What did Bernice neugarten find when interviewing?

XIX

In the fall of 1949 I returned to my position in the College at the University of Chicago, supplemented by membership on three graduate committees. One, which lasted only a short time, was the Committee on

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Communications, which Bernard Berelson directed. I had already been a participant in the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a contributor to its journal, Public Opinion Quarterly; what I especially enjoyed in AAPOR was the inclusion of nonacademics—members of the professional survey organizations, on whose work I drew for understanding and for secondary analysis, and market researchers, who in my perhaps too vivid imagination generally know more about Americans in our "market segmentation" than do sociologists. I had informal ties with the Committee on Planning, from which I had recruited Martin Meyerson to teach in the College and then, with his wife Margy Meyerson, one of Everett Hughes's students, to work on a small community study in Vermont, which is briefly reported in Faces in the Crowd . From that committee I also recruited Staughton Lynd, who helped me analyze the sources of Thorstein Veblen's economic concepts for a small book I had agreed to write on Veblen.[41]

During my apprenticeship my most important graduate involvement was my membership in the Committee on Human Development, which included Lloyd Warner, Everett Hughes, Robert Havighurst, Allison Davis, Bernice Neugarten, and William Henry.[42] Plans were adumbrated to find a new locale for a community study, and I proposed that we look for a much larger community than the small and provincial Illinois town variously known as Jonesville and Elmtown—a community I defined as manageable in that one could gather forty influentials in a room and they could pretty much decide what was to be done. I recognized that no community was typical, not Granville Hicks's "small town" nor Lloyd Warner's Newburyport (Yankee City, later restudied by Stephan Thernstrom), nor the Lynds' Middletown (later restudied by Theodore Caplow and associates). Nevertheless, after I had briefly visited Springfield, Illinois, we concluded that with its one main "industry" of state government, it would not be a good locale, and Racine, Wisconsin, also with a single major industry, did not appear inviting either. At that time Homer Wadsworth, then director of the Kansas City, Missouri, Association of Trusts and Foundations, one of many organizations of pooled local charities, had set up Community Studies, Inc., to do social research in Kansas City. Havighurst, Hughes, Warner, and I considered Kansas City and connection with Community Studies as a practicable possibility. With the aid of the energetic Homer Wadsworth (formerly a Pittsburgh social worker and executive and now for many years doing similar work in Cleveland) it was possible to meet interested local elites who appeared to be the moving forces of the city.[43]

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After I taught the fall term in Chicago in 1951, Evelyn and I moved to Kansas City, where I was hoping to learn how to conduct a community study with Martin Loeb and four graduate students in sociology (one of them, Warren Peterson, was working on a dissertation of great interest to me about Kansas City school teachers). I was a resident researcher from the supervising Committee on Human Development quartet, and Loeb was the director. The community study was framed around gerontological questions, but I wanted to go beyond those and also beyond the questions of social class that preoccupied Loeb and Richard Coleman, one of Lloyd Warner's students and his later collaborator.[44] For example, I was interested in the religious life of this predominantly Protestant community (so different from overwhelmingly Catholic Buffalo) but was unsuccessful in persuading Loeb and the others to spend their Sunday mornings visiting churches (discreetly of course) to understand, for example, the difference in liturgical practices, Sunday school, and sermons among the three Churches of Christ, one of which in an upper middle-class neighborhood had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the hope of stimulating the group of colleagues, I made field notes of observations and interviews and circulated what I loosely termed "notes on this and that"; but neither Martin Loeb nor the graduate students reciprocated my efforts, and I found that I could neither lead nor follow a project that for a time floundered.[45] I had been made a pro tem member of the Department of Sociology, chaired by the genial and reflective Ernst Mannheim, at the University of Kansas City, then a private institution, and gave a course of evening lectures on sociology.

I also continued a mode of ad hoc inquiry into the varieties of higher education that was to develop into my own specialty in community studies, namely, the community of colleges and universities. I accepted invitations to speak at those types of academic institutions with which I was unfamiliar, and if the Midwest Sociological Society was holding its annual meeting at Indiana University, I would try to go a day ahead or stay a day after its conclusion to meet people at that splendid institution and learn more about its ecological niche in the state (for example, its relationship with Purdue), in the region, and in the country. I accepted invitations to visit sociologists at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and the University of Missouri at Columbia (where I briefly explored the limited legacies Veblen had left during his time there); in Kansas City I met Jesuits teaching at Rockhurst College, and educators experimenting with a modular program at Park College; I had earlier been interested in Stephens College, also in Columbia, Missouri, as an

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aspect of a continuing concern for women's education and the role of women's colleges in that education. These visits were exploratory, not systematic, but forerunners of later dedication to a kind of academic ethnography pursued in brief bouts of fieldwork of the sort Ray Rist once characterized as blitzkrieg ethnography.[46]

In 1954 Everett Hughes, as chairman of the Department of Sociology and with support from Morton Grodzins, then dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, persuaded the department to allow me to join it on a split appointment with the College. However, there was dissent from the demographers, notably from Philip Hauser. He insisted that I not be given the title professor of sociology but retain the one I already had as professor of the social sciences, and in the end that arrangement was agreed on.

But the enmity was a problem for graduate students who worked with Hughes and with me, as well as for nontenured colleagues, particularly Nelson Foote and Anselm Strauss, with whom I shared research projects and to whom I was personally and professionally close. Unrealistically, if understandably, translating acidulous comments by faculty members into actual proscriptions of what would pass muster, some able graduate students feared to write a dissertation without tables in it. Fears increased when Hauser, after a rough political campaign, was elected to the chairmanship in place of Hughes. I sometimes had the dismal experience of having as a doctoral candidate someone who had been a spirited undergraduate and watching that person become more timid and less original as time went by. Meanwhile, I had been engaged in cooperation with Hughes in recruiting members of a group who called themselves the Young Turks at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, of whom a modest and percipient account appears in James Coleman's contribution to this volume. Coleman himself came; we had adjoining offices in the Social Science Research Building, which is so constructed that secretaries do not act as buffers. Everett Hughes was on the other side of me, and communication was frequent among us. I recall my excitement in looking through high-school yearbooks with Coleman and pondering the reasons why in some schools an overlapping group of students not only occupied the elected offices but also edited the yearbook, played in the band, served as cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in other schools there was more of a division of labor. Elihu Katz came, and I brought in Rolf Meyersohn to be research director of the Center for the Study of Leisure, which I established with Ford Foundation support in 1955. Katz, Meyersohn, and I offered seminars

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on mass communication, among other things comparing academic with journalistic ethics in interviewing. Hughes and I traveled to Cambridge and were successful in persuading Peter and Alice Rossi to come to Chicago; they had formerly worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

None of these people had tenure, and if the liveliness facilitated by their arrival was to be maintained, and the combativeness of the department contained, Hughes and I agreed that there needed to be a new, hence not previously involved, chairman. We went to New York to see if we could persuade Leonard Cottrell, Jr., then at the Russell Sage Foundation, to accept a position, if one could be worked out, at Chicago, where we had the strong support of the dean of the Social Science Division. He declined. We made other overtures, which of course had to be to persons of such distinction that there would be no question as to their academic legitimacy. None worked out. Concurrently, in the wake of Hutchins's departure, less autonomy was being granted to the College.

In the summer of 1954, I taught sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard's Summer School. That fall McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, whom I had met and admired, asked me whether he could stop over to see me in Chicago as he would be on his way to Wisconsin; I responded that if he were coming with any thought of persuading me to leave Chicago for Harvard, he should not stop by, and he did not. The intellectual excitement of the University of Chicago outweighed the price it seemed to exact in terms of combative personal and professional relations.

Several years later, however, the balance began to tilt against Chicago, and I quietly began thinking about finding a more equable place. The California Institute of Technology was one place I considered. Cal Tech possessed able faculty in economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. I would have been happy to teach bright undergraduates who might be willing from time to time to relax narrow definitions of what is scientific and examine social life with disciplined subjectivity. Stanford was another possibility. However, when in 1957 Bundy again approached me, he persuaded me to come to a newly created chair where my principal responsibility would be to undergraduates. It was an additional attraction that I would be affiliated with the Department of Social Relations. Even so, I found it very hard to leave the University of Chicago, toward which I had developed intense institutional loyalty, almost a kind of patriotism. It was a wrench to leave colleagues with whom I had worked in teaching and in research, and the many friends

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Evelyn and I had made and who urged me to stay. At Harvard I quickly managed to develop an interdisciplinary cadre to join me in teaching a large course, "American Character and Social Structure," in the General Education program.[47] Rather than returning to Dunster House, I took part in shaping Quincy House, which opened in 1959, a year after my arrival at Harvard, and which, with Henry Kissinger, H. Stuart Hughes, and others as associates, became the most politically engaged of the Houses.

One of the ironies of my shift of locale has been to observe that the University of Chicago survived the student-faculty protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also more recent controversies over issues of race and gender, with its undergraduate curriculum unimpaired, its academic seriousness unquestioned. By moving to Harvard I did not escape departmental controversy! However, the small number of graduate students with whom I have worked and with whom, happily, I continue to work, though emeritus, have not been at risk. In 1976, I became in addition a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Education. Some of the most mature and interesting graduate students with whom I have worked have come from that school.