. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York. 1952). p. 195.

Source: Richard J. Storr, A Report on the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago. Appendix Document D of Self-Study Committee. October 1, 1954.