Social Relations at Harvard After Seventeen Years: Problems, Successes and a Highly Uncertain Future

Towards the end of the 1930's Harvard's told Psychology Department found itself divided four to three on every question. The four were E.G. Boring, S.S. Stevens, John G. Beebe-Center, and Karl S. Lashley -- all experimentalists interested in the animal or physiological psychology. By winning every vote they determined the nature of examinations in the field, the selection of graduate students, and all important policies of the department.

The other three were Gordon W. Allport, Robert W. White, and Henry A. Murray, who, by contrast, concerned themselves with personality and its relation to social environment. Frustrated at every point by a department that was both professionally and personally hostile, the minority considered secession. Two members of other departments encouraged them: Clyde Kluckhohn in Anthropology and Talcott Parsons in Sociology. At several meetings in 1940, this little group (whose members came to call themselves "The Conspirators") drew plans for a new department to include Sociology (which had a staff of only three), Kluckhohn, and the disgruntled psychologists.

Theory of Human Behavior

Although it appeared to develop in response to professional antagonisms, the Conspiracy was motivated more fundamentally by the desire to forge a comprehensive theory of human behavior through the joint efforts of clinical and social psychologists, social anthropologists, and sociologists. Yale's Institute of Human Relations had tired a similar experiment in the thirties. The Rockefeller Foundation constructed a big building in New Haven for all of Yale's behavioral scientists, hoping that putting them together would lead to fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation. It didn't Each group went it own way and not until the Rockefeller Foundation threatened to cut off the Institute's funds were there any successful attempts at collaboration.

The Institute of Human Relations had little influence on the planning of Social Relations at Harvard since the dominating theorist at Yale was a student of animal learning. The Conspirator had, in Murray's words, "expelled animal psychology." The new department clearly leaned away from the natural sciences and toward philosophy and the social sciences; this was a logical result of the development of behavioral studies at Harvard.

Until 1933, courses in psychology were offered under a Department of Philosophy and Psychology. E. G. Boring, who felt a "mission to rescue Harvard psychology from the philosophers," was largely responsible for the creation of an independent Department of Psychology, and under his direction, psychological studies at Harvard concentrated for a few years on perception and animal learning. But the reorganization of behavioral science disciplines into the Social Relations Department restored the traditionally close ties between Psychology and Philosophy.

Interdisciplinary Education

The founding of Social Relations was distinguished by a vigorous enthusiasm for an experiment in interdisciplinary education, and the vision which guided the planners of the new department was every bit as exciting as that which inspired their contemporaries, the designers of Harvard's General Education program. In addition to their goal of drafting a general theory of human behavior, the social relationists also set out to broaden the intellectual base of the behavioral sciences. The founders of the Department were eminently qualified for these undertakings: Murray, trained in medicine and psychoanalysis, was also an eminent Melville scholar; Kluckhohn had studied classics before he took up cultural anthropology; Allport traced his roots at Harvard back to the old Department of Social Ethics; and Parsons' interests extended beyond orthodox sociology to economics and politics.

Not everyone in the University, however, shared the pioneering spirit of these men. President Conant (who loathed psychoanalysis) showed little interest in the proposals for a new department, and it was only when Paul Buck became Provost during the War that the Administration gave the idea serious consideration. With the enrollment of hundreds of veterans at the College after 1945, there was for the first time in the University's history a great demand by students for courses in clinical and social psychology -- the kinds of psychology young people had met with in the armed services. ON January 29, 1946 the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to establish the Department of Social Relations and, at the same time the Provost set up the Laboratory of Social Relations as an independent research facility. The experimental psychologists, losing a good bit of their old staff but allowed to keep the name "Psychology Department" for themselves, moved to the basement of Memorial Hall where S. S. Stevens had designed for them the Psychological Laboratories.

The Soc Rel Department has become one of the largest, richest, and most influential at Harvard. It has been vigorously criticized by persons in other fields, has harbored some of the most controversial research at the University, and through the past 17 years has remained an anomaly--something like a perfect vacuum. All the trends not only in modern education but also at Harvard have been toward increased specialization; Social Relations declared itself interdisciplinary and unspecialized from the start, and though in 1963 it isn't what it used to be, it has held out against extraordinary pressures toward fragmentation.

The Problems

The Department today has very serious administrative problems and goes through more internal upheavals than are good for it. Social Relations also maintains a most precarious equilibrium: in attempting to balance the proper amount of interdisciplinary pioneering and in trying to divide its energies equally between undergraduates and graduates, the Department puts itself in a position where the slightest changes in prevailing conditions require complete re-evaluation of the whole program.

Very soon, the greatest change ever to hit the Department will come along: in the Fall of 1964 the personnel of all the disconnected branches of Social Relations (which now occupy more than a dozen separate buildings throughout Cambridge) as well as the Memorial Hall psychologists will be packed together into the William James Center for the Behavioral Sciences on Divinity Avenue. At Yale, when the same sorts of people were forced to have coffee with one another, the result was chaos and disunity. No one has the slightest notion of what will happen on Divinity Avenue, but the James Center has already brought into focus all of the accomplishments and problems of Social Relations and has led everyone in the Department to reflect on the future of Harvard's behavioral studies.

Today Social Relations has the third-largest enrollment in the College; it has grown steadily since 1954, and had 329 undergraduates this year.

Critics often explain the growth of Soc Rel by charging that the Department is a "gut." They claim concentration in Social Relations is far less difficult than in other fields, especially since one can take courses in which an honors grade may be had almost without effort. In fact, however, the freshman seminar program, which exposes many students to behavioral science for the first time, and extremely popular General Education courses taught by David Riesman and Erik Erikson have been the greatest factors in drawing freshmen and sophomores to So cial Relations. These courses were not planned as recruiting ventures, but they have had that effect.

Unorthodox Teaching

Undergraduates as well as Faculty members seem to think Soc Rel is a gut department. One reason is that the Department's teaching methods are often unorthodox, relying on combinations of lecture and group discussion. As a result, the courses seem informal and nonchalant to those used to more conventional procedures. Moreover, some members of the department think that three-hour exams are inadequate grading devices; hence there are a few courses where one can act out a "role" for his final grade or turn in a sheaf of cartoons on two-person group interactions instead of writing an examination. Finally, and most important, much of the work a student encounters in the Dement is so engaging that he does not think of it as work at all.

Florence Kluckhohn's Social Relations 138 (Field Methods in Sociological Research) provides a good illustration of this last point. The course attempts to "introduce the student to the practical and theoretical problems of field research"; it requires the student to go out on his own in the greater Boston area and interview representatives of various ethnic groups. The raw material gathered must then be digested and written up in prescribed form. Everyone who has taken the course (and Mrs. Kluckhohn) agrees that it demands a great deal of time and work, but none of the students objects to any of it because all find it completely fascinating. Mrs. Kluckhohn, herself often worries that she asks much of the people in her course, but she has never gotten complaints.

At the same time she is consistently impressed with the high quality of the work turned in to her. She has said many times that she has "the highest respect" for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates. "They work as hard as they can, help each other magnificently, and hand in first-rate research material."

Concern for Undergrads

Mrs. Kluckhohn's reaction to undergraduates typifies a concern for College students that distinguishes Social Relations from most other departments. The Soc Rel staff goes out of its way to make life pleasant for its undergraduate concentrators; it opens all of its facilities to them, offers tutorial to as many as it can, and makes it as easy as possible for them to enter the Honors program. While other departments--particularly English--have rigidly segregated Honors students from non-Honors students and restricted credit tutorial on the basis of rank list standing, Social Relations had opened Honors and tutorial to more and more concentrators.

It is, then, not surprising that most undergraduates in Soc Rel are perfectly happy with their choice of a department. It is harder to find the same enthusiasm among undergraduates in Psychology, for the Psychology Department is centered around graduate students and research and does very little to brighten the College days of its few undergraduate concentrators.

The Psychology library underneath Memorial Hall, for example, is maintained as a research library--quite adequate for the teaching staff, but hardly convenient for undergraduates. In consequence, some Soc Rel people forsee friction between the two departments when they move into the Behavioral Sciences Center. Already Memorial Hall has indicated its desire to keep undergraduates out of the Center's common rooms and to lock up all its facilities in the evening. Soc Rel, predictably, wants to give undergraduates free run of the building, day or night. This problem is a simple physical one: space must be allocated in such a way that Psychology can lock itself up at 5 p.m. without shutting off access to any of the Social Relations areas.

Influential

Soc Rel has been as successful with its graduate students as its undergraduates. The department has produced over 300 Ph.D.'s, who have been in demand throughout the country, particularly to fill interdisciplinary posts in behavioral science at other universities. A further measure of the department's success is that most of its Ph.D. these have been effectively interdisciplinary, showing broad perspectives on the field. As Allport has said: "We have guided our own students and the whole country toward a less parochial view of psychology and social science. Harvard is now the most influential university in the attempt to form a coherent theory of behavioral science." Of Soc Rel's many problems the most immediate is administrative. The department is as large as some small colleges and demands an elaborate governing organization. But of its huge staff (114), few devote their full energies to the department. Some, like Erikson and Riesman, are involved in the General Education program. Others, like Jerome S. Bruner, who has his Center for Cognitive Studies, give most of their efforts to outside projects. Still others, like Alex Inkeles and Laurence Wylie hold secondary appointments that consume much of their time. This leaves few persons to sit in on committees and handle routine department business. In addition the chairman's job (now held by David C. McClelland) like that of the Director of the Social Relations Laboratory (Robert F. Bales) has become to much for one man. The Department is so spread out, with so many subdivisions and semi-autonomous agencies under its supervision that it cannot be managed as if it were an ordinary unit of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The roots of these difficulties are the ideas of the founders of the Department. The attempt at broad interdisciplinary work in a field as vast as behavioral science demands an extensive diffuse academic organization, and the more the lines between dis-S-1