The Social Studies Program

The Social Studies Program began five years ago as a coalition of malcontents, led by Alexander Gerschenkron, professor of Economics, and Stanley Hoffmann, now professor of Government and chairman of the Program.

Explains Hoffmann: "Given the growing competition for honors within departments, and the requirements of the Gen Ed Program, too few students were taking a satisfactory number of courses related to their discipline of concentration. We were graduating narrow specialists, government majors with no knowledge of Freud and Weber, economics majors with no political science background. We were all concerned that social science itself was losing coherence, splintering into artificial and uncommunicating disciplines."

Hoffmann's distaste for super-specialization was not as acceptable five years ago as it is today. And even those who agreed with him were not unanimous in applauding the new program. Many wished that he and his colleagues would instead focus all their efforts on reforming the departments 'from within."

For two reasons, Hoffmann rejected the idea of concentrating wholly on internal reform. First, and most important, it seemed an impractical idea. The ambitious academic, in search of tenure or professional prestige, shied away from the cross-disciplinary approach, just as he now rebels against teaching Gen Ed courses. To buck this trend in each department was beyond the power and energy of even a Hoffmann or Gerschenkron.

But, if departmental reform had been practical, Hoffmann would still have launched the new program. For he sought more than the broadening of disciplines. As the first pamphlet on Social Studies made clear, "the program does not aim at establishing fields of concentration broader than those provided by the departments but tries on the contrary to make possible intensive work in important and separate areas." Hoffmann was not interested simply in training economists who had read Freud or sociologists fascinated by Hobbes. Rather he wished students to approach concrete social problems as entities in themselves, and to be willing and Hoffmann believed--and still believes--that, whether one is a social scientist or a government official, one's approach to a problem should be dictated not by the guidelines of a particular academic discipline but by the problem itself.

The early Program reflected Hoffmann's point of view. Entering sophomores were expected already to have chosen a broadly conceived "problem" that would eventually flower into a thesis topic. Course requirements for concentration were liberal on paper, even more liberal in practice, and junior tutorial centred around problem area (e.g. "industrial societies") rather than methodological or disciplinary themes. To give all the students a common core of knowledge, however, the Committee on Social studies provided a sophomore tutorial covering the "writings of leading social scientists of the past" and "the problems of method common to the social sciences."

Given a five-year trial period by the Faculty, the Program was limited to 20 undergraduates a year partly because it was experimental, chiefly because the social science departments were reluctant to lose any more of their potential magna and summa students and imaginative tutors.

While its stated goals and general contours remain the same today, the Program has gone through a turbulent five year history. The Committee has revamped the curriculum of sophomore tutorial several times, and may do so again next year. To many students, junior tutorial has been a disappointment. And senior year has brought home to most thesis writers both the administration clumsiness of the Program and the incoherence of the "social studies idea" itself. Nevertheless instructors and students alike agree that the Program is improving rapidly and should definitely continue.

Sophomore Tutorial

sophomore tutorial was appended to the program almost as an afterthought. The Committee assumed that incoming students were ready to begin research on a concrete social problem of their choice and needed only a general introduction to the great writers and concepts of the social sciences.

The Committee soon discovered that, despite the bull slung at application interviews, few sophomores had really selected a research topic, that they needed a well-ordered and rigorous introduction to the Social Sciences. Converted several years ago into a full course for credit, sophomore tutorial has evolved into such an introduction, edging each year further away from an intellectual history approach toward a methodology approach.

This year Hobbes, Locke, Bacon, and other "classics" were dropped from a reading list that now centers almost exclusively around late 19th and 20 the Century commentators. Last year's sophomores learned about the biological concept of culture through reading, in chronological order, Mill, Darwin, Spencer and come. This year the sophomores read only Kluckhohn, treating the concept as a concept rather than as a study in intellectual history.

The new approach has required two sacrifices. First, it has buried the old dream of synthesizing the various disciplines into one social science. Where, earlier, instructors attempted to relate Locke to Smith to Marx to Weber, they now sharply separate sociology from psychology from economics. The goal is no longer the synthesis of disciplines but the clear specification of the validity and usefulness of each one.

The second casualty is political science. Having purged the classical philosophers, the Committee was left with the writings of contemporary political scientists, none of whom agree on the proper boundaries and methods of their discipline. To avoid confusion, Social Studies has largely deleted political science form the sophomore curriculum.

The Committee is not yet satisfied with sophomore tutorial and will surely modify it next year. But, where some students several years ago condemned the course as "utterly confusing and aimless," today's sophomores appear content. And Michael Mazer, a junior year tutor in the Program, found his incoming students last September "fantastically sophisticated and well-prepared in all aspects of social theory and method."

Junior Tutorial

Junior tutorial is another matter. Where the role sophomore tutorial has been defined and redefined, the role of junior tutorial remains totally undefined. The Program's founders wished the first half of the term "to be taught in small groups and to deal with the theoretical and methodological problems of the students' special field." The two goals are inconsistent, for there are a myriad of possible "special fields" while there can only be three groups, given the size of the Program's staff.

To remedy this inconsistency, the Committee attempted to organize all the possible special fields or problems into three roughly defined categories; industrial societies, underdeveloped societies, and international affairs. A tutorial group was set up around each category.

But the inconsistency remains. Junior year tutors still face an insoluble problem. For the sake of coherence, instructors must oblige each student to learn about something called industrial society or underdeveloped society or international affairs. Conversely, to serve the particular interests of each student, they must permit a great deal of individual choice in reading assignments and research. This tension between coherence and liberality has produced some interesting experiments and a certain amount of creative ferment. Junior tutorial has not, however, given most students what they really need: a chance to gather around a single, well-defined topic all the methods picked up in sophomore tutorial and all the factual material learned in regular course work.

Senior Year

Choosing a thesis topic has, thus, become a rather arbitrary process. In theory the student has selected a topic at the beginning of sophomore year. In fact he chooses one in February of his junior year or later, having taken a strictly methodological sophomore tutorial, an ill-defined and largely methodological junior tutorial, and series of courses that are frequently unrelated.

Finding a senior tutor is no easier. The Social Studies staff is not large enough to accommodate the wide variety of thesis topics that develop. Most senior tutors must therefore come from other departments. And, because of the University's financial system, these tutors outside the Program must supervise social studies these without pay. The is not an inviting proposition for most Faculty members, and many seniors find the Great Tutor Search a harrowing process.

But simply to list the program's administrative and curricular bottlenecks is perhaps to lose the forest in the trees. It is less important that a program has problems that that the faculty and students in the program recognize and care about those programs. In Social Studies they do. It is the only department in the College where tutors, professors, and students really talk, debate, and worry together about the education they are giving and receiving.

In the past, the Program has graduated many dissatisfied students, but it has rarely produced apathetic or quietly disgusted ones. When someone complains that he has learned nothing from the Program and proceeds to detail a better reading list for each year's tutorial, one begins to wonder why other departments are not turning out equally "dissatisfied" scholars.