Category: Economists

Categories
Economists Harvard

Harvard. Economics General Examination. Lauchlin Currie and Harry D. White, 1927

Few characters in the history of economics are quite as titillating as those who serious historians have concluded indeed passed confidential materials to the Soviet Union, namely, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White. Before they grew up to be card-carrying members of the economics profession, they too were once graduate students. Here from the Harvard General Examination for the Degree of Ph.D. we have their respective examination committees, academic histories, subject fields, and thesis subjects/advisers.  

Lauchlin Currie received his Harvard Ph.D. in 1931 with the dissertation “Bank Assets and Banking Theory.”

Harry Dexter White was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. in 1930 with the dissertation “The International Balance of Payments for France, 1880-1913.”

________________________________

 

From:
Division of History, Government and Economics, Examinations for the Degree of Ph.D., 1926-27, pp. 10-11.

 

21. Lauchlin Bernard Currie.

General Examination in Economics, Monday, April 11, 1927.

Committee: Professors Young (chairman), Burbank, A. H. Cole, Usher, and Wright.

Academic History: St. Francis Xavier College, 1921-22; London School of Economics, 1922-25; Harvard Graduate School, 1925-. B.Sc., London, 1925

General Subjects.

1. Economic Theory.
2. Economic History since 1750.
3. Public Finance.
4. International Trade and Tariff Policy.
5. History of Political Theory.
6. Money, Banking, and Crises.

Special Subject: Money, Banking, and Crises.

Thesis Subject: Monetary History of Canada, 1914-26. (With Professor Young.)

[…]

23. Harry Dexter White.

General Examination in Economics, Thursday, April 14, 1927.

Committee: Professors Taussig (chairman), Dewing, Elliott, Monroe, and Usher.

Academic History: Columbia University, 1921-23; Stanford University, 1924-25; Harvard Graduate School, 1925-.   A.B., Stanford; A.M., ibid., 1925. Instructor in Economics, Harvard, 1926- .

General Subjects.

1. Economic Theory and its History.
2. Money, Banking, and Crises.
3. Economic History since 1750.
4. Economics of Corporations.
5. History of Political Theory.
6. International Trade.

Special Subject: International Trade.

Thesis Subject: Foreign Trade of France. (With Professor Taussig.)

 

 

Source: Harvard University Archives. HUC7000.70. Harvard University, Examinations for the Ph.D. Folder “1926-27”.

Image Source: Laughlin Currie and Harry D. White from Harvard Class Album 1934.

Categories
Economists Harvard Transcript

Harvard. Coursework of Frank W. Fetter for A.M., 1923-24

Frank Whitson Fetter (born May 22, 1899 in San Francisco, CA; died July 7, 1991 in Hanover, NH). A.B. from Swarthmore College (1920), A.M. from Princeton (1922), also A.M. from Harvard (1924). Ph.D. from Princeton (1926). His father was Princeton economics professor Frank Albert Fetter.

During the course of his career Fetter taught at Princeton, Haverford, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Dartmouth.

The 1942 copy of his A.M. course transcript below matches an undated transcript (or report card) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for the academic year 1923-24 found in the same folder at the Duke Economists’ Papers Project.

 

____________________________

[Course titles and instructors]

From Economics Group I, Economic Theory and Method

11 Professor Taussig — Economic Theory.

 

From Economics Group III: Applied Economics

37 1hf. Professor Persons — Commercial Crises

39 2hf. Asst. Professor Williams — International Finance

 

From Economics Group V: Course of Research in Economics

20 Professors Taussig, Carver, Ripley, Bullock, Young, and Persons — Economic Research

 

From History, Group IV. American History

17a 1hf. Professor Turner—The History of the West.

39 2hf. Professor Turner—History of the United States, 1880-1920.

Source: Harvard University Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Harvard College for 1923-24. History, p. 103; Economics, p. 107.

____________________________

Harvard University
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

24 University Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts
November 30, 1942

Transcript of the record of Mr. Frank Whitson Fetter
1923-24

 

COURSE GRADE
Economics 11 (1 course)

A
Economics 20 (1 course)

A
Economics371 ( ½ course)

A
Economics 392( ½ course)

A minus
History 17a1 ( ½ course)

A minus
History 392 ( ½ course)

A

Mr. Fetter received the degree of Master of Arts in June, 1924.

The established grades are A, B, C, D, and E.

A grade of A, B, Credit, Satisfactory, or Excused indicates that the course was passed with distinction. Only courses passed with distinction may be counted toward a higher degree.

 

[signed] Lawrence S. Mayo
Associate Dean

 

Source: Duke University, Rubenstein Library. Frank Whitson Fetter Papers. Box 50, Folder “Student Papers, Transcripts, grades, Harvard University (1923-1924).

Image Source: (ca. 1937) John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

 

Categories
Economists Germany Johns Hopkins

Germany. The Seminary Method. Reported by Herbert B. Adams, 1884

  • The “Seminary” was the graduate student research workshop of its day. This innovation that combined research with graduate education was imported from Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. The historian Herbert Baxter Adams at the Johns Hopkins University provides us with a wonderful tour of the leading German seminaries of history, art/archeology, economics and statistics. Seminary libraries and museums provided the texts and artifacts that served as the toys of these scientific nurseries. 

The Seminary Method. Introduction.

Heidelberg Seminaries

Bluntschli’s Seminary

Knies’ Seminary of Political Economy

Historical Seminary at Bonn

An American Student on German Seminaries

Paul Frédéricq on German Lectures and Historical Seminaries

Seminaries of Art and Archeology

Seminary Libraries

Statistical Seminary in Berlin

 

Excerpt from: II. New Methods of Study in History by Herbert Baxter Adams (1884)

 

[p. 64]

4.— THE SEMINARY METHOD.

The Seminarium, like the college and the university, is of ecclesiastical origin. Historically speaking, the seminary was a nursery of theology and a training-school for seminary priests. The modern theological seminary has evolved from the mediaeval institution, and modern seminary-students, whether at school or at the university, are only modifications of the earlier types. The Church herself early began the process of differentiating the ecclesiastical seminary for the purposes of secular education. Preachers became teachers, and the propaganda of religion prepared the way for the propaganda of science. The seminary method of modern universities is merely the development of the old scholastic method of advancing philosophical inquiry by the defense of original theses. The seminary is still a training-school for doctors of philosophy; but it has evolved from a nursery of dogma into a laboratory of scientific truth.

A young American, Professor of Greek at Dartmouth College, John Henry Wright, in an admirable address on the Place of Original Research in College Education, explains very clearly the transitional process from the theological seminary to the scientific seminary. “The seminaries were instituted that theological students, who expected to teach on the way to their profession, might receive special pedagogical training in the subjects in which they would be called upon to give instruction in the schools. As the subject-matter of liberal instruction was mainly the languages and literatures of Greece and Pome, the seminaries became philological in character. The first seminary that actually assumed the designation of philological was that founded at Goettingen in 1733, by Gesner the famous Latinist. This seminary has been, in many respects, the model for all later ones.”1

1 An address on The Place of Original Research in College Education, by John Henry Wright, Associate Professor of Greek in Dartmouth College, read before the National Educational Association, Department of Higher Instruction, July 14, 1882, Saratoga, N. Y. From the Transactions, 1882. This address and Prof. E. Emerton’s recent contribution on “The Historical Seminary in American Teaching,” to Dr. G. Stanley Hall’s volume on Methods of Teaching and Studying History, are the best American authorities on the Seminary Method.

[p. 65]

The transformation of the Seminarium into a laboratory of science was first accomplished more than fifty years ago by Germany’s greatest historian, Leopold von Ranke. He was born in the year 1795 and has been Professor of History at the University of Berlin since 1825. There, about 1830, he instituted those practical exercises in historical investigation (exercitationes historicae) which developed a new school of historians. Such men as Waitz, Giesebrecht, Wattenbach, Von Sybel, Adolph Schmidt, and Duncker owe their methods to this father of historical science. Through the influence of these scholars, the historical seminary has been extended throughout all the universities in Germany and even to institutions beyond German borders. Let us consider a few seminary types.

 

Heidelberg Seminaries.

At the university of Heidelberg, as elsewhere in Germany, there are seminaries for advanced training in various departments of learning, chiefly, however, in philology and in other historical sciences. The philological seminary, where the use of the Latin language for formal discussion is still maintained at some universities, is perhaps the connecting link between mediaeval and modern methods of scholastic training. In the Greek seminary of the late Professor Koechly, at Heidelberg the training was pre-eminently pedagogical. The members of the seminary took turns in occupying the Professor’s chair for one philological meeting, and in expounding a classical author by translation and comment. After one man had thus made trial of his abilities as an instructor, all the other members [p. 66] took turns in criticizing his performance, the Professor judging the critics and saying what had been left unsaid.

In the historical seminary of Professor Erdmannsdoerffer, the method was somewhat different. It was less formal and less pedagogical. Instead of meeting as a class in one of the university lecture-rooms, the historical seminary, composed of only six men, met once a week in a familiar way at the Professor’s own house, in his private study. The evening’s exercise of two hours consisted in the critical exposition of the Latin text of a mediaeval historian, the Gesta Frederici Imperatoris, by Otto, Bishop of Freising, who is the chief original authority upon the life and times of Frederic Barbarossa. As in the Greek seminary, so here, members took turns in conducting the exercises, which, however, had less regard for pedagogical method than for historical substance. Each man had before him a copy of the octavo edition of Bishop Otto’s text, and the conductor of the seminary translated it into German, with a running comment upon the subject matter, which he criticised or explained in the light of parallel citations from other authors belonging to Bishop Otto’s time, who are to be found in the folio edition of Pertz’s Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

From this method of conducting the seminary, it would appear as though one man had all the work to do for a single evening, and then could idly listen to the others until his own turn came once more. But it was not so. Subjects of discussion and for special inquiry arose at every meeting, and the Professor often assigned such subjects to the individuals most interested, for investigation and report. For example, he once gave to an American student the subject of Arnold of Brescia, the Italian reformer of the twelfth century, who was burnt to death in Home in 1155, having been delivered up to the pope by Frederic Barbarossa. The investigation of the authorities upon the life-work of this remarkable reformer, the precursor of Savonarola and of Luther, occupied the student for many weeks. On another occasion, Seminary discussion [p. 67] turned upon the origin of the Italian Communes, whether they were of Roman or of Germanic origin. An American student, who had been reading Guizot’s view upon the origin of municipal liberty, ventured to support the Roman theory. The Professor referred the young man to Carl Hegel’s work on the Constitution of Italian Cities and to the writings of Von Maurer. That line of investigation has occupied the American student ever since 1876, and the present work of the historical seminary at the Johns Hopkins University is to some extent the outgrowth of the ererni brought to Baltimore from the Heidelberg seminary.

 

Bluntschli’s Seminary.

As an illustration of seminary-work, relating more especially to modern history and modern polities, may be mentioned the private class conducted for two hours each week in one of the university rooms by the late Dr. J. C. Bluntschli, professor of constitutional and international law at Heidelberg. In his seminary, the exercises were in what might be called the comparative constitutional history of modern European states, with special reference to the rise of Prussia and of the new German empire. Bluntschli himself always conducted the meetings of the seminary. Introductory to its special work, he gave a short course of lectures upon the history of absolute government in Prussia and upon the influence of French and English constitutional reforms upon Belgium and Germany, lie then caused the seminary to compare in detail the Belgian constitution of 1830 with the Prussian constitution of 1850. Each member of the seminary had before him the printed texts, which were read and compared, while Bluntschli commented upon points of constitutional law that were suggested by the texts or proposed by the class. After some weeks’ discussion of the general principles of constitutional government, the seminary, under Bluntschli’s skillful guidance, entered upon a special and individual study of the relations between [p. 68] church and state, in the various countries of Europe, but with particular reference to Belgium and Prussia, which at that time were much disturbed by conflicts between the civil and the ecclesiastical power. Individual members of the seminary reported the results of their investigations, and interesting discussions always followed. The result of this seminary-work was an elaborate monograph by Bluntschli himself upon the legal responsibility of the Pope, a tractate which the Ultramontane party thought inspired by Bismarck, but which really emanated from co-operative studies by master and pupils in the Heidelberg seminary.

 

Seminary of Political Economy.

At Heidelberg a seminary in political economy is conducted by Professor Knies, who may be called the founder of the historical method as applied to this department. His work on Politische-oekonomie vom Standpunkt der geschichtlichen Methode was published in 1853 and ante-dates the great work of Roscher by one year. The seminary method encouraged by Knies consists chiefly in the reading and discussion of original papers by his pupils upon assigned topics. The latter were sometimes of a theoretical but quite frequently of an historical character. I remember that such topics as Turgot’s economic doctrines were often discussed. The various theories of wealth, from the French mercantilists and physiocrats down to Henry C. Carey, were examined. The meetings of the seminary were held every week and were not only of the greatest service in point of positive instruction, but also, in every way, of a pleasant, enjoyable character. Men learned to know one another as well as their professor. A most valuable feature of the seminaries in political science at Heidelberg was a special library, quite distinct from the main university library. Duplicate copies of the books that were in greatest demand were at the service of the seminary.

 

[p. 69]

The Historical Seminary at Bonn.1

1 See L’Université de Bonn et l’enseignement supérieur en Allemagne, par Edmond Dreyfus-Brisac, (editor of the Revue international de l’enseignement). “Les Séminaires.”

The object of this seminary, as of all German historical seminaries, is to introduce special students to the best methods of original research. The Bonn seminary is one of the most flourishing in all Germany. It is an endowed institution. It was instituted in the year 1865 and enjoys the income of a legacy of forty thousand marks left it by Professor Wilhelm Pütz. The income is devoted to three stipends, each of about 600 marks, for students of history and geography who have successfully pursued one or both of these sciences for two years. Said stipends are awarded annually by the philosophical faculty upon recommendation by the director of the seminary. It is said that a student of Bonn university has a better chance of obtaining such stipend than does a candidate from outside. In addition to this endowment of ten thousand dollars, the Bonn seminary of history is allowed a special appropriation, in the annual university budget, for general expenses, for increasing the seminary library, and for the director’s extra salary. Any unused balance from the fund devoted to general expenses is expended for library purposes.

The historical seminary of Bonn has now four sections, each under the guidance of a professor, representing a special field of history. The four professors constitute a board of control for the entire seminary. The director is appointed from year to year, the four professors rotating in the executive office. The student membership for each section is restricted to twelve. The meetings occur once a week, from 5 to 7 o’clock in the evening. All members are expected to be present, although no individual student makes more than one contribution during a semester. Members are subject to expulsion by the board of control for failure to discharge any obligations, for inadequate work, or for mis-use of the library.

[p. 70]

The library consisted, in 1879, of 308 works, and was kept in the charge of one of the members of the seminary. Among the books noticed by Dreyfus-Brisac, at the the time of his visit, were the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum, the complete works of Luther, the Annales Ecclesiastici edited by Baronius, Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Muratori’s Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, The Glossary of Mediaeval Latin, by Ducange, a set of Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, Forschungen (Munich), the writings of Curtius, Mommsen, Ranke, Sybel, etc.

Dreyfus-Brisac mentions other seminaries at Bonn University, notably that of the late Professor Held in Political Economy, held privately in his own house, and the pedagogical seminary of Bona-Meyer. The observing, critical Frenchman says that he knows of nothing more remarkable in German educational methods, nothing more worthy of imitation, than the seminaries of Bonn.

 

An American Student on German Seminaries.

Dr. Charles Gross,1 an American student who has recently taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Goettingen in the department of History, with the highest honors, and who is now studying English Municipal History in the British Museum, has written by request the following account of German historical seminaries, in which he has had long and varied experience : ” The German historical seminary aims to inculcate the scientific method. It is the workshop in [p. 71] which the experienced master teaches his young apprentices the deft use of the tools of the trade. In the lecture room the professor presents the results of his investigations; in the Seminar (or Uebungen) he shows just what he had to do in order to secure those results. The German student lays far more stress upon his seminar than upon his lectures. He may “cut” the latter for weeks at a time, while he is very assiduous in his attendance upon the former. The latter may be obtained from books or from the Heft of some more conscientious student ; but the scientific method, the German maintains, is the gift of time and the seminary only, — the result of long contact between the mind of the master and the mind of the disciple.

1 Dr. Gross presented for his doctor’s dissertation at Goettingen a thesis on the Gilda Mercatoria, an important contribution to English municipal history, originally suggested by the late Professor Pauli. The subject has an interesting bearing upon the merchant associations, which furnished men, capital, and government for the English colonies in America. Dr. Gross is now writing an Introduction to American Municipal History, to be published in this series.

” Two different kinds of work predominate in the German historical seminary : the writing of short theses (Kleine Arbeiten) or the critical reading of some document or documents, more frequently of some chronicler or chroniclers. The professor selects a list of subjects for theses from the field of his special line of investigation and assigns them to the students, the latter’s particular tastes being generally consulted. A member of the seminary rarely has more than one thesis during the semester, frequently not more than one during the year, and during his first two or three semesters none at all. The professor points out the sources and authorities, and the student consults with him whenever difficulties arise in the preparation of the work. One or two critics (Referenten) are appointed for each thesis, who comment upon the production after it has been read. A free discussion of the subject then follows, the professor and students doing all in their power to show the utter lack of Wissenschaft in the author’s method.

“As regards the other element of seminary work, viz., critical reading of some chronicler, to each student is assigned a certain portion of the text, which, — with the aid, if necessary, of other contemporaneous sources pointed out to him by the professor — he is expected to treat in accordance with the canons of historical criticism, the other students commenting ad libitum.

[p. 72]

” Now these two elements are variously combined in different Seminars. Generally both are carried on side by side, an hour perhaps being taken up with the thesis and the other hour of the session with some text. (That, e.g., is the plan of Prof. Bresslau of Berlin). Sometimes the seminary is divided into two sections, one for the Kleine Arbeiten and the other for the critical manipulation of some chronicler (e. g. Giesebrecht’s Seminar in Munich). Sometimes one of the two elements is excluded (v. Noorden in Berlin had no theses in my day ; Droysen nothing but theses). Sometimes the students are not required to do any work at all, the professor simply commenting upon some text for an hour or two. (That was Weizsäcker’s and Pauli’s method).”

 

Paul Frédéricq on German Lectures and Historical Seminaries.

One of the best accounts of German university instruction in history is that given by Paul Frédéricq, Professor in the University of Liège, Belgium. He made two excursions to German university-centres in the years 1881 and 1882, and published a most instructive article in the Revue de l’instruction publique (supérieur et moyenne) en Belgique, in 1882. The article is entitled, De l’enseignement supérieur de I’histoire.1 It will probably be soon translated for publication in America. M. Frédéricq visited Berlin, Halle, Leipzig, and Goettingen. He describes, in a pleasant way, the various lectures that he attended, the professors he met, and the methods that he learned. To one acquainted with life at the Berlin university, its professors of history, and its lecture-courses, M. Frédéricq’s picture seems almost perfect. One sees again, in fancy, Heinrich von [p. 73] Treitschke, the brilliant publicist and eloquent orator, with his immense audiences, everyone of them an enthusiastic seminary of Prussian Politics. The following felicitous sketch of Gustav Droysen will be appreciated by all who have seen that distinguished professor in the Katheder : “Je le vois encore, tenant en main un petit cahier de notes à converture bleue et accoudé sur un grossier pupitre carré, exhaussé au moyen d’une allonge, qui se dressait à un demi-mêtre au-dessus de la chaire. II commença à mi-voix, à la manière des grands prédicateurs français, afin d’obtenir le silence le plus complet. On aurait entendu voler une mouche. Penché sur son petit cahier bleu et promenant sur son auditoire des regards pénétrants qui perçaient les verres de ses lunettes, il parlait des falsifications dans l’histoire. … A chaque instant une plaisanterie très réussie, toujours mordante et acérée, faisait courir un sourire discret sur tous les bancs…. J’y admirai la verve caustique, la clarté et la netteté des aperçus, ainsi que l’habileté consommée avec laquelle le professeur lisait ses notes, de manière à faire croire à une improvisation.”

1 Another good authority upon the subject of German seminaries is M. Charles Seignobos, of Dijon, France, in his critical article on L’enseignement de I’histoire dans les universités allemandes, published in the Revue Internationale de l’ enseignement, June 15, 1881. Cf. pp. 578-589.

The historical seminary conducted by Professor Droysen is one of the best at the University of Berlin. Although Professor Frédéricq failed to obtain access to this seminary as well as to that of Mommsen’s, being told qu’ on y exercait une critique si sévère, si impitoyable que la présence d’un étranger était impossible, yet he quotes in a work1 more recent than the article above mentioned the observations made in 1874 by his colleague, Professor Kurth, of Liège: “M. Droysen, dans sa Société historique, tient aux travaux écrits, parce qu’ ils semblent donner plus de consistance aux études et que c’est quelque chose qui reste; ils fournissent plus facilement l’objet d’une discussion, ils font mieux apprécier le degré de force d’une élève ainsi que ses aptitudes scientifiques; enfin, ils permettent [p.74] à ses condisciples de profiter mieux de son travail. La correction de celui-ci en effet, est confiée à un autre élève qui, sous les auspices du professeur, en critique les erreurs et le discute dans la réunion suivante avec l’auteur; de là, des controverses souvent animées, auxquelles chaque assistant peut prendre part, et qui offrent l’aspect d’une véritable vie scientifique.”

1 De l’enseignement supèrieur de l’histoire en Belgique, XV. Published as an introduction to the Travaux du Cours Pratique d’Histoire National de Paul Frédéricq. [Gand et La Haye, 1883.].

M. Frédéricq describes with evident pleasure the privilege he enjoyed, through the courtesy of George Waitz, in being admitted to the latter’s seminary, held every Wednesday evening, for two hours, in his own house. The seminary consisted of nine students. They were seated at two round tables, which were loaded with books. The students had at command the various chronicles relating to the times of Charles Martel. The exercise consisted in determining the points of agreement and disagreement among original authorities, with reference to a specific line of facts, in how far one author had quoted from another, &c. “The professor asked questions in a quiet way, raised objections, and helped out embarrassed pupils with perfect tact and with a kindly serenity.” M. Frédéricq noticed how, at one time, when a student had made a really original observation, the professor took out his pencil and made a note of it upon the margin of his copy of the chronicle. In such simple ways the spirit of independent thought and original research is encouraged by one of the greatest masters. George Waitz is the successor of G. H. Pertz as editor of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. To see upon the professor’s desk great bundles of printer’s proofs for this vast work, only deepened M. Frédéricq’s impressions that here in this private study was really a workshop of German historical science.

 

Seminaries of Art and Archeology.

M. Frédéricq describes another phase of historical training which is eminently worthy of imitation in all colleges or universities, where there is convenient access to an archaeological [p. 75] museum. Ernst Curtius is perhaps even more famous in Berlin as a classical archaeologist than as the historian of Greece. His lectures upon Grecian art are accompanied by a weekly visit of his class to the museum, where an hour or two is spent in examining plaster-casts and fragments of antique sculpture under the guidance of Curtius himself. Having enjoyed this very experience on many occasions in Berlin, the writer can attest the literal truth of the following description:

” L’après-midi, M. Curtius nous avait donne rendez-vous au Musée des antiques où il fait chaque semaine une leçon sur l’archéologie grecque et romaine. A son arrivée les étudiants qui l’attendaient en flânant à travers les collections, le saluèrent silencieusement, puis remirent leur chapeau. M. Curtius resta couvert aussi et commença sur-le-champ sa promenade de démonstrations archéologiques. Armé d’un coupe-papier en ivoire, il allait d’un objet à l’autre, expliquant, indiquant les moindres particularités avec l’extremité de son coupe-papier, tantôt se haussant sur la pointe des pieds, tantôt s’agenouillant pour mieux détailler ses explications. A un moment même il se coucha par terre devant un trépied grec. Appuyé sur le coude gauche et brandissant de la main droite son fidèle coupe-papier, il s’extasia sur les formes élégantes et sur les ornements ravissants du petit chef-d’oeuvre. On comprend aisément combien des leçons faites avec chaleur par un tel professeur, dans un musée de premier ordre, doivent être utiles aux élèves. La leçon que j’ai entendue ne roulait que sur des points secondaires : trépieds, candélabres, vases en terre cuite, etc., et malgré cela il s’en dégageait une admiration communicative et une sorte de parfum antique. On m’a assure que lorsqu’il s’occupe de la statuaire, M. Curtius atteint souvent à l’éloquence la plus majestueuse ; et je le crois sans peine.”

The same method of peripatetic lectures, as described by M. Frédéricq, was also pursued when I was in Berlin, 1874-5, by Herman Grimm for the illustration of art-history. Once a week he would meet his class at the museum for the examination [p.76.] of works illustrating early Christian plastic and pictorial art, for example, that of the Catacombs; also works illustrating Byzantine and Germanic influences, and the rise of the various Italian, French, German, and Flemish schools of painting and sculpture. More was learned from Grimm’s critical commentary upon these works of art, whether originals, photographs, or engravings, than would be possible from almost any course of lectures upon the philosophy of art or aesthetics, without concrete realities to teach the eye. The wealth of that great museum of Berlin — for student-purposes one of the finest in the world — is best appreciated when a man like Grimm or Curtius points out its hidden treasures.

The same illustrative methods in ancient and modern art were also practiced by the late Professor Stark, the archaeologist and art historian of Heidelberg. Although the museum of the latter university is small, when compared with that of Berlin, yet it serves to illustrate what any institution of moderate resources can accomplish for its students in the way of supplying original sources of art-history, at least in the shape of casts, photographs, and other fac simile reproductions of artistic objects. If Stark did not have original tripods, candelabras, and terra cottas, he had, nevertheless, images of almost every important object mentioned in his lectures. One of the exercises in Stark’s archaeological seminary consisted in the explanation at sight, by individual members, of pictorial representations upon Greek vases, which were inexpensively reproduced in colored plates, so that every man could have before him a copy of the work under discussion. There is a great future for American student-research in the field of arthistory, which Herman Grimm used to call die Blüthe der Geschichte. The quick success in England of Dr. Charles “Waldstein, a pupil of Stark’s at Heidelberg, shows what possibilities there are beyond German borders for the science of art and archaeology. The popularity of Professor Norton’s seminary and art-courses at Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows that interest in such matters is kindling upon this side of the [p. 77] Atlantic. The art collections begun by Yale, Amherst and Smith, Vassar and Cornell, Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University indicate that the day of art seminaries is not far off. Indeed, since this writing, there was instituted (March 1, 1884,) in Baltimore a so-called Art-Circle, consisting of about twenty graduate students, under the direction of Dr. A. L. Frothingham,1 a fellow of the University, who has lived many years in Rome and is a member of the Società dei Cultori dell’ Archeologia cristiana. The Circle will meet every Saturday morning in the library of the Peabody Institute, and, under the guidance of Dr. Frothingham, will spend an hour or two in the examination of plates, photographs, and other works illustrating the history of art. The subjects of study for this semester are: the catacomb frescoes; the sarcophagi; mosaics; ivory sculpture ; metal sculpture ; romanesque architecture; gothic architecture; sculpture in France (gothic period); renaissance sculpture in Italy; schools of painting in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An art-club, with eight members, has also been instituted among the undergraduates for the systematic reading of art-history.

1 Dr. Frothingham is the author of the following monographs: L’Omelia di Giacomo di Sarûg sul Battesimo di Constantino Imperatore (Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1881-2) ; Il Tesoro della Basilica di S. Pietro in Vaticano dal XIII al XV Secolo (Roma, 1883) ; Une Mosaïque Constantinienne inconnue à Saint-Pierre de Rome (Revue Archéologique, Paris, 1883); Les Mosaïques de Grottaferrata (Gazette Archéologique, for December, 1883-January, 1884); Letter to the Society for Biblical Archaeology on a Hebrew inscription on a mosaic of the V cent. at Ravenna.

Dr. Frothingham and Dr. Alfred Emerson (fellow of Greek and classical archeologist) have been the most active spirits in lately founding an Archeological Society in Baltimore, which will enjoy the co-operation of distinguished archaeologists in the old world.

 

Seminary Libraries

One of the most interesting and important features of the German historical, political, and archaeological seminaries is [p. 78] the special library, distinct from the main university collections. We have already noticed the existence of such libraries at Heidelberg and Bonn ; and it may be said in general that they are now springing up in all the universities of Germany. So important an auxiliary have these seminary -libraries become that in some universities, where the seminaries have been recognized by the state, a special appropriation is granted by the government for library purposes. The government of Saxony granted Professor Noorden of Leipzig 6,500 marks for the foundation of his seminary-library and an annual subsidy of 1,200 marks. This revenue for the purchase of books is considerably increased by a charge of ten marks per semester, paid by every student who has access to the seminary -library. The privileges of this working-library are regarded as analogous to the privileges of using laboratory apparatus or attending a clinique.

In addition to a special library, German seminaries are now procuring special rooms, not only for regular meetings, but for daily work. The historical seminary at Leipzig, embracing four sections like that at Bonn, has had, since 1880, five rooms at its disposal ; one consultation-room or Sprechzimmer for the professors, one room for maps and atlases, and three large rooms where the students work, with their special authorities around them. Every student has for himself a table containing a drawer of which he keeps the key. The rooms are inaccessible to all except members of the seminary, who are intrusted with pass-keys and can enter the library at any time from nine o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. The rooms are warmed and lighted at university expense. Each student has a gas-jet above his own table and is absolutely independent of all his neighbors. Individuality is a marked feature of student-life and student-work in Germany. Men never room together ; they rarely visit one another’s apartments ; and they almost always prefer to work alone. Society and relaxation they know how and where to find when they are at leisure. By general consent German [p. 79] students attend to their own affairs without let or hindrance. This belongs to academic freedom. It belongs to the seminary and it belongs to the individual student.

M. Seignobos, in his excellent article on l’enseignement de l’histoire en Allemagne,1 says “tout seminaire historique d’Etat possède sa bibliothèque propre et sa salle de travail réservées à l’usage de ses membres. Là, au contraire, tous les livres sans exception, restent à demeure, afin que l’étudiant soit toujours sûr de les trouver.” M. Seignobos gives a list of some of the chief works that are to be found in the historical seminary library at Leipzig. He noted Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae; Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum; Jaffé, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum ; Böhmer, Regesta imperatorum ; Böhmer, Fontes rerum Germanicarum ; Muratori, Scriptores; Bouquet, Historiens des Gaules; Wattenbach and Lorenz, Quellengeschichte; Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte; Archiv der Gesellschaft fur deutsche Geschichte; Historische Zeitschrift; Walter, Corpus juris Germanici; Zöpfl, Rechtsgeschichte; Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte ; Gengler, Codex juris municipalis; Annales ecclesiastici; Migne, Vies des Papes; Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit; Giesebrecht, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches; Scriptores rerum prussicarum ; Huillard-Bréholles, Frédéric II; Hefele, Conciliengeschichte; Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom; Collection Byzantine; Sickel, Monumenta graphica ; Potthast, Bibliotheca medii aevi.

1 Revue internationalde l’enseignement, June 15, 1881. “Bibliothèques.”

 

The Statistical Seminary in Berlin.2

2 Authorities: Dr. Engel, Das Statistische Seminar des Königl. Preussischen Statischen Bureaus in Berlin, 1864. Programmes of courses.

This government institution, while dealing with Prussian statistics, is also a regular seminary for the training of university graduates who have passed the examinations required for [80] entrance to the higher branches of the civil service. The seminary, which was first opened in November, 1862, was under the direction of Dr. Edward [sic, “Ernst” is correct] Engel, chief of the Bureau of Statistics, aided by various university professors. The idea was that the government offices of the statistical bureau should become laboratories of political science. Not only are the facilities of the department utilized for training purposes, but systematic courses of lectures are given to the statistical seminary by university professors co-operating with the chief and his assistants. Subjects like the following are treated: the theory and technique of statistics; agrarian questions; conditions and changes of population; political economy in its various branches ; insurance; social questions ; administration; prison discipline and prison reform in various countries ; sanitary questions, physical geography, etc.

The amount of original work produced by the bureau and seminary of statistics is very great. One has only to examine the Verzeichniss der periodischen und anderen Schriften,1 which are published by these government offices, in order to appreciate the scientific value of the scholar in politics. These publications are of international significance, by reasons of the lessons which they teach. Whoever wishes to study, from a comparative point of view, the subject of national or municipal finance; the relations of church and school; sanitation; insurance ; trade and commerce ; industries ; population ; land and climate; cities; development of the science of statistics; statistical congresses; markets; fairs; genealogies of royal families; tables of mortality; education; administration, etc., will be richly rewarded by consulting the published works of the Prussian Statistical Bureau, which can be obtained at catalogue prices.

1 For this catalogue, one should address the Verlag des Koniglichen Statistischen Bureaus, Berlin, S. W., Lindenstrasse, 28.

 

[p. 81]

Library of the Statistical Seminary.

Among the publications of the Prussian Statistical Bureau is the catalogue of its library in two royal octavo volumes. In the first, the authors and titles are arranged according to the sciences which they represent. In the second, the contents are grouped by States. Probably there is in existence no other such complete guide to political science in its historical, theoretical, and practical aspects.

This library, now numbering over 70,000 volumes, has been used by Johns Hopkins University men, two of whom have belonged to Dr. Engel’s Seminar, and they would fully endorse the published statement by Dr. Engel, in his account of the Statistical Seminary, made as long ago as 1864. He says: “If we may believe the admissions of many specialists, there exists far and wide no library so rich, no collection of periodicals so select, no map collection so excellent, as those in the royal bureau of statistics. All new contributions to this branch of literature, whether in Germany, France, England, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, North and South America, are brought to the eyes of members of this seminary. A series of more than seventy special magazines of political economy, statistics, and the allied branches of industry, agriculture, commerce and trade, public; works, finance, credit, insurance, administration (municipal and national), social self help, — all this is not only accessible for seminary-use, but members are actually required to familiarize themselves with the contents of these magazines inasmuch as one of the practical exercises of the seminary consists in the preparation of a continuous report or written abstract of these journals.”

 

Source:

Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ed. by Herbert B. Adams.
Second Series: Methods in Historical Study. January-February, 1884.

 Image Source: Portrait of Herbert B. Adams (between 1870 and 1880). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.

Categories
AEA Economists Statistics

AEA. The Study of Statistics in College by Carroll D. Wright, 1887

Carroll D. Wright can be counted among the founding fathers of official government statistics in the United States. Here a few biographical details from an encyclopaedia published shortly after the paper below was presented. For impatient readers (sorry, he didn’t write with the Twitter-feeding generation in mind) my favorite quote:

“Know thyself” applies to nations as well as to men; and that nation which neglects to study its own conditions, or fears to study its own conditions in the most searching and critical manner, must fall into retrogression. If there is an evil, let the statistician search it out; by searching it out and carefully analyzing statistics, he may be able to solve the problem. If there is a condition that is wrong, let the statistician bring his figures to bear upon it, only be sure that the statistician employed cares more for the truth than he does for sustaining any preconceived idea of what the solution should be. A statistician should not be an advocate, for he cannot work scientifically if he is working to an end. He must be ready to accept the results of his study, whether they suit his doctrine or not. The colleges in this connection have an important duty to perform, for they can aid in ridding the public of the statistical mechanic, the man who builds tables to order to prove a desired result. These men have lowered the standard of statistical science by the empirical use of its forces.

The statistician writes history. He writes it in the most concrete form in which history can be written, for he shows on tablets all that makes up the Commonwealth…

Also worth reading are his admiring words for Ernst Engel’s statistical seminar in Berlin…yes indeed, the Engel-Curve Engel.

____________________

 

The Study of Statistics in College
By Hon. Carroll D. Wright

United States Commissioner of Bureau of Labor.

Paper read at the joint session of the American Economic and Historical Associations, at Cambridge, Mass., May 24, 1887.

America has no counterpart to the continental school of statisticians, whose members have entered their particular field of science after special training by a systematic course of instruction. We have our statisticians, to be sure, but they have taken up their work accidentally, and not as a profession. Men engaged in the practice of law or of medicine, or in the other learned professions, enter them only after careful preparation. Our government trains its soldiers and sailors; our colleges and higher institutions of learning fit men for various special scientific and professional labors, but we have not yet reached the advanced stage of educational work in this country which comprehends administration in its broadest terms. The European has an advantage over those engaged in statistical work in this country. Many of the leading colleges and universities of the continent make special effort to fit men to adopt statistical science as a branch of administration, or as a profession.

Körösi, Neumann-Spallart, Ernst Engel, Block, Böhmert, Mayr, Levasseur, Bodio, and their score or more of peers, may well excite our envy, but more deeply stimulate the regret that one of their number, [6] from his brilliant training and his scientific attainments, cannot present to you to-day the necessity of copying into the curricula of our American colleges the statistical features of the foreign school. For magnificent achievement the American statistician need not blush in the presence of the trained European, for, without conceit, we can place the name of our own Walker along with the names of those eminent men I have enumerated. With all the training of the schools, the European statistician lacks the grand opportunities which are open to the American. Rarely has the former been able to project and carry out a census involving points beyond the simple enumeration of the people, embracing a few inquiries relating to social conditions; such inquiries seldom extending beyond those necessary to learn the ages, places of birth, and occupations of the population. Such a census, compared with the ninth and tenth Federal enumerations of the United States, appears but child’s play.

Dr. Engel once said to me that he would gladly exchange the training of the Prussian -Bureau of Statistics for the opportunity to accomplish what could be done in our country. For with it all, he could not carry out what might be done with comparative ease under our government. The European statistician is constantly cramped by his government; the American government is constantly forced by the people. The Parliament of Great Britain will not consent to an industrial census, the proposition that the features of United States census-taking be incorporated in the British census being defeated as regularly as offered. Nor does any continental power yet dare to make extensive inquiries into the condition of the people, or [7] relative to the progress of their industries. The continental school of statisticians, therefore, is obliged to urge its government to accomplish results familiar to our people. The statistics of births, deaths, and marriages, and other purely conventional statistics, are substantially all that come to the hands of the official statisticians abroad. In this country, the popular demand for statistical information is usually far in advance of the governments, either State or Federal, and so our American statisticians have been blessed with opportunities which have given them an experience, wider in its scope, and of a far more reaching character than has attended the efforts of the continental school. Notwithstanding these opportunities which surround official statistics in this country, the need of special scientific training for men in the administration of statistical work is great indeed. This necessity I hope to show before I close.

It is not essential, in addressing an audience of this character, to spend a moment even upon definitions. The importance of statistics must be granted: the uses of the science admitted. But it may be well, before urging specifically the needs of this country for statistical training, to give a few facts relative to such work in European schools.1

1President Walker, of the Institute of Technology; Dr. Ely, of Johns Hopkins; Prof. R. M. Smith, of Columbia College; Dr. Dewey, of the Institute of Technology; and Dr. E. R. L. Gould, of Washington, have very kindly placed at my disposal information supplemental to that which was at hand.

The best school for statistical science in Europe is connected with the Prussian statistical bureau, and was established a quarter of a century ago by Dr. Ernst Engel, the late head of the bureau, probably [8] the ablest living statistician in the old world. The seminary of this statistical bureau is a training school for university graduates of the highest ability, in the art of administration, and in the conduct of statistical and other economic inquiries that are of interest and importance to the government. The practical work is done in connection with the government offices, among which advanced students are distributed with specific tasks. Systematic instruction is given by lectures, and by the seminary or laboratory method, under a general director. Government officers and university professors are engaged to give regular courses to these advanced students. It is considered one of the greatest student honors in Berlin for a university graduate to be admitted to the Statistical Seminary. One graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, a doctor of philosophy, is already under a course of instruction in the Prussian laboratory of political science.

The work of taking the Census of the Prussian population and resources is entrusted to educated men, many of them trained to scientific accuracy by long discipline in the Statistical Seminary, and by practical experience. (Circulars of Information, U. S. Bureau of Education. No. 1, 1887, by Prof. H. B. Adams.)

In this seminary there are practical exercises under the statistical bureau during the day time, with occasional excursions to public institutions, in addition to lectures held mostly in the evening. A recent programme of the seminary comprehends:

  1. Theory, technique, and encyclopedia: once a week.
  2. Statistics of population and of dwellings: once a week.
  3. Medical statistics: once a week. [9]
  4. Applied mathematical statistics: once a week.
  5. Agrarian statistics: once a week.
  6. Exercises in political economy, finance, and financial statistics: 2 hours a week.

The students assist in the work of the statistical bureau without compensation. This is a part of their training, and by it theory and practice are most successfully combined.

I believe there are courses in statistics in nearly all the universities in Germany, certainly in the more prominent institutions of that country, but there are no distinct chairs of statistics. Statistical science is considered a part of political economy, and professors of the latter science give the instruction in statistics.

The most prominent announcements for the leading European universities, for the year 1886-7, are as follows:

University of Leipzig: Professor W. Roscher lectures on agricultural statistics, this branch being a part of one course, taking one or two hours a week. One hour a week is also given to political economy and statistical exercises by Dr. K. Walker.

University of Tübingen: Prof. Gustav von Rümelin devotes three hours a week to social statistics, while Professor Lorey includes in his lectures a treatment of the statistics of forests.

University of Würzburg: Professor G. Schanz devotes four hours a week to general statistics.

University of Dorpat (a German institution in Russia): Professor Al. v. Oettingen teaches ethical statistics two hours each week.

University of Breslau: Professor W. Lexis uses one hour a week on the statistics of population.

University of Halle: Professor Conrad has a seminary of five hours a week, in which statistical subjects, among others, are carefully treated.

University of Kiel: Professor W. Seelig devotes four hours a week to general statistics, and statistics of Germany.

University of Königsberg: Professor L. Elster lectures two hours a week on the theory of statistics.

[10] University of Munich: Dr. Neuberg has a course of one to two hours a week on statistics.

University of Strasburg: Professor G. F. Knapp teaches the theory and practice of statistics three hours a week, and with Professor Brentano has a seminary two hours a week, in which, among other matters, they treat statistical subjects.

University of Prague: Professor Surnegg-Marburg teaches the statistics of European States three hours each week.

University of Vienna: Professor von Inama-Sternegg devotes two hours each week in a statistical seminary.

In addition to the university work outlined, much work is done in the technical schools, as, for instance, at the technical school in Vienna there are given regularly two courses of statistics:

First, ” General comparative statistics of European States ;” their surface, population, industries, commerce, education, etc.

Second, “Industrial statistics of European States;” methods and “technik” of industrial statistics.

These courses are given by Dr. von Brachelli, who is officially connected with the Government Bureau of Statistics.

At Dresden, Dr. Böhmert lectures at the Polytechnic on “The elements of statistics,” and has a statistical seminary. Böhmert is the director of the statistical bureau in the department of the interior. Part of the instruction is given at the bureau. Courses are also given at Zurich on the elements of statistics.

Some of the more important announcements connected with the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, of Paris, for the year 1886-7, are as follows:

  1. By Professor Levasseur, the theory of statistics, and the movement of population, one hour a week for the first quarter.
  2. By M. de Foville, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, one hour a week in the second quarter upon statistics, commerce, and statistics of foreign commerce.
  3. By Professor Pigeonneau, one exercise each week, in which he treats, among other subjects, of commercial statistics.

[11] In the programme of the University of Brussels, for 1878 and 1879, an announcement for a course of political economy and statistics twice each week, by Professor A. Orts, was made.

Something is being done in Italy, but how much I am not at present able to learn.

These courses, it will be seen, are devised for special training in the practical statistics of the countries named.

A great deal of effort has been expended in Europe through statistical congresses since 1853 to secure uniform inquiries in census-taking, and it is to be regretted that the Congresses have not accomplished the results sought. It was unfortunate that the attention of the statisticians of the world, as brought together in the congresses, was given to the form of inquiry to the exclusion of the form of presentation. In tracing the discussions and deliberations of these congresses, the absence of the intelligent treatment of the presentation of facts, even when drawn out by uniform inquiries. becomes apparent. The art of the statistician in his administrative work found but little encouragement in the long discussions on forms of inquiry, and less was accomplished by these congresses, which are not now held, than has been accomplished through training in the universities of Europe. The great statistical societies abroad have done much in stimulating statistical science, and out of these societies there has now been organized the International Statistical Institute, the first session of which was held in Rome during last month; much is to be hoped from the labors of this Institute, for the men who compose it bring both training and experience to the great task of unifying statistical inquiries [12] and presentations, so far as leading generic facts are concerned, for the great countries comprehended under the broad term, “the civilized world.” For this great array of work, the outlines of which I have briefly and imperfectly given as carried on in Europe, America has no parallel.

Our colleges are beginning to feel that they have some duty to perform, in the work of fitting men for the field of administration, and specifically in statistical science. Dr. Ely is doing something at Johns Hopkins, giving some time, in one of his courses on political economy, to the subject of statistics, explaining its theory, tracing the history of the art or science, and describing the literature of the subject. He attempts, in brief, to point out the vast importance of statistics to the student of social science and to put his student in such a position that he can practically continue his study. Johns Hopkins, as soon as circumstances will admit, will probably secure teachers of statistics and administration, in addition to its present corps of instructors.

Dr. Davis R. Dewey, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also devoting some time, in connection with his other work, to statistical science. He has two courses:

First, A course of statistics and graphic methods of illustrating statistics, in which attention is chiefly given to the uses of official statistics of the United States. Students are directed to the limitations there are in this respect, what compilations have been and are made, and to the possible reconciliation of discrepancies which appear in official reports. This course is taken in connection with a course in United States finance, and the student is trained to [13] find and use the statistics which will illustrate the points taken up, and to present them graphically.

Second, An advanced course is given in statistics of sociology, in which social, moral, and physiological statistics are considered, in short, all those facts of life which admit of mathematical determination to express the “average man.” Some of Dr. Dewey’s actual problems may serve to illustrate the practical work of his course. Samples of the problems which he gives to his students are as follows:

Are the Indians increasing or decreasing in numbers?
Criticise by illustrations the statement that the value of the products of manufacture of the United States in 1880 was $5,369,325,442.
What margin of error would you allow, if called upon to test the accuracy of the returns of population under one year of age in the Federal census returns?
Can you devise a method to determine from the census reports on population, Table XXI., which is the healthier state, Massachusetts or Connecticut?
Is it true that Massachusetts has more crime per capita than Alabama or Georgia? Can you offer any explanation or facts modifying such a statistical conclusion? Do the census reports afford information as to the increase or decrease in crime?

Perhaps the most systematic teaching of the science of statistics in America is given at Columbia College, under the direction of Professor Richmond M. Smith. He has lectured on the subject of statistical science in the Columbia College School of Political Science since the year 1882. His course is an advanced one for the students of the second or third year of that school. In the first year of the work there were but three students of statistical science; at present there are about twenty-five. Professor Smith gives them lectures two hours per week through the greater part of the year. The theoretical lectures cover a brief history of statistics; a consideration of statistical [14] methods; of the connection of statistical science with political and social science; of the attempt to establish social laws from statistical induction; the doctrine of probabilities, etc., this part of the course being based on German and French writers, principally Mayr, Engel, Wagner, Knapp, Oettingen, Quetelet, Block, and others. The practical part of the Columbia course covers the ordinary topics of statistical investigation, and the statistics are taken, as far as possible, from official publications. These latter lectures are of course comments on the tables and diagrams themselves. Wall tables are used to a certain extent, but experience has found it more convenient to lithograph the tables and diagrams, giving a copy to each student, which he can place in his note-book, and thus save the labor of copying.

From a circular of information from the Columbia College School of Political Science I find the following, relating to the teaching of statistical science:

“Statistical science: methods and results. This course is intended to furnish a basis for a social science by supplementing the historical, legal, and economic knowledge already gained, by such a knowledge of social phenomena as can be gained only by statistical observation. Under the head of statistics of population are considered: race and ethnological distinctions, nationality, density, city and country, sex, age, occupation, religion, education, births, deaths, marriages, mortality tables, emigration, etc. Under economic statistics: land, production of food, raw material, labor, wages, capital, means of transportation, shipping, prices, etc. Under the head of moral statistics are considered: statistics of suicide, vice, crime of all kinds, causes of crime, condition of criminals, repression of crime, penalties and effect of penalties, etc. Finally is considered the method of statistical observations, the value of the results obtained, the doctrine of free will, and the possibility of discovering social laws.”

There may be other instances of the teaching of statistical science in American colleges, but those given are all that have come to my knowledge. At [15] Harvard, Dr. Bushnell Hart is teaching the art of graphically presenting statistics, while at Yale and other institutions the theory and importance of statistics are incidentally impressed upon ‘the students in political economy. It will be seen, therefore, that if there is any necessity for such a course as has been cited, the necessity is being met only in slight degree.

Is there such a necessity? Speaking from experience I answer emphatically, Yes. There has not been a single day in the fourteen years that I have devoted to practical statistics that I have not felt the need, not only in myself, but in the offices where my work has been carried on, of statistical training; training not only in the sense of school training, but in the sense of that training which has come to our American statisticians only through experience. My great regret on this occasion is that I can address you with the statistical bureau only as my alma mater, but perhaps the lack I have seen and felt of a different alma mater may give force to my suggestions.

The problems which the statistician must solve, if they are solved at all, are pressing upon the world. Many chapters of political economy must be rewritten, for the study of political economy is now brought under the historical and comparative method, and statistical science constitutes the greatest auxiliary of such a method. There is so much that is false that creeps into the popular mind, which can be rectified only through the most trustworthy statistical knowledge, that the removal of apprehension alone by it creates a necessity sufficient to command the attention of college authorities. The great questions of the day, the labor question, temperance, tariff reform, all great topics, demand the auxiliary aid of [16] scientific statistics, and a thorough training is essential for their proper use. But in the first place there should be a clear understanding of what is necessary to be taught. We read many chapters on the theory and practice of statistics. What is the theory of statistics? The use of the word theory, in connection with statistical science, is to my mind unfortunate, for the word theory, when used in connection with positive information, antagonizes the public mind. When you speak of the theory of statistics, the word theory meaning speculation, the popular feeling is that theoretical statistics are not wanted, but facts. Theory may be fact; statistics may substantiate theory or controvert it. All this we know, and yet I feel that the word is used unfortunately in this connection. If I understand it correctly, the theory of statistics is simply a statement of what it is desired to accomplish by statistics.

Every branch of social science serves to explain the facts of human life. There are some facts which can be explained only by statistics. For instance, it is asserted that there is an alarming amount of illiteracy in Massachusetts. Statistical inquiry shows that by far the greater number of these illiterates are of foreign birth, so that the fault is not with the public school system, but the evil is due to a temporary cause, namely, immigration.

Again, it has been freely asserted that in the United States women of native birth do not have as many children as women of foreign birth. The Census of Massachusetts will show that although American women do have a less number of children, on the average, yet a larger number survive. Common observation would never have shown these things, or would not have shown them accurately.

[17] So everywhere statistics attempt to explain the facts of human life, which can be explained in no other way, as for instance, the effect of scarcity of food on births, on marriages, or crime; the effect of marriage laws on the frequency of divorce, etc. The theory of statistics points out where the statistical method is applicable, and what it can and cannot accomplish. In my opinion, however, it would be better to avoid the use of the word theory entirely, and adopt a concrete term like statistical science, which has three branches: collection, presentation, and analysis. Statistics is a science in its nature, and practical in its working.

The science of statistics, practically considered, comprehends the gathering of original data in the most complete and accurate manner; the tabulation of the information gathered by the most approved methods, and the presentation of the results in com- pact and easily understood tables, with the necessary text explanations. It is the application of statistics which gives them their chief popular value, and this application may, therefore, legitimately be called a part of the science of statistics. The theoretical statistician is satisfied if his truth is the result of statistical investigation, or if his theory is sustained. The practical statistician is satisfied only when the absolute truth is shown, or, if this is impossible, when the nearest approximation to it is reached. But the belief that theory must be sustained by the statistics collected, or else the statistics be condemned, is an idea which gets into the popular mind when the expression, theory of statistics, is used. I would, therefore, avoid it, and I hope that should our colleges adopt courses in statistical science, they will agree [18] upon a nomenclature which shall be expressive, easily understood, and comprehensive in its nature.

The necessity of the study of statistical science would not be so thoroughly apparent if the science was confined to the simple enumeration and presentation of things, or primitive facts, like the number of the people; to tables showing crops, exports, imports, immigration, quantities, values, valuation, and such elementary statements, involving only the skill of the arithmetician to present and deal with them. The moment the combinations essential for comparison are made, there is needed something beyond the arithmetician, for with the production of averages, percentages, and ratios, for securing correct results, there must come in play mathematical genius, and a genius in the exercise of which there should be discernible no influence from preconceived ideas. The science of statistics has been handled too often without statistical science, and without the skill of the mathematician. Many illustrations of this point involving the statistics of this country could be given.

In collating statistics relating to the cost of production, the best mathematical skill is essential, even the skill which would employ algebraic formulae. So with relation to statistics of capital invested in production. To illustrate, the question may be asked, what elements of capital are involved in the census question of “capital invested?” Is it simply the cash capital invested by the concern under consideration, or is it all the money which is used to produce a given quantity of goods? If the members of a firm con- tribute the sum of $10,000, and they have a line of discounts of $100,000, the avails of which are used in producing $200,000 worth of completed goods, what [19] is the capital invested? What is the capital invested which should be returned in the census? If a man has $5,000 invested in his business as a manufacturer, and he buys his goods on 90 days, or four months, and sells for cash, or 30 days, what is his capital invested? This question is one among many of the practical problems that arise in a statistical bureau, but which has not yet been treated scientifically. What has been the result of the reported statistics relating to capital invested? Simply that calculations, deductions, and arguments based on such statistics have been, and are, vicious, and will be until all the elements involved in the term are scientifically classified. Another illustration in point arises in connection with the presentation of divorce statistics, especially when it is desired to compare such statistics with marriages, or to make comparisons to show the progress, or the movement of divorces. Shall the number of divorces be compared with the number of marriages celebrated in the year in which the divorces are granted, or with the population, or with the number of married couples living at the time? I need not multiply illustrations. The lies of statistics are unscientific lies.

The conditions of this country necessitate knowledge as to the parent nativity of the population, features not included in any foreign census, and need not be. Such features lead to what may be called correlated statistics; for instance, where there are presented three or more facts relating to each person in the population, the facts being coordinate in their nature. In this class of work skill beyond that which belongs to the simple operations in arithmetic becomes necessary. There must be employed [20] some knowledge of statistical science beyond elementary statistical tables, or the correlations will be faulty, all the conclusions drawn from them false, and harm done to the public. While the scientific statistician does not care to reach conclusions from insufficient data, he much less desires to be misled by the unscientific use of correct data, or from data the presentation of which has been burdened with disturbing causes. The analytical work of statistical science demands the mathematical man. While this is true, it is also true that the man who casts a schedule (for instance, to comprehend the various economic facts associated with production), should have the ability to analyze the tabulated results of the answers to the inquiries borne upon the schedule. In other words, the man who casts the schedule should not only be able to foresee the work of the enumerator, or the gatherer of the answers desired, but he should foresee the actual form in which the completed facts should be presented. Furthermore, he should foresee the analysis which such facts stimulate and not only foresee the detail, but foresee in a comprehensive way the whole superstructure which grows from the foundation laid in the schedule. He should comprehend his completed report before he gathers the needed information.

How can these elements in one’s statistical education be secured? The difficulties in the way of the best statistical work are not slight. Dr. Dewey, in a recent address upon average prices, before the American Statistical Association, gave an exceedingly valuable, and a very clear explanation of the difficulties which underlie all efforts to secure average prices ranging over a period of years; he pointed out the [21] different methods of securing such averages, and I can do no better than to use Dr. Dewey’s own words, as taken from the address referred to. He says:

“There is first the ordinary ‘index method ‘ introduced by Mr. Newmarch, and continued by the Economist and Mr. Jevons. In this there is no attempt to take account of the varying importance of the commodities where prices are averaged together, but equal consideration is given to all.

“A second method is to give each commodity, where price enters into the averages, a weight proportionate to the quantity of it sold during a fixed period of time.

“In the third method account is taken of the varying importance of the commodities by regarding the part each plays in the exports and imports of a country. This system has been used by Messrs. Giffen and Mulhall. Mr. Giffen’s process in detail is to find the average value of the different articles in the exports and imports; combine these in the proportions of the different articles to the totals of the exports and imports, and then reduce the totals for a series of years to the values they would have been equivalent to had prices remained unchanged.”

This simply indicates that no statistician has yet arrived at a method for securing average prices that shall be considered absolutely correct; that is, in other words, the science of average prices has not been reached, because, if it had been, there would be but one method of securing them. There is but one multiplication table; all men agree to it, because every part of it has been demonstrated to be true. The principle of the multiplication table in statistical operations indicates that science triumphs, for no scientific conclusion is reached so long as skilled men, men of experience and of training, differ relative to methods or results.

The teaching of statistical science in our colleges involves three grand divisions:

  1. The basis of statistical science, or, as it has been generally termed in college work, the theory of statistics.
  1. The practice of statistics, which involves the preparation of inquiries, the collection and examination of the information sought, and the tabulation and presentation of results. [22]
  1. The analytical treatment of the results secured.

These three general elements become more important as the science of statistics becomes more developed; that is, while in conventional statistics, or official statistics if you prefer, meaning those which result from continuous entry of the facts connected with routine transactions, like custom house’ operations, the registration of births, deaths, and marriages, etc., these three elements may not be apparent. But when considered as regards the collection of information from original sources by special investigation through the census, through our bureaus of statistics of labor and kindred offices, and through the consular service, these three grand elements assume a vast importance, and statistical science demands that men be employed who comprehend thoroughly and clearly all the features of the three elements of the science, for the variety of facts to be collected suggests the variety of features connected with the work.

Last year I had the honor to address the American Social Science Association upon popular instruction in social science, advocating the teaching in the public schools of the elementary principles of social science, comprehending those things which are most essential in the conduct of life, in the preservation of health, and in the securing of good order. The Association discussed the practicability of teaching social science in our higher institutions of learning. The suggestion that the school and the college be utilized for propagating the science was met with but one [23] objection of any moment. This objection was that in the colleges and schools the whole time is now exhausted in teaching the branches of human knowledge already established as a part of the curricula of such schools; an excellent objection from a narrow point of view, but a thoroughly inadmissible objection from a point of view which takes in the development of the human race on the best basis, and on a high standard. It was met by the counter-statement that if there is no time in the ordinary college to teach all that the college now teaches, and devote a few hours per week to social science, and all that social science means, so far as teaching is concerned, then drop something else and introduce the social science. But nothing need be dropped in order to teach social science in the colleges and schools of the country. Now, the only objection which I anticipate to the teaching of statistics in our colleges is the same that was made to the proposition to teach social science generally in such institutions, that there is no room for the introduction of instruction in the new science. To my own mind this objection is not only trivial, but of no account whatever in the practical working of institutions of learning. Every well appointed college has its chair of political economy, and this department can be broadened sufficiently to take in statistical science, without impairing efficiency in this or any other department. If this cannot be done, then I would say to the colleges of America that the institutions which soonest grasp the progressive educational work of the day will be the most successful competitors in the race. That college which comprehends that it is essential to fit men for the best administrative duties, not only in government, but [24] in the great business enterprises which demand leaders of as high quality as those essential for a chief magistrate, will receive the patronage, the commendation, and the gratitude of the public. The college or the university which comprehends the demand of the day and institutes new forms of degrees to be conferred upon the men and women specially qualified in special science is in the van. Why should there not be a degree for sanitary science? Why should there not be a degree for social science? Doctor of Philosophy is not enough; it means nothing in popular estimation. The Doctor of Philosophy must understand various things; must be taught and thoroughly trained in the branches necessary to secure the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, but he may know nothing of other branches of human knowledge, except in the most incidental way, which are so essential to fit him for the best administrative duties. The organization of industry demands the very highest type of mind. I sometimes think that the great industrial chieftains of the world are far superior in their capacity, and in their general comprehensive ability, to the great statesmen, to the great leaders of politics, and the great lights that carry nations through crises even. The men who are the best trained, who have learned the practical work of special sciences, are the ones that are guiding the people, and so the colleges or the universities which grasp these things, introducing the teaching of statistical science along with all the other great features of social science, including the branches which bring knowledge nearest to the community itself, are the colleges which will secure success; and not only success in a pecuniary point of view, but success in that grander field of the best [25] work for the race. I urge, therefore, that our American colleges follow the example of European institutions. I would urge upon the government of the United States, and upon the government of the States, the necessity of providing by law for the admission of students that have taken scientific courses in statistics as honorary attachés of, or clerks to be employed in the practical work of, statistical offices. This is easily done without expenditure by the government, but with the very best economic results.

We take a census in the United States every ten years, but as a rule the men that are brought into the work know nothing of statistics: they should be trained in the very elementary work of census-taking and of statistical science. How much more economical for the government to keep its experienced statisticians busily employed in the interim of census- taking, even if they do no more than study forms, methods, and analyses, connected with the presentation of the facts of the preceding census. Money would be saved, results would be more thoroughly appreciated, and problems would be solved.

Our State and Federal governments should be vitally interested in the elevation of statistical work to scientific proportions; for the necessary outcome of the application of civil service principles to the conduct of all governmental affairs lies in this, that as the affairs of the people become more and more the subjects of legislative regulation or control, the necessity for the most accurate information relating to such affairs and for the scientific use of such information increases.

The extension of civil service principles must become greater and greater, and the varied demands [26] which will be created by their growth logically become more exacting, so that the possibilities within the application of such principles are therefore not ideal, but practical in their nature. And these potentialities in the near future will enhance the value of the services of trained statisticians.

The consular and diplomatic service, as well as other fields of government administration, come under this same necessity. The utilization of the consular service for original investigations creates in itself a wide reaching statistical force, and one which should be competent to exercise its statistical functions with all the accuracy that belongs to science. So government should supplement college training with practical administrative instruction, acquired through positive service in its own departments.

This appeal that statistical science be taught in our colleges comes to the Economic Association more forcibly than to any other. The beginning which has been made in this direction in this country is honorable indeed. Shall it be supplemented in the great universities and leading colleges of America? Do not think for a moment that if the teaching of statistical science be incorporated in our college courses the country will be flooded with a body of statisticians. There is enough work for every man who understands statistical science. He need not be employed by government. The most brilliant achievements of the European statisticians have been secured in a private or semi-official way. The demand will equal the supply, and the demand of the public for statistical knowledge grows more and more positive, and the supply should equal the demand.

[27] General Walker in a letter in 1874 said: “The country is hungry for information: everything of a statistical character, or even of a statistical appearance, is taken up with an eagerness that is almost pathetic; the community have not yet learned to be half skeptical and critical enough in respect to such statements.” He can add, Statistics are now taken up with an eagerness that is serious.

“Know thyself” applies to nations as well as to men; and that nation which neglects to study its own conditions, or fears to study its own conditions in the most searching and critical manner, must fall into retrogression. If there is an evil, let the statistician search it out; by searching it out and carefully analyzing statistics, he may be able to solve the problem. If there is a condition that is wrong, let the statistician bring his figures to bear upon it, only be sure that the statistician employed cares more for the truth than he does for sustaining any preconceived idea of what the solution should be. A statistician should not be an advocate, for he cannot work scientifically if he is working to an end. He must be ready to accept the results of his study, whether they suit his doctrine or not. The colleges in this connection have an important duty to perform, for they can aid in ridding the public of the statistical mechanic, the man who builds tables to order to prove a desired result. These men have lowered the standard of statistical science by the empirical use of its forces.

The statistician writes history. He writes it in the most concrete form in which history can be written, for he shows on tablets all that makes up the Commonwealth; the population with its varied [28] composition; the manifold activities which move it to advancement; the industries, the wealth, the means for learning and culture, the evils that exist, the prosperity that attends, and all the vast proportions of the comely structure we call State. Statistical science does not use the perishable methods which convey to posterity as much of the vanity of the people, as of the reality which makes the Commonwealth of to day, but the picture is set in cold, enduring, Arabic characters, which will survive through the centuries, unchanged and unchangeable by time, by accident, or by decay. It uses symbols which have unlocked to us the growth of the periods which make up our past—they are the fitting and never changing symbols by which to tell the story of our present state, that when the age we live in becomes the past of successive generations of men, the story and the picture shall be found to exist in all the just proportions in which it was set, with no glowing sentences to charm the actual, and install in its place the ideal; with no fading colors to deceive and lead to imaginative reproduction, but symbols set in dies as unvarying and as truthful in the future as in the past. The statistician chooses a quiet and may be an unlovely setting, but he knows it will endure through all time.

 

Source: Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. 3, No. 1, (March 1888), pp. 5-28.

Image Source: Library of Congress Photograph Collection. Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, 1894 Aug. 9, p. 86.

Categories
Economic History Economists

Portrait of Prof. Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres of Price Index-Number Fame

It just didn’t seem fair, posting a portrait of Paasche without giving his famous price index-number counterpart Laspeyres the benefit of a quick internet search. Sure enough, two portraits of the good Gießen professor can be found at the link to the Gießen University Archive given below.

Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres, a.k.a. Ernst Ludwig Stephan Laspeyres, was born November 28, 1834 in Halle and died August 4, 1913 in Gießen, Germany.

Image Source: Universitätsarchiv, Universität Gießen

P.S. from the same archive, a picture of his grave.

Professorengräber auf dem Alten Friedhof in Gießen

Categories
Economists ERVM

Portrait of Hermann Paasche of index number fame, 1907

Until I myself became a blogmeister, I had been blissfully unaware of the backside design choices involved in blogmeistering. Indeed there awaited an entirely new set of meanings associated with words long comfortable in my pre-blog vocabulary such as “theme”. When you set up a blog, you must first enter a virtual showroom of themes, a collection of templates that package color schemes, page widgets, plugins etc for you, the blogmeister, to fill with your postings. Being a rookie in this league, I chose what I expected would be a keep-it-simple-stupid (KISS) theme that would allow me to concentrate on providing text content. Soon I realized that having a nice graphic for each posting provides welcome visual relief and, I hoped, a memory tag to make the posting-visitor bond strong enough to outlast the session. 

Because there are so many more good (and not-so-good) economists than great (and truly important wrong) economic ideas, a serious history of economics soon falls victim to the curse of dimensionality. Portraits help me keep the names straight and to never forget that economists are indeed economics made flesh and they too were once young. Dealing primarily with defunct academic scribblers necessarily implies that most of the photographs are monochromatic which turns out to be a feature since black-and-white images fit quite well into the black-and-white-with-red-accents theme chosen for Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Given my ambition to be blogger of (mostly) new content, I figured a little search for less-iconic images and especially those close in time to the content of my postings would result in higher value-added.

One truly great source of historical images is the U.S. Library of Congress.  When I searched for “economists”, the 96th image was that below for Dr. Paasche. In my earlier research life I was deeply into economic index numbers (e.g. my 1999 comment  (beginning page 87) that follows a NBER chapter about the theory of multilateral index numbers written by Erwin Diewert and  “The DM and the Ossi Consumer: Price Indexes During Transition” published in 2012) so I was absolutely delighted to find myself looking Hermann Paasche straight in the eye for the first time. 

1907_PaascheHermann_LOC

The Hamburg photography studio of Emilie Bieber (1810-1884) was taken over by her nephew Leonard Berlin (1841-1931) in 1872.  In 1890 he opened the “E. Bieber” photography studio in Berlin. In 1897 Leonard began to go by the name Leonard Berlin-Bieber.  In that year he was also awarded the title “Photographer of the Court” by King Wilhelm II of Prussia. Having a photo portrait done at the Bieber studio was something that one just had to do. In 1911 Leonard Berlin-Bieber closed the Berlin studio and his son Emil Bieber took over the business now concentrated in Hamburg. In 1938 Emil was forced to sell the business and the family emigrated first to England then to South Africa. This particular image comes from the George Grantham Bain Collection (a collection of photographic files of an early U.S. news picture agency).

The University of Rostock where Hermann Paasche was a professor has a website Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium where you can find the following outline of his career. At the bottom is noted “died early April 1925 in Detroit while travelling in North America.”

Image Source: Library of Congress website.

Categories
Economists Michigan

Michigan. Organization of Behavioral Sciences. Report to Ford Foundation, 1954

Here an except from the University of Michigan’s Survey of the behavioral sciences, the fourth university of five participating in the Ford Foundation Project of 1953-54 on the behavioral sciences. Harvard, Chicago, Stanford and Michigan’s reports are in the public domain and available at hathitrust.org. I have been unable to locate the University of North Carolina’s report but perhaps some kind visitor to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror (attention colleagues at Duke!) can track that one down for us sometime. These reports provide a very nice set of artifact-bookends for my project on graduate economics education in the United States that I truncate around mid-twentieth century. Link to Michigan’s Economics-Pantheon here.

___________________________________

[p. 11]

THE ORGANIZATION OF
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE ACTIVITIES

At the University of Michigan there is no general administration of Behavioral Science or of Social Science as such. The teaching activities of the University are organized in a College of Literature Science and the Arts, a Graduate School, and 13 professional schools. Research and special services are carried on in each of the teaching units, and also in special bureaus, institutes and centers which are authorized for particular continuing operations and which, depending on their scope, may report to a department, a school, or to the central university administration.

Since 1934 there has been a Division of the Social Sciences1, comprised of representatives from the relevant departments and schools. Its function is primarily advisory and it has no budget or administrative responsibility. The General Committee of the Division nominates a Research Committee which advises the Board of the Graduate School on allocations for research projects in the field of social science.

The administrative units concerned with the Behavioral Sciences are described in the following sections:

1) Departments of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts
2) Professional Schools
3) Institutes and Research Agencies.

[p. 12]

DEPARTMENTS OF THE COLLEGE
OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND THE ARTS 

Anthropology

The present organization of the Department of Anthropology, in a sense a transitional one, involves a staff of 15 members of whom five hold full-time teaching appointments in the Department of Anthropology and five hold full-time appointments in the Museum of Anthropology. Of the other five, two hold joint appointments with the Department of Sociology, one with the Department of Near Eastern Studies, one with the Institute of Human Biology, and one with the English Department. These complicated administrative arrangements are the result of a long-standing and well established tradition of separation of Museum and Department, and a general overlap of research interests with other disciplines.

In 1939 the Department had a staff of three men, one of whom devoted most of his time to his duties as Director of the Museum of Anthropology and of the University Museums, while the others taught full-time. It offered an undergraduate major and an A. M. degree. Museum staff members, not including the Museum Director, were three men who devoted themselves to research and curatorial work, their chief contact with students being consultation on research topics involving Museum collections. Owing to war absences in 1944-45, the Museum staff members were called upon to participate in the regular teaching program of the Department, and shortly thereafter this practice was formalized by granting them professorial titles, although no change was made in budgetary arrangements. This growth of departmental resources made possible a considerably expanded curriculum, and it was decided to press for further expansion of staff with a view to establishing a full-fledged doctoral program. This goal was achieved in 1948.

Joint appointments, particularly in the specialized fields of social organization, culture and personality, and linguistics, materially aided the rapid staff expansion. A fairly well rounded representation of the various areas of special interest within anthropology has resulted, although the staff and administrative structure are by no means thought to have attained any final or ideal form. The development of smoothly functioning working arrangements among the units involved in anthropology is an important problem; presumably these arrangements will evolve [p. 13] in response to problem situations as they arise. No difficulties have as yet come up which are insoluble under the present organization.

Research in anthropology at Michigan reflects several currents of influence. Traditional, individual research in descriptive ethnography and culture theory is well represented by the work of White and Titiev, and in prehistoric archaeology by the Museum staff; Beardsley, Schorger, and others participate in area interdisciplinary team research through such programs as those of the Center for Japanese Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Studies; and topical research interest in the problems of kinship and social organization is represented by Aberle and Miner. There does not appear to be any strong “official” emphasis along any of these lines from the standpoint of the insider, but the outside image of Michigan research is probably still influenced by the pre-expansion situation when the archaeological work of the relatively large Museum staff was especially visible.

No well defined trend is now evident, and it seems likely that Michigan anthropological research will be as difficult to characterize sharply in ten years as it is now. Presumably the archaeological research collections of the Museum will continue to be exploited, the dominant interest of the Michigan physical anthropologists in population genetics will persist, and the various area programs will continue to operate.

 

Economics

The Department of Economics has been in the forefront of the post war development of economics in two principal and interrelated directions, increased attention to economics as part of the study of human behavior as a whole, and greater emphasis on quantitative economics and econometrics.

Five members of its staff of 17 hold joint appointments with other departments and institutes, and 10 teaching fellows and predoctoral instructors are engaged in elementary course teaching.

Student enrollment consists of about 127 undergraduate concentrates and 62 graduate students of whom about two-thirds are working at the doctoral level.

The fields of economics in which research is being carried on are:

Economic Theory: Ackley, Boulding, Dickinson, Katona, Morgan, Palmer, Suits
[p. 14]
Money and Banking: Musgrave, Watkins
Labor: Haber, Levinson
International Economics: Remer, Stolper
Public Control and Regulation: Peterson, Sharfman
Public Finance: Ford, Musgrave
Quantitative Economics, Statistics and Research Methods: Katona, Klein, Suits
Economic History: Dickinson
Interdepartmental, Interdisciplinary, Area Programs, etc.: Ackley, Boulding, Remer, Stolper, Suits

The trend at Michigan to relate the study of economics to human behavior as a whole and thus to integrate it with the problems and results of other disciplines is shown in many activities of its staff. Of particular interest is the work of George Katona on the psychological foundations of economic behavior, and Kenneth Boulding’s explorations into problems in the integration of the social sciences. Members of the economics staff participate in the interdisciplinary seminars in the Japanese, Near Eastern and Latin American area programs, and in the Metropolitan Community Seminar and the Seminar on Land Utilization.

Considerable emphasis is placed upon quantitative economics and econometrics. The number of courses in this field has been increased from the two courses in economic statistics formerly available, to include a semester’s work in mathematical economics, now required of all doctoral candidates, a year’s work in econometrics under Klein, a semester of research methods under Katona, and a continuing research seminar in quantitative economics. In addition, an increasing amount of quantitative research is being carried on in the substantive seminars. Particularly notable are the recent studies in the incidence of taxation carried out by Musgrave in his seminar on Fiscal Policy, and studies of interregional development directed by Stolper.

The location of the Survey Research Center here has greatly encouraged and facilitated the development in these two directions by providing personnel, materials and additional methodology for the conduct of quantitative research. It has stimulated graduate student interest in these problems through participation in research and in many cases through employment. The annual appointment of two post doctoral visiting economists as research associates of the Center, broadening the area over which ideas are interchanged, was made possible by Carnegie Corporation funds.

[p. 15] The Interdisciplinary Program in Mathematics and the Social Sciences and the Detroit Area Study, both established under the 1950 Ford Foundation grant, have made important contributions to mutual understanding of problems by mathematicians and social scientists. The Detroit program makes an annual sample survey of the population in that area, providing training for graduate students as well as a research facility for faculty members.

These developments have had a natural effect on the interests and work of graduate students. Five students at the doctoral level are now employed by the Survey Research Center as study directors. Five others are engaged as half-time research assistants in the research seminar in quantitative economics. One student is engaged in an independent sample survey project growing out of the interregional studies mentioned above, and two students are pursuing independent research utilizing data obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances conducted annually for the Federal Reserve Board by the Center.

Quantitative research by graduate students is limited by two factors. In the first place, the costs involved in processing quantitative data in any volume discourage such activity except where the expenses can be met by the research institute, program or seminar in which the student is participating. No free departmental funds are available for this purpose.

Secondly, the department itself has not yet overcome the “cultural lag” between its encouragement of quantitative research on the one hand and its formal doctoral program on the other. Traditionally the department has placed primary emphasis on theory rather than research. The student has been required to familiarize himself with economic theory and the institutional background of economic activity. Introductory courses in statistics and accounting have long been required as research “tools” for graduate students, but although further study has always been encouraged, no formal place in the graduate curriculum has been provided for it. The members of the Economics faculty are well aware of this contradiction and it is expected that it will be resolved in the near future.

 

Political Science2

[p. 16] Although lectures in political science were given as early as 1860 (by members of the law faculty) and courses in political institutions were found in the history department from 1870 on, a political science department as such was not established until 1910. An abortive “Institute of Political Science” had been established in 1887, but administrative difficulties caused it to disappear from the scene in a few years.

The department gradually grew in size until its faculty by 1933 numbered 12. In the post war days this number doubled, and there are now 24 members on the department staff. In the early days the department expanded by adding new courses in public law, political theory, municipal government and administration, and foreign governments. The work in public administration increased gradually from 1914, when a special curriculum was organized, until 1937 when an Institute of Public and Social Administration was created, which in turn led to a separate Institute of Public Administration in 1945. From the mid-thirties on the department has expanded primarily by the addition of staff in the fields of international relations and politics.

Today there are 1887 student enrollments in a total of 43 courses. There are 71 graduate students, and 176 undergraduate concentrates. Fifteen graduate students are in the process of writing dissertations.

The department divides its program into the following six fields of specialization: American government and constitutional law, foreign governments, political parties and public opinion, political theory, public administration, international law and relations. The staff is divided unequally in these fields, reflecting the demands of undergraduate and graduate instruction. The largest number of courses in the department, according to a recent report of its Curriculum Committee, are of the institutional-descriptive type (about 40). The political theory courses follow the traditional pattern of chronological analysis of great ideas. Two methodology courses are given each for one semester only: Scope and Method of Political Science, and Bibliography and Methods of Research. A growing interest in political behavior is indicated by three courses in this area and by the use of behavioral methods and materials in other courses.

The content and method of doctoral dissertations reflects an orientation of staff and courses toward institutional-descriptive materials. Of the 56 dissertations completed since 1947 or now being written, about one-half are legal-structural studies in American national, state or local government. Another 10 [p. 17] are in the international field, with half of them in international law. Six are traditional political theory studies. Eight can be classified strictly as behavioral and these have been written in the last two or three years.

The department has several interdisciplinary linkages, both formal and informal. Four members of its staff are involved in the Japanese Research Center, the Russian Studies Program, the Latin-American Program, and the Near Eastern Studies Program. The department regularly participates in the Metropolitan Community Seminar and the Land Use Seminar. By invitation of the government and the University of the Philippines, and supported by a government contract, it organized and operates a Public Administration Training Center in Manila. It has set up special courses in conjunction with the schools of Public Health, Forestry, and Education. Its linkages with Sociology are close on occasion. The Institute of Public Administration has had a sociologist on its staff for the past year. Political science staff and graduate students were on the staff of the Detroit Area Study during two of the three years it has been going on. The Political Behavior Program has granted a research assistantship to a Sociology graduate student for the past two years. The Phoenix Project in the Institute of Public Administration, includes a sociologist as well as economists on its staff.

The most significant behavioral developments in the department, especially from a student-training standpoint, are the Political Behavior Research Program inaugurated in 1950 with Ford funds, and the Phoenix project in public administration and legislative aspects of atomic energy control. Currently several members of the department are planning a collaborative program of research on the representative process. A program of behavioral research and training is thus seen to have a substantial and promising start. It will develop by the addition of staff members in this area and by the inclusion of more research training for graduate students, in proportion as the demonstrated achievement of the current activities earn departmental support and succeed in gaining financial support.

 

Psychology3

A major development in the Department of Psychology was undertaken in the years following 1946. Prior to the war the [p. 18] department had been small, with primary emphasis in experimental work. Walter Pillsbury retired as chairman in 1943 and during the war there was greatly restricted activity. After the war, with the establishment of a training program in clinical psychology, and with the expansion in social research, the staff was trebled and the graduate program greatly broadened.

The staff now consists of 55 members, only a few of whom are appointed full time on the teaching budget. The sum of their fractional teaching appointments is 24. The other parts of their appointments are in the Institute for Social Research, on research grants, and in clinical agencies.

The main directions of activity in graduate research and training may be conveniently considered as three; clinical, social, and general experimental. There is a certain amount of administrative separation of the three, and the students tend to group in these categories, but a deliberate effort has been made to integrate their work. Four-fifths of the work of the first graduate year is common for all students; specialization begins in the second year; after prelims many of the seminars again find all kinds of students together.

There are about 110 graduate students working toward the doctoral degree in Psychology. The number is arbitrarily limited by the admission of not more than 25 or 30 graduate students each year. They are selected from 200 or more qualified applicants. Admissions are planned so that there will be about the same number of students in clinical, social and general. Only two or three a year drop out for personal or academic reasons. The Department undertakes to find half-time positions for practically all students in research, teaching or clinical work which will contribute to their training. There are 30 appointments in the Veterans Administration, 5 to 8 in other clinical agencies, 5 on United States Public Health Service stipends, about 20 in teaching, and 10-20 on research projects. Ordinarily two students hold University fellowships and two to nine hold outside fellowships. The capricious inflexibility of this system is obvious, and it is frequently impossible to provide the job most appropriate for the student’s level and direction of training.

Active research programs are carried on in the following fields, usually with some assistance from outside grants:

Visual psychophysics: Blackwell, Kristofferson
Physiological: McCleary, Smith
Learning: Walker, Birch
[p. 19]
Motivation: Atkinson, Clark
Perception: Brown
Therapy: Bordin, Raush, Hutt, Segal
Counseling and Psychodynamics: Blum, Miller, McNeil, Allinsmith
Personality Assessment: Kelly
Mathematical Methods: Coombs, Milholland, Hays
Attitude Change: Katz, Newcomb, Peak, Rosenberg
Teaching Process: McKeachie
Industrial Human Relations: Maier
Others in Institute for Social Research

Laboratory and practicum facilities, in addition to the I.S.R., include the well equipped Vision Research Laboratory, a 10- room animal research laboratory, and a 10-room experimental laboratory in addition to a 10-room teaching laboratory, all in Mason Hall. A three-room machine and wood shop is fully equipped. In the Bureau of Psychological Services is a Psychological Clinic directed by Frederick Wyatt, and a Student Counseling Service directed by Edward Bordin, both extensively used for training. Hospital facilities are favorable for training in Pediatrics, less so in Psychiatry.

One of the continuing objectives of the Department of Psychology is to realize a reasonable balance of strengths. Before the war the emphasis was almost exclusively on laboratory experimental work. With the advent of the Veterans Administration program in 1946 the emphasis became heavily clinical. The establishment in 1948 of the Institute for Social Research created an immediate emphasis in social psychology. Only in the last year or two has general experimental psychology been strengthened by new appointments, new laboratories, and outside research grants to the point where reasonable balance has been attained.

 

Sociology

Courses in sociology have been taught at Michigan for about 60 years. During half of that period the leading figure was Charles Horton Cooley, an outstanding exponent of the psychological approach to the analysis of social life. In 1930, after Cooley’s death, sociology became a separate department, under the leadership of Roderick D. McKenzie. McKenzie’s interest in human ecology was a counterfoil to the Cooley tradition. Both approaches, developed through the years, are reflected in the current work of the department.

[p. 20] The major areas of research and graduate training concern four fields: Social Organization, Human Ecology and Population, Social Psychology, and Methodology. A series of substantive courses and seminars are offered in each of these areas. Some of the principal research areas in which graduate and faculty research go on within each of these general fields are as follows:

Social Organization

Social Stratification: Landecker, Lenski, Swanson
Political Sociology: Janowitz, Campbell
Social Integration: Angell
Industrial Sociology: Carr
Comparative Community Structure: Miner
Family and Kinship: Aberle, Blood
International Social Organization: Angell and Landecker
Collective Behavior: Swanson, Aberle
The Urban Community: Hawley, Janowitz, Freedman
Religious Institutions: Lenski
The Dynamics of Small Groups: Lippitt, Swanson

Population and Human Ecology

Population Distribution: Hawley, Kish
Fertility Trends: Freedman
Migration: Freedman, Hawley

Social Psychology (see next section of report)

Methodology

Survey Research Techniques: Likert, Campbell, Kish
Group Dynamics Methodology: Lippitt
General Quantitative Methodology: Williams

The department has major responsibilities in undergraduate teaching. In the fall semester of 1953 there were 1708 course elections in sociology. Most of the undergraduate elections are in introductory courses. In the fall of 1953 there were 60 undergraduate concentrates in sociology and 24 concentrates in pre-professional social work. There were approximately 50 graduate students.

Many ties with other University units are maintained. Two staff members have joint appointments in anthropology; three have joint appointments in psychology; and four are on the staff of the Institute for Social Research. Twelve of the 24 graduate courses offered for credit during the current semester are also listed by at least one other department.

[p. 21] There has been considerable revision in the graduate curriculum during the post-war period. Outstanding trends have been increasing emphasis on (1) systematic theory, oriented to the empirical testing of hypotheses and (2) training in and utilization of new methodological developments for empirical work. Illustrative of the first trend is a seminar in Theories of Social Organization required of all doctoral candidates. Illustrative of the second trend is the required participation in the Detroit Area Study of all first year graduate students.

At the present time approximately one-third of all graduate students have their primary orientation in the field of Human Ecology and Population; the remaining two-thirds in Social Organization. Students whose major orientation is in Social Psychology generally enter the special doctoral program in that field. The department now has rather large groups of students trained for work in these three fields.

Continuing research programs involving students and faculty in these areas compose the chief development needs felt at the present time.4 These needs are reflected in part in the proposal for a social organization research program, presented elsewhere in this report. The Department assigns the highest priority to the continuation of the Detroit Area Study as a central focus for its training of first year graduate students.

Work in the area of Social Psychology is carried on mainly through the special doctoral program in Social Psychology and is described in the next section of the report. The Sociology Department makes a special contribution to this program in its emphasis on the relationship between aspects of social organization and psychological variables. Illustrative of this contribution are courses in mass communication, personality and culture, and collective behavior. Eight members of the department do teaching directly related to the social psychology program.

 

Doctoral Program in Social Psychology

In 1947 the Departments of Psychology and Sociology, wishing to avoid overlapping and competition in the field of common interest, and hoping to provide better advanced training jointly than either could provide alone, were authorized by the Graduate School to create the jointly sponsored Doctoral Program in Social Psychology. Its policies are determined by an Executive [p. 22] Committee appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School from the faculties of the two departments. The chairman, Theodore Newcomb, holds a professorship in each department.

The Program has its own requirements for admission, for courses of study and examination, and recommends candidates for the Ph.D. degree. It has no teaching staff of its own and there is no formal faculty status labeled “Social Psychology.” Instruction is provided by staff members from the Sociology and Psychology Departments. There are about 20 staff members holding graduate faculty status in one or both of the two departments who regard social psychology as their primary specialization and who give instruction in this area. Several of these people hold full-time teaching appointments; most of the rest hold primary appointments in the Institute for Social Research, characteristically teaching a one-semester course each year.

Because social psychology draws heavily upon both sociology and psychology, early specialization is discouraged. Admission to the Social Psychology Program presupposes at least one year of graduate work in one of the two “parent” fields. Certain advanced theory courses in the field which was not the student’s previous specialty are required in the program. Another important way in which students are kept in close touch with the parent fields is through the preliminary examinations; two of the four which are required in Social Psychology (Personality, Social Organization) are the same as those taken in Psychology and Sociology respectively.

Curricular requirements include a series of units in theory (mostly in small seminars), one year of advanced statistics, and three methods courses, two of which involve active experience in gathering and analyzing data. A paid assistantship, most commonly in research, less often in teaching, is found for every student for at least one of his years in the Program. Many of these are provided by the Institute for Social Research.

Only about ten students are admitted to the Program each year, roughly half from each of the two parent fields, out of a much larger number who apply. Very few of them have been Michigan undergraduates, but about half have begun their graduate study here. One advantage of selecting among applicants who have already completed a year of graduate work is that mortality is very small. The nine or ten Ph.D’s granted each year make this Program the fourth largest in the University.

Of the 35 persons who completed their degrees during the Program’s first four years, more than half now hold full-time or part-time research positions; the next largest number (about [p. 23] one-quarter) have academic teaching positions. There has been no greater difficulty in finding suitable positions for these people — perhaps less — than for Ph.D’s in Psychology or Sociology.

 

PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS

The University’s constituent schools have strength and considerable autonomy. In addition to the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies there are 13 professional schools: Architecture and Design, Business Administration5, Dentistry, Education, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Music, Natural Resources6, Pharmacy, Public Health and Social Work. The Deans of the various schools meet together at the Deans’ Conference—an important agency in the formation of overall University policies. The major part of this report is concerned with activities centered in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and in the School of Graduate Studies. However, every professional school in the University also has certain activities with a behavioral science aspect. A special study of these activities is reported in Chapter X.

 

INSTITUTES AND RESEARCH AGENCIES

Institute for Social Research7

The Institute for Social Research, consisting of the Survey Research Center and the Research Center for Group Dynamics, [p. 24] was established by Regents’ action in 1948. It is organized on a University-wide basis, administratively independent of the teaching departments and schools, but closely allied with many of them through research, teaching, and professional interests. The Board of Regents specified that “the Institute shall be under the direction of a Director (Dr. Rensis Likert) appointed by the Board of Regents on recommendation by the President and assisted by an Executive Committee.” It provided further that “the Executive Committee shall be responsible for the determination of general policies regarding the nature and scope of the activities of the Institute…” In keeping with the broad relevance of the Institute’s activities, members of the Executive Committee have been drawn from various schools of the University.

From the time of its establishment the Institute has conceived its objective as having four main aspects: (1) the conduct of fundamental research on a variety of problems of both practical and theoretical significance, (2) the dissemination of research results in ways that maximize the usefulness of the research to other scientists and to the public at large, (3) the development of behavioral science through the training of research people and the provision of assistance and consultation to researchers at Michigan and elsewhere, and (4) the development of improved methods for social research.

The Institute conducts a broad program of quantitative research on economic and political behavior, social organization and leadership, group functioning, human relations, the process of planned and unplanned change, and the effects of group membership on individual motivation and adjustment. The research undertaken employs recently developed techniques of sampling, interviewing, quantification of verbal materials, observation and quantification of group functioning, and the experimental control and manipulation of variables determining the phenomena under investigation.

The Institute contributes to graduate training through participation in formal teaching and by providing opportunities for graduate students to take part in ongoing research projects. During the year 1953-54 eighteen members of the Institute staff held joint appointments with seven teaching departments or schools, and taught twenty-five courses. Ordinarily about forty graduate students hold appointments in the Institute, and many of these complete doctoral dissertations in conjunction with this employment.

[p. 25] The research of the Institute is administered within the two major Centers in a number of program areas under the supervision of senior professional staff members. This senior staff consists, in the Survey Research Center, of Angus Campbell, Director, and Charles F. Cannell, Robert L. Kahn, George Katona, Leslie Kish, and Stephen Withey. In the Research Center for Group Dynamics it is composed of Dorwin Cartwright, Director, and John R. P. French, Jr., Ronald Lippitt, and Alvin Zander. The regular staff of the Institute consists of about fifty research scientists, a central clerical and administrative staff of about sixty persons, and a staff of part-time field interviewers located throughout the country numbering over two hundred.

The major portion of the Institute’s financial support comes through research contracts with governmental agencies, private business firms, and professional organizations/ and through grants from research supporting foundations. The Institute during recent years has operated on a budget of approximately $800,000 per year.

 

Institute of Human Biology8

The Institute of Human Biology is a research unit of the University devoted to “the discovery of those fundamental principles of biology which may be of importance for man and the application of biological principles to human affairs.” It is supported in part by general funds of the University and in part by grants from outside sources. Its regular scientific staff of 16, supplemented by 12 other research associates or collaborators, is organized around specific research projects as research teams.

Certain Institute projects have directly significant implications for behavioral science. The Heredity Clinic functions as an outpatient clinic for the University Hospital, giving advice to referred patients on medical problems of hereditary origin and conducting research on the genetics of various defects. The Community Dynamics section conducts ecological studies with particular emphasis on communities in which man is a conspicuous member. The Assortative Mating Study is investigating the effects on the heredity of a city population which may be produced by the tendency of persons with similar traits to marry [p. 26] more or less frequently than would be expected by chance. The Hereditary Abilities Study is an elaborate investigation of human heredity using the method of comparison of identical twin, fraternal twin, and sibling pairs on a large number of psychological, bio-chemical and anthropometric variables.

 

Institute for Human Adjustment

The Institute for Human Adjustment was established by Regents’ action in 1937, its purpose being “to discover means of applying the findings of science to problems of human behavior, to train professional workers, to disseminate new information and techniques among professional workers, and as far as staff, funds, and selection of problems permit, to perform distinct social services. The actual program of the Institute is carried out through five operating units, each administratively responsible to Dean Ralph Sawyer of the Graduate School who serves also as Director of the Institute.

(1) The Division of Gerontology, Wilma Donahue, Director, engages in research in the psychosocial aspects of aging; offers educational programs for older adults in conjunction with communities, business, and industry; assists in the training of professional and volunteer workers through institutes, workshops, conferences, and publications; and serves as a consultation and information center about the problems of aging.

(2) The Fresh Air Camp, Edward Slezak, Director, provides courses in sociology, education and social work, experience in organizing group programs with children, and opportunity for systematic, supervised observation of child behavior.

(3) The Social Science Research Project, Amos Hawley, Director, is a facility for giving students of the social sciences actual field experience in research. The laboratory is the metropolitan community of Flint.

(4) The Speech Clinic, Harlan Bloomer, Director, provides opportunity for the observation, diagnosis, and treatment of all types of speech disorders, for experience in the rehabilitation of persons with hearing loss, and for research in speech pathology.

(5) The Bureau of Psychological Services, E. Lowell Kelly, Director, carries out its program through four divisions as follows:

[p. 27]
(a) Evaluation and Examining (E. J. Furst, Chief) is responsible for all university testing programs and through consultation is of service to individual staff members as well as schools and departments in improving programs of student evaluation.

(b) Student Counseling (E. S. Bordin, Chief) is designed to help students in solving their problems of educational, vocational and social adjustment.

(c) Reading Improvement (Donald Smith, Chief) provides noncredit training in reading speed and comprehension.

(d) Psychological Clinic (Frederick Wyatt, Chief) serves the general public and is especially interested in the early identification and treatment of psychological problems in the family.

Most of the units of the Institute are affiliated directly or indirectly with one or more of the teaching units of the University, and have planned their programs to contribute to the training of specialists in the fields of human adjustment as well as to provide services to individuals. Financial support for the several programs is derived from endowments of the Horace H. and Mary A. Rackham Funds, from general funds, private contributions and fees for services. In general, the funds available from these combined sources are not sufficient to provide any substantial research support in addition to the service and training functions.

 

Museums

One unit of the University Museums, the Museum of Anthropology, is concerned with social science. It is administratively distinct from the Department of Anthropology, although its curatorial staff hold academic appointments and ranks in the Department and teach two or three courses each year.

The scientific staff of the Museum consists of a director and three curators who are responsible for the collections of the Museum and who conduct research in addition to their teaching. They act only in an advisory capacity with regard to the exhibits of the Museum which are installed and maintained by a special department. The research activities of the Museum curators are in the fields of archaeology and ethnobotany and hence do not fall within a strict definition of behavioral science.

Two series of publications are issued by the Museum; any topic within the general field of anthropology is acceptable for these publications and several members of the Department staff [p. 28] have used this outlet for publications in behavioral science.9 The Museum maintains an anthropological library which is used by students and the staff of the Department.

 

The Institute of Public Administration10

The Institute of Public Administration integrates instruction, research, and service in the field of public administration. The major instructional emphasis of the Institute is its full-time graduate program for people who wish to enter the public service. The Institute also develops inservice training courses for persons already employed in public positions. Through its Bureau of Government, the Institute undertakes a governmental research program and provides technical advice and assistance on problems of local, state, and national government.

The graduate program in public administration is conceived as a training course for administrative generalists. The positions which graduates are likely to fill are those which involve staff assistance to key administrators, administrative research and procedures analysis, or personnel and fiscal management. The curriculum in public administration leads to the degree of Master of Public Administration and utilizes courses throughout the University.

The Bureau of Government is the research and public service unit of the Institute of Public Administration. One of the oldest organizations in this country devoted to governmental research, the Bureau of Government was established in 1914 as a center of information on government. Its activities now include (1) a program of research on governmental problems, (2) bulletins and pamphlets based on research findings, (3) an information service on public problems which may be used by any citizen or governmental agency, and (4) the research training of the graduate students holding research assistantships in the Institute of Public Administration.

[p. 29] Recent research publications11 have dealt with career attitudes of the personnel of a federal agency, the use of admissions and income taxes by municipalities, and the public personnel activities of professional and technical associations. Problems outside Michigan are being examined in current research on civil-military leadership and an analysis of recent changes in state constitutions. Research now being done on Michigan problems concerns highway finance, elections, and the preparation of an assessors manual to be used by all the assessors in the state.

The Bureau is undertaking a study of “Public Administration Aspects of the Atomic Energy Program,” with a special staff of research associates and assistants, under a grant from the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project.

The Institute of Public Administration, in cooperation with the University of the Philippines and the Foreign Operations Administration of the Federal Government, is now engaged in the operation of a new Institute in Manila, Philippine Islands. Under the terms of the agreement the initial personnel of the Philippine Institute are supplied by the University of Michigan, and the University of the Philippines will gradually assume complete direction. Financial support is provided jointly by the Foreign Operations Administration and the Philippine government.

 

Area Research and Training Programs

Area research and training programs at the University of Michigan include the Program in Far Eastern Studies, the Center for Japanese Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

As the title indicates, the program in Near Eastern Studies is organized as a full department offering a concentration program to undergraduates and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees to graduate students and having an independent staff and course list. Its basic program consists primarily of historical and linguistic training, but a close association with other departments is maintained and students are expected to develop skills in traditional disciplines. Interdisciplinary field training sessions in the Near East are held in alternate years under the guidance of two faculty members. These sessions last for a [p. 30] full year and are flexible in organization to permit the student to specialize in his particular interest.

The remaining area programs are staffed by members of various departments, and the listed courses are compilations from the offerings of those departments. Undergraduate concentration is permitted only in the Program in Far Eastern Studies. All three offer the M.A. degree and some students preparing for business or government service stop there; students continuing in graduate school transfer to one of the regular departments for the Ph.D. degree.

The Center for Japanese Studies12 maintains a special library on the campus, a field station at Okayama in Japan, and has an extensive publication program for the research of faculty and students.13

The activities of the area programs are by no means confined to the behavioral sciences. All have literary and historical interests, and elementary linguistic training is an important phase of the student’s training. Behavioral science is fostered however; community studies, for example are a characteristic activity, and the integrated multidisciplinary approach is well exemplified in the faculty seminar conducted in each program.

 

FACILITIES AND SERVICE AGENCIES

Statistical Services

The University has a variety of statistical facilities located in a number of different units.

A major facility is the Tabulating Service which is well equipped with IBM machines. These machines are available to those research projects having budgets adequate to meet the service charges. The bulk of the work done by Tabulating Service is for the Registrar’s Office and the Business Office. A significant portion is devoted to tabulations for the Institute for Social Research. Only a small part is for other research projects on the campus. In addition to the customary IBM equipment, the Tabulating Service has a 602A Calculating Punch which is used a great deal. In the spring of 1952 an IBM Card Programmed Electronic Calculator (CPC) was acquired on a trial [p. 31] basis, but there has been insufficient demand from contract research to meet the full costs of this relatively expensive machine.

The Statistical Research Laboratory exists for the express purpose of assisting faculty members and graduate students with their individual statistical problems. The laboratory maintains a small but fairly complete IBM installation (including a 602A Calculating Punch). Automatic desk calculators are also available. Most of this equipment may be used without charge provided the use is for pure, (unsponsored) research, such as doctoral dissertations.

Small IBM installations, consisting of little more than a punch and sorter, are located in other units of the University. Of major relevance to behavioral science research are those in the Institute for Social Research and in the School of Public Health.

High speed, large capacity automatic computing machines are available at the Willow Run Research Center. These are of both the analog and digital types. These facilities appear to be capable of handling statistical problems as complex as behavioral scientists are likely to encounter for some time. They are primarily used at the present time by those conducting research in engineering, natural sciences, and mathematics.

Recently a group of staff members closely associated with the various statistical services of the University submitted an unofficial report to the administrative authorities urging that steps be taken toward establishing a centralized facility for both training and research in all aspects of computation, and it is hoped that the development of the North Campus will include such a computation center more readily available to all interested University personnel.

 

Photographic Services

The University has an adequate and efficient Photographic Service, equipped to handle a wide variety of work in the field of photography. It is prepared to produce slides of all sizes in black and white or color, film strips, motion pictures, and prints. It does photomacography and photomicography. It also does a large volume of photo-offset work.

The Photographic Service has a photostating section which is equipped to handle many kinds of duplicating processes. Its Ozalid facilities are used extensively for reproducing transcripts and theses. Its map service may be used for photographing maps and modifying their scale.

[p. 32] These services are available at cost to anyone connected with the University. At the present time 11 people are engaged in the work of the Photographic Service.

 

Publication Facilities

The University has very limited facilities for scholarly publication. Some funds are regularly available from the University budget for publications, but only a very small portion of this sum is available to the behavioral sciences. Editorial facilities are so limited that few scholars are willing to endure the publication lag involved in obtaining editorial help. The Institute for Social Research has employed a full-time editor to facilitate its own publications.

The University of Michigan Press, organized in 1930, is currently undergoing study and reorganization and there is widespread hope that it will become a more significant and effective agency in Michigan scholarship.

 

The Library

The University has a large library with a competent and efficient staff. Lack of sufficient space, however, has operated to reduce the efficiency of library service. The University General Library Building is badly overcrowded. Many acquisitions of research materials cannot be made easily available because of inadequate shelves and files. Lack of space has also led to an excessive dispersion of materials in numerous special collections housed in various buildings about the campus. The groupings of materials at separate locations has not always been functional from the point of view of the behavioral scientist with an interdisciplinary interest. The University administration regards the improvement of library facilities as a first priority in general development plans, and important steps are now being taken to relieve the overcrowding by the construction of a stack building on the North Campus and of the Kresge Medical Library building.

 

Audio-Visual Education Center

The University has a well-equipped Audio-Visual Education Center, with a large collection of sixteen-millimeter sound and silent motion pictures, filmstrips, tape recordings, and art reproductions. It also is prepared to produce a variety of audio-visual materials and to provide consultation on the use of audio-visual [p. 33] materials. The staff of the Center offer graduate and undergraduate courses in audio-visual methods in the School of Education and in the Extension Service. Instructors in schools and departments on the campus may obtain materials from the Center without charge for instructional purposes. Projection service is also available without charge for any regularly scheduled University class.

 

GENERAL LEVEL OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE ACTIVITY

In order to bring together the relevant data about the departments the following table has been prepared. These data are for the year 1953-54. They are provided for confidential use and should not be published in any form. Figures on numbers of students and on class enrollments are particularly difficult to use in comparisons between universities because of the differences in methods of calculation.

1954_Michigan_BehSciencesTable

 

[NOTES]

 

  1. Appendix item 5; The Division of the Social Sciences: Reprinted from “The University of Michigan, An Encyclopedia Survey” Ann Arbor, Univ. Mich. Press, 1942, Vol. I, pp 304-306. Appendix item 6; List of Members, General Committee of the Division of the Social Sciences, University of Michigan, 1953-54. Appendix item 7; News Letters of the Division of Social Sciences, University of Michigan, April, 1950, June, 1952, January, 1953, May, 1953. Appendix item 8; List of Faculty Members in the Social Sciences, University of Michigan, 1953.
  2. Appendix item 9; The Department of Political Science. Reprinted from “The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedia Survey” Ann Arbor, Univ. Mich. Press, Part IV, 1944, pp 702-708.
  3. Appendix item 10; The Department of Psychology, Reprinted from “The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedia Survey” Ann Arbor, Univ. Mich. Press, Part IV, 1944, pp 708-714.
  4. Appendix item 11; Suggestions to the Dean and Executive Committee from the Department of Sociology on the Development Council Request.
  5. Appendix item 12; Publications, School of Business Administration, Bureau of Business Research, Bureau of Industrial Relations, Univ. of Michigan, 1953.
  6. Appendix item 13; Dept. of Conservation: The First Three Years (1950-1953) Univ. of Mich. School of Natural Resources. Appendix item 14; The School of Natural Resources and the Social Sciences, 1951.
  7. Appendix item 15; Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Univ. of Mich., 1952. Appendix item 16; Executive Committee and Staff of the Institute for Social Research, 1953. Appendix item 17; Publications of the Institute for Social Research, September, 1952 through November, 1953.
  8. Appendix item 18; Institute of Human Biology, Univ. of Mich. Appendix item 19; Publications, Institute of Human Biology, March 1, 1953.
  9. Culture and Agriculture by Horace M. Miner, Occasional Contributions from the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan, No. 14, 1949; Araucanian Culture in Transition by Mischa Titiev, Occasional Contributions from the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan, No. 15, 1951; Spanish-Guarani Relations in Early Colonial Paraguay by Elman R. Service, Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 9, 1954.
  10. Appendix item 20; Institute of Public Administration, 1954- 55 Announcement, University of Michigan, Official Publication.
  11. Appendix item 21; Publications. Bureau of Government, Institute of Public Administration, February, 1953.
  12. Appendix item 22; Center for Japanese Studies, Announcement, June 11, 1954.
  13. Appendix item 23; Publications, Center for Japanese Studies and Near Eastern Studies, 1953.

 

Source: University of Michigan. Survey of the Behavioral Sciences. Report of the Faculty Committee and Report of the Visiting Committee. Ann Arbor, Michigan: July 1, 1954.

 

Categories
Economists Stanford

History of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. From Report to Ford Foundation, 1954

Having most recently posted brief histories of the behavioral sciences as reported by Harvard and Chicago to a larger Ford Foundation Project that was completed 1953-4, I simply couldn’t resist going the extra mile to add the corresponding chapter for Stanford University’s contribution to the project here. I have added boldface to highlight economics-specific information for those of you historians of economics in a hurry.

________________________________

[p. 6]

Chapter 3
The Development of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford

I. PRIOR TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

A. Teaching. When instruction at the University began, in 1891, there were at Stanford only three departments—History, Psychology, and Economics and Social Science—embracing the field of the behavioral sciences. The last of these had three divisions: I. Political Economy, Statistics and Finance; II. Sociology; and III. Political Science. Thus all the present behavioral science departments except Journalism were present in some form or other from the very start. The Economics Department retained its conglomerate character as the haven of incipient departments until the Second World War.

In the next year, 1892, there were added two new departments — Education and Law — which for a period of years were closely related to the original three. The Department of Law was not conceived on a merely vocational basis, but listed among its “ultimate aims” the furnishing of “such instruction in the elementary principles of Anglo-American law as may properly form a part of the education of an American citizen”; the furnishing of “such instruction in commercial law as may be adapted to the needs of those who intend to become merchants, bankers, brokers, etc. or to follow other lines of business”; the providing “for students intending to enter the public service, adequate instruction in public and international law”; and the furnishing “to students of political and social science, training in special branches of law related to such subjects”.1 The Department of Education in its very first year listed at least one course, “Studies on Children”, that was [p. 7] substantially a psychology course, and over the many succeeding years such courses were increased in number and scope as the Department developed into a School.

The “charter members” of the Stanford faculty in the behavioral sciences included at least two eminent figures. Andrew Dickson White, who had been President of Cornell from 1866-1885 and Minister to Germany from 1879-1881, was the first Professor of History. His service at Stanford was interrupted from 1892-1894 while he was President Cleveland’s Minister to Russia and in 1896 while he served on the Venezuelan Commission. The first Professor of Law was Benjamin Harrison, who came to his chair at Stanford immediately on taking his leave of the Presidency of the United States in 1893. The original Professor of Psychology, Frank Angell, continued in his chair until 1921 and was the last of the “charter” faculty in the behavioral sciences to retire. Amos Griswold Warner, first Professor of Economics, had been Superintendent of Charities in Washington, D. C. The stamp of his influence was reflected in the curriculum for most of the years following until the Second World War, particularly in the emphasis on social institutions, on reform and remedial legislation, and on charities and humanitarianism.

Stanford was coeducational from the start; in fact, the first person awarded the Ph.D. degree in the behavioral sciences was a woman, Mary Roberts Smith, who received her degree in Sociology in the year 1896. The first doctorate in any field had been awarded two years before in Geology. In the very first academic year, nine behavioral science degrees were awarded, 8 in History and 1 in Economics and Social Science. There were 63 student majors in the behavioral sciences that year—1 in Psychology, 49 in History, and 13 in Economics and Social Science. At the second commencement 4 students of History and 1 in Economics and Social Science were granted master’s degrees, the first in the departments’ history. The first class to complete four years’ residence, 1894-95, graduated 31 in behavioral sciences: [p. 8] 20 A.B.’s and 1 M.A. in History, 6 A.B.’s in Economics and Social Science, and 4 A.B.’s in Law.

The curriculum of the first year, especially in History and in Economics and Social Science, reflected the major concerns and horizons of that age. The Psychology Department offered only two courses, Elementary and Advanced Psychology. The History Department offered courses in Greek, Roman, and Medieval History, the History of the Christian Church, of the English Constitution, of the French Revolution, of the Pacific Slope, and American Political History — a historical diet confined largely to the history of Western Europe and Anglo-America. The History Department listed three courses for graduate students with this explanation: “The courses offered to graduate students are especially designed to afford a training in methods of historical research, through the use of original materials. The results of such investigations are presented in the seminary, to which these courses are tributary. No attempt, however, is made sharply to separate the undergraduate from the graduate department. Graduates will often find it to their advantage to take courses designated for undergraduates; while undergraduates with adequate preparation may, by invitation of the professor, be admitted to courses primarily designed for graduates.”2 The problem of graduate courses has, it can be seen, been with us from the beginning. The fuzziness of disciplinary lines is reflected in the first list of courses in the Department of Economics and Social Science. As a matter of interest it is reproduced here.

  1. Principles of Political Economy. Elementary course.
  2. Advanced Economic Theory: Bimetallism, Railway Transportation, etc.
  3. A History of Tariff Legislation in the United States.
  4. Taxation and Finance.
  5. Statistics: History, Theory, and Technique.
  6. [p. 9] Social Science: with special reference to Public Charities and the Management of Penal Institutions.
  7. A Study of Industrial Corporations.
  8. A History of Agriculture and Prices.
  9. Commercial Relations of the United States.
  10. History of Economic Theories.
  11. Civil Service Reform in England and the United States.
  12. Sociology
  13. Land and Land Tenure. The Australian System of Registration.
  14. Method in Domestic Consumption.
  15. Communism and Socialism.
  16. Co-operation: Its History and its Influence.
  17. A History of Industry, including Trade Unions, Guilds, Factory Systems, Strikes, Arbitration, Labor Organizations, etc.
  18. Municipal Administration: the Natural Monopolies, Police, Taxation, etc.
  19. Railroad Management: A Course offered in cooperation with the Engineering Department.
  20. City and State Politics.
  21. A History of Estates and Land Tenure in California.
  22. Recent Social Reform.

 

There were many changes during the University’s first fifty years. One of the early changes occurred in 1899 in the Department of Law. In that year the departmental objective was redefined: “This Department offers such courses in Law as are usually given in professional law schools.”3 in that year a three-year program leading to the Bachelor of Laws degree was inaugurated, and the A.B. in law was soon thereafter abandoned.

The changing names of the Department originally called Economics and Social Science reflect its changes in personnel and curriculum. Sociology courses waxed and waned several times in its history. Political Science ran a more even course, but it also virtually disappeared in the years from 1902 until 1908. The following table summarizes the development of this department.

Department Title:   Years

Department of Economics and Social Science:   1891-1894
Department of Economics and Sociology:   1895-1901
Department of Economics and Social Science:   1902-1911
[p. 10]
Department of Economics:   1912-1914
Department of Economics and Political Science:   1915-1918
Department of Economics:   1919 – date
Department of Political Science:   1919 – date
Division of Sociology, Department of Economics:   1926 through 1940

While the Department of Psychology expanded very slowly in its first thirty years under Professor Angell, the psychology offering in the Department of Education4 flourished in the earlier years (1897-1903) under Professor Edwin Diller Starbuck and later (1910-1921) under Professor Lewis Madison Terman. On Professor Angell’s retirement in 1921, President Wilbur designated Professor Terman head of the Department of Psychology, after which date the department grew rapidly in personnel, in curriculum, and in enrollment. Whereas in the preceding years the psychology curriculum in the Department of Education had rivaled that of the department proper in every respect, thereafter the Psychology Department was dominant.

One of the present behavioral sciences originated at Stanford in the humanities curriculum. In 1908 the Department of English Literature and Rhetoric announced that “students preparing for journalism may substitute for the more advanced courses in literature, courses in Advanced Composition, History, Economics and Social Science.”5 In 1910 Everett Wallace Smith gave a course in News Writing in this department. In 1917 Journalism became a sub-division of the Department of English. It became the Division of Journalism in 1920, and in 1924 the Division was transferred from the Department of English to the jurisdiction of the newly organized School of Social Sciences.6

[p. 11] In the years following upon the First World War there were two major additions to the behavioral science resources of Stanford, both deriving from the interests and activities of her most celebrated alumnus, Herbert Hoover. These were, of course, the Food Research Institute established in 1921 and the Hoover War Library established in 1924. “The Food Research Institute is organized under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for the purpose of studying the production, distribution, and consumption of food,” declared the Annual Register of 1922. “The Hoover War Library is a collection of materials for research in the causes, conduct, and results of the Great War, covering also the period of reconstruction since the end of the war. These materials are of all kinds and from all the nations of the world, whether belligerent or neutral, but special efforts have been made to secure those which will be useful in research along the lines of non-military history and on social, economic, and governmental problems.”7

There was also expansion in this post-war period in the direction of a required course for freshmen not intent upon a behavioral science major. In 1923, Professor Edgar Eugene Robinson of the History Department was made director of an interdisciplinary program in Citizenship. It consisted of “a general introductory course required of all students in their first year. Designed to present the salient features in the bases and background of present-day society; to consider the place of education in modern life and the political equipment of the citizen; and to examine in detail the fundamental political, social, and economic problems of the American people.”8 Lectures were given by professors in such fields as History, Geology, Law, Philosophy, Political Science, Mechanical Engineering, Education, and Psychology. These were supplemented by smaller discussion groups. In 1935 [p. 12] Citizenship gave way to the History of Western Civilization under the jurisdiction of the Department of History, by this time headed by Professor Robinson, as the course required of all freshmen. It retained the technique of combining lectures with discussion sessions.

One may perhaps summarize the growth of the faculty over the University’s first fifty years by citing some of the better-known names among them. The Department of History included such regular members as Max Farrand, Ralph Haswell Lutz, Edward Maslin Hulme, Thomas Andrew Bailey, and George Vernadsky, and such visitors as Carl Lotus Becker, Guy Stanton Ford, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and Carlton J. H. Hayes. The Department of Psychology had Walter R. Miles, Lewis Madison Terman, Calvin B. Stone, and Ernest Hilgard as members, and Karl Buhler, Albert Edward Michotte, Kurt Lewin, and Edwin G. Boring as visitors. The Economics Department claimed among its number Thorstein Veblen, Alvin Saunders Johnson, Harley Leist Lutz, Bernard Francis Haley, Joseph Stancliffe Davis, and Theodore Harding Boggs, and among its visitors Frank Albert Fetter, John Maurice Clark, Charles Jesse Bullock, Alvin Harvey Hansen, Jacob Viner, and Fritz Machlup. The political scientists included such permanent professors as Westel Woodbury Willoughby, Burt Estes Howard, Victor J. West, Edward Angell Cottrell, Thomas Swain Barclay, Hugh McDowall Clokie, and Charles Fairman, and such guests as James Wilford Garner, Arthur N. Holcombe, Francis William Coker, Edward Samuel Corwin, Harold Hance Sprout, Arthur W. MacMahon, Henry Russell Spencer, Peter H. Odegard, William Anderson, Clyde Eagleton, James Kerr Pollock, and Leonard Dupee White.9 Among the sociologists there were Charles N. Reynolds and Richard LaPiere. From 1907 to 1914 George H. Sabine was a member of the Department of Philosophy.

The office of Executive Head of the Department was first mentioned in the Annual Register of 1913-1914. It was early established that the Stanford [p.13] policy was to have a permanent department head rather than a rotating one, except in the Food Research Institute. The Department of Economics had two permanent heads in the period from the beginning of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War, Murray Shipley Wildman (1915-1930) and Bernard Francis Haley (from 1931). History had four chairmen: Edward Benjamin Krehbiel (1913-1914), Ephraim Douglas Adams (1914-1922), Payson Jackson Treat (1922-1930), and Edgar Eugene Robinson (from 1930). Psychology had two chairmen: Frank Angell (1913-1922) and Lewis Madison Terman (from 1922). Political Science also had two: Victor J. West (1919-1927) and Edwin Angell Cottrell (from 1927). The Food Research Institute had three joint directors, who rotated the executive directorship among them – Alonzo Engelbert Taylor, Carl Lucas Alsberg, and Joseph Stancliffe Davis. In 1942 the present director, Merrill Kelley Bennett became executive director. There were two chairmen of the Hoover War Library: Ephraim Douglass Adams (1923-1924) and Ralph Haswell Lutz (from 1924), as there were in the School of Social Sciences—Murray Shipley Wildman (1923-1930) and Edwin Angell Cottrell (from 1930)–and in the Department of Journalism— Everett Wallace Smith (1927-1933) and Chilton Rowlette Bush (from 1933).

Until the year 1908-1909 the History Department had the greatest enrollment of student majors. In that year the Economics Department overtook History and with the exception of a few years immediately following has remained the largest department in terms of total enrollment in the behavioral sciences area. The History Department, however, continued to have the greatest enrollment of graduate students throughout this period. From the beginning, the Psychology Department had the smallest enrollment in the behavioral sciences area. When the Political Science Department was established in 1919, it immediately exceeded the Psychology Department in enrollment. From the year 1922 on—the first of Professor Terman’s chairmanship—the number of graduate students was higher [p. 14] in proportion to undergraduates in the Psychology Department than in any other behavioral science department.

The table which follows summarizes the degrees granted by the several behavioral science departments in the first fifty years of Stanford’s history, and in the case of Ph.D.’s through the academic year 1952-1953.

A.B.’s M.A.’s Ph.D.’s
 

Depart-ment

 Prior 1920 1921-1940 Prior 1920 1921-1940 Prior 1920 1921-1940 1941-1953
Econo-mics 600 2998 34 82 4 41 14
History 708 917 90 223 2 55 63
Journal-ism 8 317 0 20 0 0 0
Food Research 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Inter-national Relations 0 0 0 0 0 0 2
Political Science 7 1000 1 138 0 33 26
Psycho-logy 31 303 1 70 1 49 64
Sociology & Anthro-pology * 159 * 22 1 12 9
Social Sciences 0 1161 0 9 0 1 0

*Prior to 1928, Sociology A.B.’s and M.A.’s were included as Economics Degrees.

It is noteworthy that the number of A.B.’s in Psychology increased ten times in the inter-war years as compared with the first thirty years, and the A.B.’s in Economics six times in the same period, in spite of the fact that in the later period such new departments and programs as Political Science, Sociology, and Social Sciences siphoned off elements among the students previously included under Economics. Growth in terms of the number of advanced degrees awarded is similarly reflected in comparing the two periods—with the single exception of the number of Ph.D.’s granted in Economics between 1941 and 1953. Whereas the average had earlier been [p. 15] about two Economics Ph.D.’s a year, in the more recent period it has declined to slightly more than one per year.

In all the fields there has been a great increase in the number of courses given. In the inter-war years the departments began to classify their course offerings both as to level of complexity and as to subject matter. The establishment of the lower division and the increase in the size of the faculty were among the factors leading to this change. It is also possible to detect changes in emphasis in the course offerings of the departments over the years, reflecting both the development of the subject matter of the several fields and the shifting interests of individual faculty members.

In the field of psychology, for example, in the first thirty years the courses primarily bore such all-embracing titles as Elementary, Advanced, Experimental, Applied, Systematic, Comparative, and Social Psychology and Psychological Literature. Child psychology and testing were offered in the School of Education. After the First World War, statistics, physiology, clinical psychology, child psychology, and testing, personality measurement, and vocational guidance were emphasized in the curriculum.

Throughout the first fifty years of Stanford’s history the economics curriculum was dominated by courses on economic institutions as opposed to economic theory. Courses on railroads, corporation finance, money and banking, economic history, labor legislation, accounting, insurance, tax procedure and the like comprised the major part of the offering. Secretarial training was also included in the economics curriculum. It is apparent that the primary objective of this department was to afford apprenticeship to a business career. In the later years of this period, however, there was an increase in the offering of theoretical [p. 16] courses such as capital and income, production economics, mathematical economics, value and distribution, and the history of economic thought.

Perhaps the most striking changes in emphasis over the years occurred in the history curriculum. The early emphasis on Rome, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and British constitutional history was supplemented in the first decade of the century by courses in International Law, Diplomatic History of the United States, and the Westward Movement in the United States, and such courses in the history of the Far East as the History of Australasia, the Philippines, and Tropical Colonization in the Far East. In 1911 there were added a course on Spain and Spanish America and one on international conciliation, and in 1913 the first courses in Japanese history. After the war there appeared courses in the Slavic nationalities, Russia, the Baltic States, the World War, and the Paris Peace Conference. As the number of courses on modern Europe, the history of the United States, Latin America and the Far East increased, Greek and Roman history were taken over by the Classics Department; international law and conciliation were taken over by the Department of Political Science and the School of Law; and the Middle Ages and the History of the Christian Church assumed-a lesser role.

When political science was still a part of the Economics Department, such courses as the theory of the state, methods of legislating, administration of states, cities, and towns, practical politics, modern federal government, and political theory were offered. The History Department, as has been noted, offered courses in the international field. When the Department of Political Science was organized after the war, the course offering fell into the following general areas: elementary courses in American government and state and local government, comparative government, political theory, political parties, administration, relation of [p. 17] government and industry, and international relations. As early as 1924 there was a course in quantitative measurements in public administration, and in the following year there was a course in political statistics. In 1928 a course in public law was offered for the first time. With the exception of the statistical courses, these general areas have continued to be the principal ones in the political science curriculum.

Throughout the first fifty years of the University’s history, the sociology curriculum was combined with Economics. There is, however, evidence of the development of the subject matter during this period. In the nineties there were courses in static and dynamic sociology (using as texts Herbert Spencer and Lester F. Ward), in social pathology, charities and corrections, penology, and even statistics and sociology. Static and dynamic sociology disappeared, but charities, causes of poverty, and courses of that type persisted into the war years. After the war the character of the courses changed. Problems of Poverty, of Child Welfare, Crime as a Social Problem, and Care of Dependents were courses given in the early twenties. Later, courses in population, rural society, social organization, and sociological theory were added to the curriculum, and from this developed an emphasis that persisted until the Second World War. In 1937 a course in Cultural Anthropology was included in the sociology offering, marking the beginning of anthropological instruction.

We have already noted the beginnings of Journalism in the English Department, with one course in Newswriting in 1910 supplemented in 1912 by one in Current Newspapers. By 1916 there were eight courses covering newswriting, analysis, reporting, editing, management and advertising. In 1920, as we have seen, Journalism was recognized as a Division of English and, in 1925, of the School of Social Sciences. From this time the curriculum continued to grow—with courses in geographical, [p. 18] sociological and legal aspects of journalism, techniques of propaganda and investigative methods in journalism.

From its inception the Food Research Institute offered a course in Food Research Problems. In 1934 a course for upper division students in The World’s Food was added, and in 1940 there was a considerable increase in the number of courses offered, including Consumption Economics, Commodity Prices, American Agricultural Policy, Foreign Agricultural Policy, and Agriculture and the Business Cycle.

In 1931 the Hoover Library offered a course in Problems of Research. By 1937 this had been expanded to include directed research in such special fields as the World War and Reconstruction, Austria-Hungary, the Bolshevik Party and the Third International, Soviet Policies and the Civil War, Housing in the United States, History of International Relations since 1914, European Totalitarianism, and the German Revolution, 1918-1919.

 

B. Research Institutes and Grants. The establishment of the Hoover War Library just after the First World War inaugurated the first major research development in the behavioral sciences at Stanford. The Annual Report of the President for 1920 notes that:

The Hoover War Library has grown steadily during the year through gifts and purchases. Professor E. D. Adams and Professor Ralph Lutz have been actively engaged in assembling and classifying this notable collection. Several students have already entered the University in order to do research work with the help of this collection and it is inevitable that there will be a considerable increase in the number of such students from year to year.10

In the following year the plans for establishing the Food Research Institute were announced.

[p. 19] During the year the final plans for the organization of the Food Research Institute of Stanford University have been consummated. The general terms of this gift are as follows: A contract was drawn up between Stanford and the Carnegie Corporation of New York in which the University agreed to set up the research organization ‘to study the problems of the production, distribution and consumption of foodstuffs’, to appoint 3 scientists as Directors who shall determine the research pursuits and be Professors with teaching a secondary aspect of their duties, appoint a 7 man Advisory Committee, furnish housing etc. free, and disburse the money.11

The Corporation agreed to supply $54,000 from July 1, 1921, to June 30, 1922; $66,000 from July 1, 1922, to June 30, 1923; and $73,000 annually for the next eight years. Two years before the expiration of the contract a conference would be held to determine the Institute’s future status.

The Annual Report12 went on to state that

Dr. Alonzo E.Taylor, Dr. Carl L. Alsberg, and Dr. Joseph S. Davis have been appointed as Directors of the Institute. The Advisory Committee is made up as follows: Mr. Herbert Hoover, Mr. A. R. Howard, of the American Farm Bureau; Dr. John C. Merriam, President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Mr. George C. Roeding, Mr. Julius Barnes, President William M. Jardine, of the Kansas State Agricultural College; President of the Carnegie Corporation, President of Stanford University. One of the original buildings in the Inner Quadrangle, formerly occupied by the Department of German, has been set aside for the use of the Directors. The Hoover War Library, which formed the main center of attraction for the Food Research Institute, is being assembled on one floor of the stacks of the new Library with an adjacent special reading room for the use of the members of the Food Research Institute and faculty and students of the Departments of History and Economics. The Food Research Institute constitutes one of the most notable opportunities for research of a wide scope that has come to any university in America within recent years.

In 1924, the specific plans for the Hoover War Library were announced.13

[p. 20] The Hoover War Library is a separate gift and has special endowment funds for the maintenance of certain of its features. It is under the general administration of the University Librarian.

In order to make it possible to:

a. secure acquisitions in the many different fields touched upon by the Library,
b. care for the interests of graduate students and others using the facilities of the Library, and
c. determine upon the lines of development,

Directors of the Hoover War Library are to be appointed with a relationship to the Library similar to that of a departmental faculty …

Many additions have been made to the collection during the course of the year. Mr. Hoover has increased his personal gifts until they now total about $90,000 in cash expended. The Directors of the library are making every reasonable effort to make it one of the great war collections of the world.

When the time came for renegotiation of the original contract of the Food Research Institute, the Carnegie Corporation acted by granting $750,000 in 1931 to provide a permanent endowment. In the brochure of the Institute describing its activities and publications14 its financial history is described as follows:

The [Carnegie] Corporation guaranteed funds for a period of ten years, while Stanford University undertook to provide quarters and facilities for the Institute and accorded it departmental status. Financial support is at present derived jointly from endowment granted by Carnegie Corporation to Stanford University in continuing support of the Institute, from University appropriations, and from short-term grants provided by foundations and other private organizations.

In 1939, the plans for building the Hoover Library building were announced

For some years we have been accumulating funds for the construction of the Hoover Library Building. With the original funds, the gift of $50,000 from Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the $300,000 from the Belgian- American Educational Foundation, Inc.,in hand, the university architects prepared plans for a monumental structure… It is anticipated that the building will be completed in 1940.15

[p. 21] With the completion of this building the two principal research facilities of Stanford’s first fifty years, and, indeed, in the lifetime of the University were solidly established.

The major grants for behavioral science research in the years prior to the Second World War, aside from those for the Hoover Library and the Food Research Institute, were the Laura Spellman Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation, which amounted to $454,838.49; funds to Professor Terman for his studies of intellectually gifted children—$60,673.29 from the Commonwealth Fund and $26,000 from the Carnegie Corporation; and funds for sex research granted to Professors Stone, Miles, and Terman by the Academy of Sciences, amounting to $73,298.73.

The principal publication output of the Hoover Library comprised a series of eighteen books of collected documents, memoirs, and special studies, and those of the Food Research Institute included seventeen volumes of Wheat Studies, three monographs in the Grain Economics Series, seven Fats and Oils Studies, and nine Miscellaneous Publications. The publications resulting from the Laura Spellman Fund are tabulated in Appendix I to Chapter 14.

[p. 22]

II. SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Since the Second World War the following major ohanges in the behavioral science field have occurred at Stanford:

 

A. New Departments and Agencies Established. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology was set up on an independent basis in 1948. Previously sociology had been under the Department of Economics. Anthropology teaching had begun with the arrival at Stanford in 1945 of Felix M. Keesing, who was to be appointed three years later as head of the new joint department. Other major additions to the staff in this area included Paul Wallin (appointed in 1942) in sociology and Bernard J. Siegel (appointed in 1947) and Bert A. Gerow (appointed in 1948) in anthropology.

The Department of Statistics was established in 1949 under the chairmanship of Albert H. Bowker. It quickly became a major center for research, which two years later was institutionalized as the Laboratory of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Important staff appointments included Meyer Abraham Girshick (1948), Herman Chernoff (1951), and Charles E. Stein (1953).

In 1943 two professors of geography were brought to Stanford on a permanent basis. Seven years later, geography was established as a separate department under the chairmanship of C. Langdon White.

In 1951 the Committee for Research in the Social Sciences (CRISS) was set up as an inter-departmental body for the initiation, screening, and coordination of social science research. In the following year Alfred de Grazia, of the Political Science Department, was appointed its first executive officer, (see Chapter 8,III).

 

B. Remade Departments. In the years following 1945, first under the chairmanship of Bernard P. Haley and later under that of Edward S. Shaw, [p. 23] the Economics Department was restaffed with a series of outstanding younger scholars. The result has been a “planned” and well-integrated staff. The present national reputation of the department, particularly in the field of economic theory, largely dates from this period. The major additions to the staff, with their dates of appointment, are as follows: Tiber Scitovsky (1946), Lorie Tarshis (1946), Melvin W. Reder (1947), Moses Abramovitz (1948), Paul A. Baran (1949), Kenneth J. Arrow (1949).

A similar expansion tool: place in the Department of Psychology following the appointment of Ernest R. Hilgard as executive head in 1945. Here the chief additions to the staff now at associate or full professor rank included: Lois Meek Stolz (1945), Donald W. Taylor (1.945), Clarence L. Winder (1948), and Douglas H. Lawrence (1949). Last year Robert R. Sears was called to Stanford from a Harvard professorship to succeed Professor Hilgard as head of the department following the latter’s appointment as Dean of the Graduate Division.

The expansion of the Psychology Department was in three directions: (1) the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program supported by the Veterans Administration and the Public Health Service; (2) the nursery school and child development laboratory; (3) the Office of Project Research, as a “holding company” and initiator of research sponsored by the government and the foundations (see Chapter 8,V).

 

C. Changes in Other Behavioral Science Areas. Both History and Political Science have recently acquired new chairmen. In 1952 Thomas A. Bailey was appointed executive head of the former department and James T. Watkins IV of the latter. Today, of the behavioral science departments, only Journalism is under its pre-war head.

Of recent years the Department of History has pursued a vigorous policy of recruiting its staff from highly diversified academic and [p.24] geographical backgrounds. Areas in which substantial new staff recruiting has taken place include Far Eastern History—Claude A. Buss (1946), Arthur F. Wright (1947), and Thomas C. Smith (1948)—and United States history— John C. Miller (1949), Frank Freidel (1953), and Don E. Fehrenbacher (1953).

In Political Science, eight out of ten staff members of the rank of assistant professor and above are post-war appointees. Concurrently the Department has supplemented its earlier emphasis on international relations with added attention to public administration and political behavior.

The immediate post-war years saw the Hoover Institute and Library expanding its interests in new areas to which the Second World War had given increased importance. Whereas the pre-war collections had been heavily concentrated on Central and Eastern Europe, the Far East and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East now became areas of major interest. In 1941, the Hoover Library holdings on Asia and the Middle East consisted only of materials relating to mandates or colonies of European powers. Virtually none of this material was in the vernacular languages of these areas.

Since 1945, the Hoover Library has been making a systematic effort to collect and preserve the sources for the political, social, and economic history of Asia and the Middle East during the twentieth century, together with relevant background materials. The political and social movements of the twentieth century—nationalism, communism, religious movements with political significance, etc.—have formed the basis for the collections. The Chinese collection now numbers some 34,000 volumes; the Japanese collection, some 20,000 volumes; the Middle East collections, principally in Turkish and Arabic, some 8,000 volumes; the South Asian, and Southeast Asian collections are much smaller. These new interests have been reflected in the appointment of highly-trained scholars to serve as curators for the new collections—Christina P. Harris (Middle [p. 25] East), Mary C. Wright (China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia), and Nobutaka Ike (Japan).

Experiments in the application of newer techniques of behavioral science have constituted much of the post-war research in the Hoover Institute. The leading project, Revolution and the Development of International Relations (RADIR), was supported by the Carnegie Corporation.

 

D. Related Professional Schools. A further sign of the post-war tendency toward growth and change can be seen in the appointment of new deans for the School of law (Carl B. Spaeth, 1946), the School of Medicine (Windsor C. Cutting, 1953), and the School of Education (I. James Quillen, 1953).

 

E. Conclusion: Prospects for Continued Development. It is the conviction of the committee responsible for the present survey that the above evidences of development and branching into new fields of teaching and research represent the dominant tendency in Stanford today. The growth potential of the University is apparent in nearly all areas of behavioral science interest. The purpose of the present study is to look ahead on the basis of the foundations now in existence—bearing constantly in mind that for a comparatively small university the most advisable course is considerable specialization within departments rather than an effort to cover all fields equally.

 

[NOTES]

  1. Annual Register, 1892-93, p. 72.
  2. Annual Register, 1891-92.
  3. Annual Register, 1899-1900, p. 98.
  4. Became School of Education in 1917.
  5. Annual Register, 1908-09, p. 89.
  6. Established in 1924.
  7. Annual Register, 1924-25, p.240
  8. Annual Register, 1923-24.
  9. These twelve men are all former presidents of the American Political Science Association, as was W. W. Willoughby, mentioned earlier.
  10. Annual Report of the President, 1920, p. 28.
  11. Annual Report of the President, 1921, p.7.
  12. Ibid., p. 9.
  13. Annual Report of the President, 1924, p.3.
  14. Stanford University Press, 1948, p. 2.
  15. Annual Report of the President, 1939, p. 14.

 

Source: The Stanford Survey of the Behavioral Sciences. Report of the Executive Committee and Staff, July 1954.

Image Source: Library of Congress. Encina Hall, Leland Stanford Junior University (1898).

 

 

 

Categories
Chicago Economists

History of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, from 1954 Report to Ford Foundation

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.

______________________

[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.

 

Categories
Economists Harvard

Harvard. Early Evolution of Behavioral and Social Science Departments. Mason Report.

Taussig, Ripley, Gay, Day

Today I generate another posting from the Mason Committee Report The Behavioral Sciences at Harvard published in June, 1954. Here we have a quick trot through Harvard’s own history of behavioral and social sciences, the splitting of some of its divisions into departments and the creation of new departments and schools. It is an extremely convenient collection of names and dates to help us see where economics  and economists fit into the larger academic community during the first half century or so following the emergence of political economy and government at Harvard College. You can tell an economist chaired the committee, it’s so much about us. I have added boldface to help readers of this blog find stuff they might (should) be interested in.

________________________

[p. 18]

HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES AT HARVARD

The future historian of Harvard will note that a new term began to be prominent in University documents during 1953-1954. A reorganization of course offerings in the Graduate School of Education created the “behavioral sciences” as a prominent new rubric. Reports in the Business School allude to present and planned developments in the “behavioral sciences” and this survey utilizes the new term as an inclusive category to define the area of its inquiry.

If the term is of recent birth, Harvard’s activities in the area of the behavioral sciences certainly are not. Taking the loose definition of the behavioral sciences, which we have adopted (at least provisionally) for this survey, their cultivation at Harvard goes back at least to the emergence of Harvard as a modern university in the second half of the nineteenth century. At least some of the behavioral sciences shared in the rapid growth of Harvard to university stature at the end of the nineteenth century. The reorganization of 1890, establishing the system of Divisions and Departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, brought into existence a Division of History, Government, and Economics. Prior to this time there had been instruction in all of these fields, and Harvard could already point to distinguished scholars in some parts of them. History, after a “false dawn” in 1838 when Jared Sparks was appointed to the new McLean Professorship of Ancient and Modern History, was rapidly coming to strength under the inspiration of Henry Adams and the young men bringing new methods and standards from the German universities. Economics had begun its emergence from moral philosophy in the early Seventies when anxiety that sound currency doctrines be heard in Harvard College led to the appointment of Charles F. Dunbar as Professor of Political Economy. The study of government was comfortably developing in the work of a group of historians who were predominantly concerned with constitutional and institutional history.

1892 Dunbar
Charles F. Dunbar

Today the Division of History, Government, and Economics has been reduced to a shadowy holding company for three powerful and [p. 19] autonomous departments. In 1890-1891, the situation was different. Prior to the reorganization, the Harvard College faculty had indeed been subdivided into departments, but they were very loose and informal bodies, so casual in their operation that regular meetings were not held nor formal records kept. After 1891, a new structure of departments established itself firmly, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences quickly became the nexus of self-contained subdivision that it is today. History and government naturally fell together in a department first labeled that of “History and Roman Law” which in 1895 became the Department of History and Government.1 The split of this joint department into the present Departments of History and Government took place considerably later, in 1911. A Department of Political Economy was in existence from 1879, and economics courses enjoyed a separate listing under this heading until the present Department of Economics became established in 1892.

Within this evolving framework, Harvard quickly pushed to a place of prominence in studies in this area. In history the dominant pattern of activity was clear:

“Institutional History was uppermost at Harvard in the last third of the nineteenth century. Maine and Stubbs in England, Waitz in Germany, Fustel de Coulangcs in France, initiated an eager search into the origins and development of political institutions, believing therein to find the true explanation of human progress. Henry Adams introduced the fashion to Harvard. To take a sample year, 1890-91, there was hardly a history course in the catalogue, save History I, and those given by Emerton, which did not smack of Verfassungsgeschichte. There was Constitutional Government (later Government 1), Constitutional History of England since George I, and Principles of Constitutional Law, by Professor Macvane; English Constitutional History from 1485 to George I, and Early Medieval History “with special reference to Institutions,” by Mr. Bendelari; French History to Louis XIV, with the same emphasis, by Dr. Snow; Constitutional History, Constitutional Development, and Federal Government by Professor Hart; Early American Institutions, by Professor Channing; and three more courses on English Constitutional History by Dr. Gross. Certainly no institutions in the United States or England today would offer so much constitutional history. . . “2

The doctoral dissertations accepted before 1900 in history and government reflect this concentration of interest. In a total of thirty-one accepted during the period 1873-1900, twelve were in United States national and colonial history, ten were in English institutional history, three were in “government and international law.”3 While Harvard initially lagged behind Johns Hopkins in its production of Ph.D.’s, it was early in the field, and its staff played a prominent role in the professionalization of historical study. They were active in the establishment of the American Historical Association (1884) and can claim [p. 20] to have been the prime movers in starting the American Historical Review. The intimate connection between political science and history which was fostered by the joint department and the nature of historical studies in this early period served to give the study of political science a strong historical cast. But instruction in political science extended beyond clearly historical courses, and Government 1 by 1900 was established as one of the great introductory courses with more than four hundred students.

After beginnings in the Seventies with the appointment of Charles F. Dunbar as Professor of Political Economy, Harvard’s work in economics quickly took on strength in the Eighties. The year 1886 is notable for two events: the establishment of the first professional economics journal in the English language, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which has been continuously published under the auspices of the Department since that date; and the appointment of Frank W. Taussig, who became perhaps the central figure in a generation of growth in Harvard economics. As Professor Taussig modestly remarks in his own survey of department history, after 1886, the Department of Political Economy “was able to present a substantial offering.”4 From the first, the work of the Department showed a strong concern with contemporary issues of public policy, but it also reflected the late nineteenth-century concern with economic history in the appointments of William J. Ashley (1892) and Edwin F. Gay. Economics 1 took its place alongside History 1 and Government 1 as one of the famous introductory courses and like them attracted more than four hundred students by 1900.5 A temporary dip in activity occurred shortly after the turn of the century, but the foundations were laid for an exuberant later development.

The history of the other behavioral sciences in this early period is more varied, tentative, and uncertain. Anthropology got off to an early start with the Peabody bequest in 1866 establishing the Peabody Museum and the Peabody Professorship of American Archaeology and Ethnology. The terms of the bequest were such that part of it had to be left to accumulate until it had reached a specified level. The building which now houses the Peabody Museum was not begun until 1876, and the Professorship was not filled until 1887 (by Frederick Ward Putnam).6 The gathering of collections, however, began almost immediately after the Peabody bequest, and the first Report dates from 1868. By the Nineties the Museum collections had grown impressively, [p. 21] and the University acquired a major resource when the Museum became an integral part of it in 1897. Instruction in anthropology was almost lacking before 1890, there being no undergraduate courses and only a few graduate students. The reorganization of 1890 established a Division of American Archaeology and Ethnology, but no regular course in general anthropology was offered until 1894-1895. During the Nineties the Division shared in the general expansion of the University, increasing its staff and offerings so that by 1903 its old title was inappropriate, and it became the Department of Anthropology which still exists. The Nineties saw the beginning of a long series of archaeological and ethnological expeditions in the Americas and elsewhere which have enriched the collections of the Museum and the literature of the field. Studies and instruction in physical anthropology began at this time and have continued to the present day.

Psychology at Harvard is relatively old. Professor Boring when interviewed in the course of this survey has emphasized the point:

“America was very early in the development of experimental psychology, and the development was centered largely at Harvard. James had a very small laboratory as early as Wundt, actually — that is, in 1875. It is true that Germany led the world in experimental psychology in the 1890’s, but there was a great push in America to get psychological laboratories started, and I would say that they lagged behind Germany by less than ten years. In America there was a laboratory developed at Johns Hopkins in 1883, and ours here at Harvard officially began in 1892, although, as I said, there was a small laboratory before that.”

William James not only began experimental studies in psychology at an early date; in 1875 he offered a course in the Relations between Physiology and Psychology, and in the following year he presented another psychology course under the label of Natural History 2. His enthusiasm for experimental psychology led him to raise the necessary funds for the official establishment of the Psychology Laboratory in 1892. He did not, however, want to devote himself primarily to this work, and at his instigation Dr. Hugo Muensterberg was brought from Freiburg, first temporarily (in 1892), then after a brief interval, as a permanent Professor of Psychology in 1897. The early years of the new century saw important additions to the staff (in E. B. Holt and Robert M. Yerkes) and the availability of new space for the laboratories in Emerson Hall (1905). Instruction in psychology grew rapidly, but no independent department appeared. In 1913 psychology courses won separate listing, and the title of the sheltering department was expanded to become the Department of Philosophy and Psychology.

Sociology began its Harvard career in at least two places. The broad concern about social problems which swept over American society in the last third of the nineteenth century and did so much to establish sociology as an academic discipline had its representation at Harvard. The Reverend Francis Greenwood Peabody was giving a course in [p. 22] Practical Ethics in 1881, and from 1883 he offered another in Ethical Theories and Moral Reform. In 1905 it became possible, largely through the benefactions of Andrew Tredway White, to establish instruction of this sort more amply in a separate Department of Social Ethics. The early years of the new department saw expanded work in various types of social problems and a somewhat cautious venture in the direction of professional social work training.7

Not all of Harvard’s early sociology was contained in this lineal ancestor of its present work in sociology. The Department of Economics appointed an assistant professor of sociology in 1893, and after his appointment in 1901 Thomas Nixon Carver regularly gave sociology courses. There was further concern with sociology in connection with such subjects as labor problems, but in summing up the situation to 1929, Professor Taussig found cause to lament Harvard’s failure to “keep pace with the forward movement of economic science … in the field of the social applications or implications of the subject.”

Our sketch thus far has brought the account of the behavioral sciences at Harvard down to the years preceding the first World War. The subsequent years were crowded and active ones, but they have put their imprint so clearly on the present that we may hope to bridge them quickly, reserving details for the contemporary picture presented in Section B.

The organization of the behavioral sciences at Harvard has seen both fission and fusion in the twentieth century. We have noted the splitting off of Social Ethics in 1905 from its parent Department of Philosophy. The next fission was that between Government and History in 1911. In this, as in other organizational changes at Harvard, personalities and special local problems played their role, but the development of the fields themselves made the change a natural one. As Harvard developed rapidly into one of the major American centers of historical study, the heavy concentration in constitutional and institutional history yielded to more diversity. Many of Harvard’s great historians continued to write history in which political events and institutions bulked large, but the range of interests became increasingly catholic. In the history of religions George Foote Moore and others continued and ornamented an established Harvard tradition, Charles H. Haskins ranged over a vast field of medieval studies, Frederick J. Turner brought a sweeping perspective on American democracy, and by 1924 the University had a recognized practitioner of the “new” history in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. An era arrived in which social and economic history took established positions among the common varieties of historical writing so that they now look like older trends in the 1954 picture. A glance at the list of doctoral dissertations submitted [p. 23] to the Department shows a steady and strong growth in American and modern European history paralleling the over-all growth of the Department to a commanding position in the production of the professional historians.8

Since its independent establishment in 1911, the Department of Government has shown continued loyalty to its older union with History. In Charles Mcllwain it had an inspiring continuator of the tradition in English constitutional history and thought. The new Department rapidly expanded its concern with political theory and made new ventures in constitutional and international law, American national, state and local government, comparative government, and international relations. The establishment of the Graduate School of Public Administration in 1937 broadened and strengthened work on matters related to contemporary public policy. A steady rise in the popularity of government as a field of undergraduate concentration brought the Department in the years after World War II into the demanding position of caring for more undergraduates than any other department.

The Department of Economics has continued to grow until it stands today among Harvard’s largest. The concern with the issues of the day which engaged Harvard economists from the first has persisted. The tradition of government consulting blossomed with the work of Taussig, Ripley, Gay and Day during World War I, and in the ill-fated Harvard Economic Service Harvard economists in the Twenties ventured predictions on the course of business conditions. Theoretical economics was pursued with distinction, and a rounded development of the field could be pointed to as a basis for a commonly recognized position of leadership. The Graduate School of Public Administration at its founding could draw on a department with vigorous interests in economic policy, and it in turn provided stimulus and facilities for such work.

Anthropology at Harvard during the early decades of this century continued activities on the wide front established in the Nineties. While Harvard could claim no single figure of such commanding leadership as Boas at Columbia, men like Dixon, Tozzer, and Hooton took major places in the development of American anthropology. A long series of Peabody Museum expeditions extended all over the globe and established Harvard’s position of leadership in Middle American archaeology, Southwestern archaeology, Old World prehistory, and other fields. The large-scale Irish expedition in the Thirties brought widely-known results, and it is perhaps less well remembered that the Yankee City study had its inception in the Department of Anthropology. The Forties brought an important organizational change in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations (1946). This move, which relocated part of the work in [p. 24] Social Anthropology in a new department, has resulted in a substantial expansion of the total numbers of anthropologists on the Harvard staff and of the range and quantity of anthropological investigation.

The chapter on psychology in an official history of Harvard published in 1930 was written by a philosopher, Ralph Parton Perry. Professor Perry notes at the beginning of his account: “Harvard is almost the only American university in which Philosophy and Psychology still constitute a single department.”9 This tardiness of Harvard in following the movement toward an independent status for psychology continued until 1934, when the Department of Psychology was established with Professor Boring as chairman. The lack of separate status had not meant inactivity. The work of the Psychological Laboratory begun under James and Muensterberg continued under the direction of Langfeld (until 1924) and later under Professor Boring. The range of work included that of Yerkes on animal psychology, Troland on physiological optics, and McDougall (after 1920) on social psychology. In 1926 a special bequest for work in abnormal and dynamic psychology led to the establishment of the Psychological Clinic, first under Dr. Morton Prince, and later under Professor Henry A. Murray. The appointment of Professor K. S. Lashley in 1936 brought new work in physiological psychology which was later transferred to the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, Orange Park, Florida. During the second World War, Harvard’s psychologists became heavily involved in work which led to the present Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under the direction of Professor S. S. Stevens. Substantial uncertainty as to the ideal arrangements for psychology in the University persisted. A special commission was appointed in 1945, under the chairmanship of Dr. Alan Gregg to examine this question,10 but the work was overtaken by action from another quarter which issued in the founding of the Department of Social Relations in 1946. The consequences of this change will be evidenced at many places in this report; suffice to say here that work in clinical and social psychology was moved to the new department, experimental and physiological psychology remaining in the Department of Psychology.11

Sociology at Harvard continued under the departmental label of Social Ethics until 1929. In the early years of this department (after 1905) the ethical and practical concerns of its founder marked both instruction and research.12 Courses were taught in criminology and penology, radical social movements, juvenile delinquency, housing, immigration, and the typical range of “social problems” found in sociology [p. 25] curricula of this era. After World War I, when Dr. Richard C. Cabot was made Professor of Social Ethics and Chairman of the Department (1920), sociology extended its concerns into philosophical questions and some applied fields, while preserving the ethical orientation. As Professor Cabot’s retirement approached, the status of sociology was subject to a general re-examination. A new Department of Sociology was established under the direction of a committee drawn from various existing departments and including a new appointee, Pitirim A. Sorokin, as Chairman and Professor of Sociology. The new department continued through the Thirties, establishing a strong tradition in theoretical sociology and producing a small but distinguished group of Ph.D.’s. A need for further organizational change was felt by the beginning of the Forties,13 and when the Department of Social Relations emerged in 1946, it had absorbed the old Department of Sociology. Since that time, sociology has been without separate departmental status at Harvard, but it has been strongly represented in the new organization.

This rapid survey could include little more than the most conspicuous and central developments in the behavioral sciences within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. It has neglected many interdisciplinary committees and degree programs, research organizations, area programs, and the growth of such indispensable facilities as the College Library. A great many of the most important special developments have appeared since World War II and are still in existence. As elsewhere throughout the country, much of the history of behavioral sciences at Harvard crowds onto the contemporary scene.

The history we have presented has been largely a history of departments, but we think this not improper. The departments have long been and remain the fundamental units in the organization of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The historical record of the growth of the behavioral sciences at Harvard seems to show a common pattern. Harvard has not been unresponsive to new needs and the development of new fields, but it has moved cautiously, making its first ventures under the shelter of established departments. Government, psychology, and sociology at Harvard thus began under older departments, only slowly winning autonomous status. Ultimately, fields like these have taken their place in an extended roster of the same type of organization which fostered them, namely, as departments on the established model. The record is doubtless a conservative one, substantively and organizationally, but it is perhaps in keeping with President Eliot’s aim of building “securely and slowly, a university in the largest sense.”

Thus far the growth of the behavioral sciences in the professional [p. 26] schools has gone largely unmentioned. Their development will be sketched briefly near the end of Section B, but, to avoid too much repetition, the more detailed historical developments are reserved for Part VI of this report, where each professional school receives a unified and comprehensive analysis. Unless the reader familiarizes himself with the trends in the utilization of the behavioral sciences in the graduate schools of Business, Education, Law, Medicine and Public Health, and Public Administration he will have only a partial image of Harvard’s activities in this field.

[NOTES]

1 Emerton and Morison, in Morison, ed.. Development of Harvard University, 1869-1929 (1930) p. 153, n. 1.

2 Emerton and Morison, op. cit., pp. 159-160.

3 Tabulation in Emerton and Morison, op. cit., p. 164.

4 In Morison, op. cit., p. 190.

5 A graph in Morison (between pp. 194-195) traces the rise in enrollment in these courses. They followed roughly the over-all increase in college enrollment.

6 A delay in the approval of Putnam’s appointment by the Board of Overseers deprived Harvard of the distinction of having the first professorship of American archaeology. (Daniel S. Brinton was appointed Professor of American Archaeology and Linguistics at Pennsylvania in 1886.) Dixon in Morison, p. 211, n. 1.

7 Ford in Morison, op. at., p. 225.

8 Cf. tabulation in Morison, op. cit., p. 164, and data below in Section B.

9 Morison, op. cit., p. 216.

10 Cf. The Place of Psychology in an Ideal University (1947).

11 A contemporary report on the nature and rationale of the split may be found in a joint article by Professors Allport and Boring, American Psychologist, v. 1, 1946, pp. 119-122.

12 Cf. the chapter by James M. Ford in Morison, op. cit., pp. 223-230.

13 The Report of the Visiting Committee to the Department for 1944-1945 remarks, “Obviously, the Department should not be allowed to continue as at present constituted.” Report No. 32, p. 219.

 

Source: The behavioral sciences at Harvard; report by a faculty committee. June, 1954.

Image Source:  Faculty portraits of Professors Taussig, Ripley, Gay and Day from Harvard Album, 1916.