Faculty Radicals

The dispute between radical social science faculty and their senior colleagues, which seemingly was resolved last year with the forced departure of economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis and sociologist Michael Useem, surfaced again last week with the release of the Board of Overseers' Visiting Committee report on the Economics Department.

The report's most important recommendation was that the Economics curriculum be "broadened" to include the study of problems "not easily encompassed within the corpus of traditional economics as taught at Harvard." The broadening of the Ec Department's curriculum and faculty viewpoint is what the constantly dwindling number of radicals have demanded for the past five years. While the radicals may have been pleased by the belated official confirmation of their stand, the visiting committee report may be one of the final ironies of the most recent radical-orthodox struggle, and not the first skirmish in a new one.

Since its beginning in 1969 the current struggle between radicals and almost everyone else in the Harvard social science faculty has had the vicious and bloodletting quality that only a family struggle can have. The liberal spirit of compromise has given way as the stronger senior faculty has gradually removed almost every one of the radical junior faculty members over the past five years, and has refused to give tenure to even the most respected radical academics, like Bowles or Gintis.

The nature of the conservative reaction is revealing: Associate Professor Bowles was defeated in his 1972 tenure bid by a 15 to 5 vote of the Economics Department tenured faculty. Even liberal Democrats on the faculty, like Otto Eckstein and Robert Dorfman, opposed Bowles. The radicals saw the faculty saying that, in a liberal university, all ideas are to be tolerated-except those ideas that critically undercut the very basis of liberal scholarship, the liberal credos of the scholar as an impartial observer of society and the university as an ivory tower outside the influence and direction of the prevailing social order.

Arthur MacEwan, lecturer on Economics and the only remaining non-tenured radical in the department, said last week, "the concept of the ivory tower does not apply to Harvard, except possibly to the Classics Department--and I've heard that an ex-student in Classics once wrote speeches for Agnew." MacEwan says that the Government and Economics Departments "are bound up with advising and even running the government," adding, "Consider people like Kissinger, Bundy, Moynihan and Dunlop; consider institutions like the Center for International Affairs. The bourgeois faculty here is well-rooted in the class they serve and the system they strive to perpetuate."

MacEwan's and the other since-departed radicals' point is that the practice of neutral scholarship is impossible. MacEwan says, "Ideology is a good thing, and in any case, an inescapable thing--if it's a good ideology." The radical faculty at Harvard takes pride in having a point of view, and insists that all scholars have points of view. The radicals think the senior faculty's bias toward maintaining the capitalist social system is concealed by its seemingly value-free work. MacEwan says that "to work to help coordinate the economy and advise the government--as many orthodox economists do--is to make an implicit decision in favor of the system that is in existence."

The conflict between radical and orthodox social science comes down, in one sense, to the radicals' wish to make explicit what they believe has always been implicit: that social science and social scientists are part of the society they live in, and that interaction between society and the university flows more than one way. To the radicals John Dunlop's shuttling between Cambridge and Washington to make clear to former President Nixon that wage and price controls were a fine thing was evidence of both the university's influence on the society's conservative leader and the conservative society's influence on the university and the direction of its neutral, pure scholarship.

To aid Nixon or Ford or the leader of any capitalist society, the radicals say, is to favor the type of society these presidents seek to maintain--the traditional professor's cries of value-free scholarship not-withstanding.

The internecine character of the Economics Department struggle stems, then, not only from the radicals opposing the society that practically all of the senior faculty tacitly supports. The radicals are also calling into question the image of the academic as a neutral searcher after truth, an image upon which the entire legitimacy of the American university and the American academic depends. The radicals'view of what an intellectual is challenges directly their senior Harvard colleagues' mystique and status as independent intellectuals. The radicals portray academics largely as the ideological offshoots of the classes they represent in society and not as impartial arbiters, standing above society who study it and come to more or less true and neutral judgments.

This helps to explain the lack of tolerance extended to radical social science at Harvard, most clearly in the Economics Department. In their absolute rejection of Marxist economics, for example, the senior faculty was rejecting both a societal analysis and, more importantly perhaps, a view of themselves that dragged them into the dirt of the social system. To recognize the radicals' claims would, the radicals say, require the tenured faculty to admit the possibility that their view of truth, objectivity and the independent power of ideas and intellectuals--in short, their identity as academics--wrong.

Theda Skocpol, now an instructor in Sociology and one of only two radicals at Harvard with a contract to stay for at least a time, said last week that Harvard "is where some of the most powerful academics are, with the most connections to corporate and government ruling circles; Harvard will be among the last, not the first, to change." Still, last year the Sociology Department hired two radical instructors, Skocpol and Rosemary Taylor, both of whom will receive five-year contracts as assistant professors when they complete their theses later this year.

Following its refusal to grant tenure to Michael Useem, a radical assistant professor, nearly two years ago, the Sociology Department's decision to hire Skocpol and Taylor seemed to be a sop to the radicals. In the face of widespread protest over the departure of several radical economists and Useem, and with no commitment ever to grant tenure to the newly-hired radicals, the Sociology Department appeared to be simultaneously answering immediate radical demands reasonably and preserving the traditional character of Harvard sociology over the long range.

Skocpol, however, sees this development differently. Sociology, she says, "is a much better place for a radical than economics." She explains that, in the same way that orthodox economists see their job as working within the present economic system to make it function more efficiently, orthodox sociologists traditionally look on themselves as critics of society and proponents of social analysis and policies not currently accepted. Skocpol says the discipline "is much less focused than economics, because it has much less immediate application and involves more than technical manipulations of specialized knowledge, the way neo-classical economics does."

Sociology, according to the radicals now in it, is a department that has limited ties to corporations and the government, and this is partly a result of the discipline's lack of a large majority consensus among sociologists on what sociology is. Skocpol says, "If you go into opposition in economics, you are disputing a generally undisputed science. But in sociology, there is no absolutely dominant body of doctrine, like neo-classical economics." To be a Marxist sociologist, Skocpol and Taylor say, is to uphold one critical theory--even if it is the most critical theory--among many others.

Because of sociologists' general agreement on the non-objective character of their discipline, identification between the content of the subject and the faculty who practice it, as has often occurred in Economics, is less likely to happen in Sociology. Radical economists came into irreconcilable conflict with senior faculty because they disagreed with the whole of a coherent, relatively rigid theory of neo-classical economics. In this way, the radicals challenged an accepted science that was tied to the intellectual and professorial identity of the economics faculty. There could be no compromise on either side.

But because of sociology's lack of all-encompassing theory tied to the existing social order, sociologists have a tendency towards the accommodation of radical views. Senior sociologists at Harvard, like Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell, have integrated Marxist modes of analysis into their own theories. A parallel development would be impossible for any neo-classical economist. For this reason, and also because the senior Sociology faculty is somewhat to the left of Economics, an Economics-type purge of radicals seems unlikely. Taylor said last week, "In the Sociology Department, there are various sorts of Marxist sympathizers and very leftish liberals. They do not react with horror at the mention of Marx, the way many orthodox economists do."

If immediate intolerance does not threaten the radical sociologists, the general problem of working in a traditional university does. Radical sociologists say that Harvard trains its students to function as productive members of capitalist society, that it inculcates a bourgeois ideology, and that the hierarchical relationships in the university and the classroom reflect the hierarchy of capitalist society.

Taylor says that "the problem for us is not intolerance, but repressive tolerance." The radical faculty at Harvard is in a tiny minority, and it is difficult to predict that such a small group could have a very substantial impact against the control of education by more orthodox and conservative faculty and a more conservative society in general. The problem for Harvard faculty radicals has been until now a refusal by the rest of the faculty to accept the radical viewpoint. For Taylor, Skocpol and any radical teachers in the future, the problem may be that the University will accept them, perhaps even tenure them, and then isolate them in a permanent minority enclave