Harvard Sociology: What Went Wrong?

It was the best of times--and then the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom--and then the age of foolishness. It was Social Relations--and then it became Sociology.

In the 1950s, in the Golden Age of the Social Relations Department--which consisted of sociology as well as social psychology and cultural anthropology--Harvard's department was considered a national superpower, equally attractive to both faculty and students.

Today, faculty members paint a different picture of sociology at Harvard, saying that the department is grappling with disagreement over the proper focus of sociology as a discipline, less than ideal inter-personal relations among department members, and its small size.

Meanwhile, the sociology department may risk losing up to three of its 11 tenured faculty members, who are rumored to be considering leaving their lifetime posts at Harvard:

.Professor of Sociology Harrison C. White says he plans to leave Harvard to become chairman of the sociology department at the University of Arizona;

.Alessandro D. Pizzorno, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, says there is a 50-50 chance that he will accept tenure at the European University;

.Sociology Professor Orlando Patterson is weighing an offer from the University of Pennsylvania, according to sources who say he probably will not accept;

Professor of Sociology James A. Davis may be considering offers from other universities, observers say. But Davis adamantly denies any intention of leaving, saying that the rumors "have absolutely no basis in fact."

But despite these difficulties that have yet to be resolved, some faculty members say the next decade cannot be much worse than the last one.

Five years ago, Harvard's Sociology Department was in such turmoil that President Derek C. Bok decided to call for a special committee of top sociologists from around the country, in order to plot a course of action for the ailing department.

The committee decided that the department's biggest problem was that it was weak in mainstream, bread-and-butter sociology. Mainstream sociology, which can be either statistically or historically based, includes organizational studies, social psychology, political sociology, and sophisticated mathematical modeling.

Many of the department members, however, while highly regarded scholars, were interested in subjects considered on the periphery of sociology. The committee concluded that Harvard was especially weak in quantitative sociology and suggested that increasing the number of mainstream sociology professors, with a special effort to hire quantitative sociologists, would improve the department.

Bok tried to follow the committee's advice by offerring tenured positions at Harvard to three sociologists: Nancy Tuma, a professor at Stanford University; Edward Laumann, dean of social sciences at Chicago; and David Featherman of the University of Wisconsin. All three refused.

So Bok tried again, this time offerring four top scholars positions at Harvard. Three of the four turned down Harvard's offers, but Aage B. Sorenson, a top quantitative sociologist, accepted the position and came to Harvard two years ago to become the department's chair.

Generally, when an appointment needs to be made, a department chooses the professor it would like to hire. After appointing an ad hoc committee to evaluate the professor in question, Bok then decides whether or not to approve the recommendation.

But after the special committee meeting five years ago, Bok chose scholars who the committee thought would be appropriate--without the official sanction of the department participation, sources in the department say. While Bok encouraged department members to write to him individually and express their opinion on the people being considered, sources say the department as a whole never voted on whether it wanted these scholars to be a part of their department.

Moreover, three times in a row, when the department recommended a scholar for tenure, Bok overturned the department's decision--actions which sources say greatly lowered department morale. The university's president usually vetoes a department's tenure recommendation about 10 to 15 percent of the time, says Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Phyllis Keller.

First, the department recommended that Columbia Professor Alfred Stepan be appointed to the Gutman chair in Latin American Studies, but members say Bok overturned the decision because Stepan was more of a political scientist than a sociologist.

Then, when the department voted to ask Eric Olin Wright of the University of Wisconsin to come to Harvard, Bok once again overturned the decision.

Last spring, when the department voted to grant tenure to Paul E. Starr, an associate professor in sociology, Bok vetoed the decision after a split vote of the ad hoc committee. Starr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, "The Social Transformation of American Medicine," was the first junior faculty member to be recommended for tenure by the Sociology Department in 16 years. Starr now holds a tenured position at Princeton University.

Amid these tumultuous tenure decisions, the department also had to deal with a sexual discrimination grievance filed by a former assistant professor of sociology, Theda R. Skocpol (see accompanying story).

Although department members agree that the biggest problem facing the department is its lack of mainstream sociologists, Department Chairman Sorenson says that the situation will improve after four senior and junior appointments coming this spring.

In defense of the department, Sorenson also says he has completely revamped the graduate program in sociology in order to put more emphasis on basic sociological training. The new program makes both teaching and research experience mandatory for all graduate students.

The number of graduate students applying to the department has doubled since the change, Sorenson says, adding that about 50 students applied to the department last year, and nearly 100 applied this year.

National Crisis

But to some extent, the problems which Harvard's department faces are a reflection of a national crisis in sociology.

"Nationally, there has been a wide range of views about what sociology should be doing. It's not a tightly knit discipline with very clear research priorities," says Professor of Sociology Ezra F. Vogel.

"There's so much confusion these days, and sociology. itself is in a critical stage," Professor of Education and Social Structure Nathan Glazer notes. "There are a number of tendencies, and they don't seem to interact much."

Some sociologists believe that a strict methodology--with a scientific approach and a great deal of research--is most important, Vogel says, while others like him believe "real life is far too complex to be turned into variables--we cannot really be scientific."

"It's very hard to say who is a mainstream sociologist. The term doesn't have much meaning right now," Glazer concurs.

Sanford Dornbusch, a sociology professor at Stanford, agrees that mainstream sociology was not at all well-defined. "One person's main-stream is another person's creek," he says.

"Part of the reason there's such disagreement is that, unlike some social sciences, sociology has no central set of theoretical doctrines," Dornbusch adds.

But most Harvard faculty members agree that the general trend in sociology has been toward a more quantitative, or number-oriented discipline.

"The profession has been going through the kind of changes that have already gone on in economics. It has been a transition in the quantitative direction," says David S. Landes, Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics.

"Such changes are always a source of travail, as they involve bringing in techniques that the older generation hasn't learned. In the Harvard case, my sense is that this is a problem which has not yet been resolved," he adds.

Rooted in Past

But the struggle over sociology's proper direction does not explain all of Harvard's problems, which many say have roots in the more distant past of social relations.

Forty years ago, Harvard's sociology department merged with social psychology and cultural anthropology to become the Department of Social Relations, under the leadership of Talcott Parsons. Parsons, trained in philosophy and intrigued by several areas within the social sciences, envisioned a broad-based department which could transcend individual disciplines in its study of society as a whole.

"Social relations sprung from this vision of a large, inter-disciplinary enterprise that would break down barriers and deal with the larger problems of social and behavioral sciences," says Landes. "There was an emphasis on the positive, unifying, lubricating elements of society."

But when sociology broke off from social relations, it was ill-equipped to be a department of its own, and some of the problems that faced the fledgling department--such as its lack of focus and its small size--still greatly hinder Harvard sociology today, according to a number of sources within the department.

But social relations grew less and less unified, and in 1970, sociology split off to become an independent department.

"It's very hard to have one department containing several disciplines. For example, each discipline has different reference groups. Also, you have to figure out which sub-areas get to make appointments, and so on. Eventually, the hassle just wasn't worth it," Sorenson says.

"During the reign of social relations, there was really an effort on the part of the sociologists to be part of larger disciplines," Vogel says.

But this tendency, while part of the spirit of social relations, has tended to create problems for the department ever since it became independent.

"One of the problems we've had has to do with the fact that many of us are considered peripheral sociologists--we're interested in sociology, but we're also interested in related disciplines," Vogel comments.

Vogel says that he, for example, is interested in East Asian sociology. "I find that it is hard for me to keep up with what is new in mainstream sociology, because I'm so busy keeping up on East Asian matters as well." Vogel notes that peripheral certainly doesn't mean bad. "The most vital, dynamic work is often around the periphery," he says.

But many do not see Vogel's non-mainstream view of sociology in such a positive light.

One professor at another school says "Harvard's department has had, ever since its creation, a large number of people not professionally identified with sociology."

"The department is filled with 'luxury items'," the source adds. "You basically have a set of people, each of whom would be fine in terms of adding color and variety to a regular department, but there's just no regular department to add them to."

Another problem stemming from the social relations era is the sociology department's exceptionally small size.

"When social relations broke up, the psychology element just went back to the psychology department, and the anthropology part just went back to anthropology," Sorenson says. "But the sociologists had no one to go back to, so these few guys had to try and come up with a sociology department by themselves."

"When they created the department, they did not hire sufficient people--they put it together with bits and pieces," says Professor of Sociology James A. Davis. "It was never really viable because of this basic size problem. It has not been able to build up a critical mass, or a consensus," the Winthrop House master says about the 11-member department.

"Other departments have just as many 'luxury items' as we do, but they are three times as big," Sorenson adds.

Sources say that because of these difficulties, the department had a very hard time coming to a consensus on whom to appoint, and that this is one of the main reasons Bok decided to appoint a special committee to examine the situation.

"We've had a hard time identifying and agreeing on people," Vogel says. "If a person is 50 and has published a lot, we'll all agree on how good he is. But we've had a hard time getting a consensus on younger people--if a person is 35 or 40 and has published one book, then there's much more disagreement about how good he is."