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Wanderlust in Academia by Neil J. Smelser

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Wanderlust in Academia by Neil J. Smelser Wanderlust in Academia by Neil J. Smelser 2 TABLE OF CONENTS Prefatory Note Chapter 1 Beginnings, 1930-1942 Birth and Infancy 2 Family Background 9 The Family Drama 12 Our Gang 19 Early Schooling 21 Early Work 24 Summary Reflections on My Youth 27 Chapter 2 Later Schooling and Pre-professional Education, 1942-1954 Late Grammar School and High School Years 29 Collegiate Years at Harvard 35 The Oxford Years 46 Chapter 3 Graduate Training at Harvard, 1954-58 1954-55: An Impossible, Awful, and Wonderful Year 53 Collaborating with Parsons 54 Slogging Through Graduate School 57 Formulating a Dissertation Topic 60 Life in the Society of Fellows 63 The Thesis, the Book, and Its Reception 65 Recruitment to Berkeley 70 Chapter 4 Early Years at Berkeley, 1958-64 3 Dramatic Career Beginnings 76 Work on Collective Behavior 79 Other Scholarly Enterprises 83 Working with My Brother 87 Editing the American Sociological Review 89 Stirrings of Citizenship 94 Chapter 5 Rupture, Recovery, Broadening, 1964-73 A Psychoanalytic Decade 97 The Free Speech Movement and Its Aftermath 101 Teaching Graduate Students in the Late 1960s and early 1970s 109 The Crumbling of the Sociology Department 112 The National Scene: A Move into Premature Statesmanship 115 Research and Publication in the Chaotic Decade 119 Coda 124 Chapter 6 New Ventures at Home and Abroad, 1973-80 A Splendid Year in Europe 126 A Strange Interlude 130 Two Tough Years as Chair 132 A Brush with Medical Education 139 Enter Erik Erikson and Psychoanalysis Again 140 An Intellectual Misadventure and Setting it Right 142 Abroad Again 144 A Return to “Normalcy” 147 4 Chapter 7 A Decade of Service, 1979-89 “Mr. Report” 151 The Academic Senate 163 Two “Service” Episodes Derived from My Senate Activities 165 A Re-link with Professional Medicine 167 A Policy Voice in the National Academy of Sciences 168 Troubles at Harvard and Yale 173 Lectures on Academic Cultures 175 The International Scene 176 The National Laboratories 179 The Stanford Center 181 The Center for Studies in Higher Education 182 Squeezing in Academic Scholarship 183 Chapter 8 Professional Confirmations, 1989-1996 Paralysis Finished, Paralysis Ended 185 Looking About at Age 60 186 The Office of the President 192 VERIP, the Prospect of Retirement, and the Center 194 Academic Work: Ambivalence Front and Center 197 Other Academic Work: Reflections on Sociology 199 Election to the National Academy and the Presidency of the ASA 202 Chapter 9 The Center Years, 1996-2001 Joining the Center 205 5 Keeping up with the Social Science Establishment 214 Keeping a Finger in the Natural Sciences and Medicine 219 Some Miscellaneous Academic Writing 220 A Festschrift by Any Other Name . 222 Editing the International Encyclopedia 223 Chapter 10 Unemployed but Not Retired, 2001- A Thought on Retirement in General 233 First Plans for Retirement 234 The Social Sciences and Terrorism 235 Back to the Odyssey 240 Adventitious Teaching 242 A Return to General Education 243 John Reed and Usable Social Science 245 A Return to Higher Education (“Reflections”) 249 More on Higher Education: The Kerr Lectures 251 An Unanticipated Joy: My Oral History Project 254 References 256 Appendix A: Curriculum Vitae 269 Appendix B: Bibliography 279 Index 298 6 Prefatory Note I have thought a long time about what word to use to describe this book. I came up with “autobiography,” “memoirs,” “reflections,” “career,” and more complicated terms such as “life search,” “personal history” and “intellectual journey.” I both accepted and rejected each of these terms, because what follows is simultaneously none of them in pure form and all of them in altered form. In one sense I do not like this lack of categorical neatness because it offends my lifelong commitment to intellectual order. In a more important sense, however, I want to stress that my life course—and others’ I daresay—inevitably has elements of indeterminacy, chance, contingency, change of direction, and some disorder. I think that the word “wanderlust” captures all of these facets of personal biography. The “wandering” has been not so much geographical (I stayed at the University of California, Berkeley, for most of my professional career.) Rather it has been through the thickets of the social-science disciplines, and in the organizational, institutional, and political environments of American university life. I have organized the chapters like an intellectual biography, that is, in sequential age periods. For each period, however, I have recorded a different set of major themes, preoccupations, and lines of activity. Some of these themes weave in and out of the different periods. Throughout I have emphasized social and cultural aspects of my life, minimizing intimate personal experiences and problems except as they weave into this emphasis. I am hopeful that readers may learn about the following topics in reading these pages: (a) something of the history of societal preoccupations in the second half of twentieth century America; (b) the penetration of these preoccupations into the history of the social sciences; (c) the story of one scholar’s confrontation and coping with these histories; and (d) how personal biography, social involvements, and cultural history intersect. 7 Chapter 1 Beginnings, 1930-1942 Birth and Infancy All children inherit a myth about their birth. They are not responsible for the myth. No one can remember his or her own birth, despite all speculations about birth trauma and other mystical constructions. A birth-myth is based both on solid facts and on memories and other mental creations of parents (mainly mothers), older siblings, and relatives. The child learns about the myth later, and thereafter takes more responsibility in elaborating its meaning and status in his or her mental life. Such myths become the basis for endless imaginary adventures, referrals, and distortions as life proceeds and preoccupations with life change. As birth-myths go, mine seems on the rich side. The simple facts are that I was born in the middle of the night on July 22, 1930, in a bedroom of a farmhouse outside Kahoka, Missouri, a small town located near the Mississippi River where Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois touch one another. Subsequently I was told repeatedly how unusual I was as a newborn. I weighed ten-and-one-half pounds (my mother was small, weighing around 100 pounds); I had pronounced red hair; and, most unusual, I had two fully exposed lower teeth. So the raw materials for thinking myself a special being were there at the beginning. (When I was about seven years old I met the midwife who delivered me, and she described the event and said she would never forget that birth among her hundreds of other deliveries.) I was a large infant, and, I was told, a late walker; my dad was fond of saying that I spoke full sentences before I could take full steps. At the same time, there were darker sides. For one thing, my two special teeth turned out to be more a problem than a wonder. I was told that they became severely inflamed when I tried to nurse, and that they had to be clipped out at the age of two weeks (payback for my early fame?), leaving a gap that was filled only when my permanent teeth came in at age six. In all events, I had a soup-dribbling early childhood. More gravely, my life was nearly taken back six weeks after I was born. The circumstances were as follows. My family had moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1929, where my father had luckily been appointed to a junior-college teaching position in the year the Great Depression struck. (I once made a backward-in-time calculation that if 8 you subtract nine months from July 22, 1930, there is a good probability that I was conceived on October 24 of 1929, Black Thursday on the stock market. Were my parents, in my fantastic elaboration, ruing that tragic day or celebrating the collapse of capitalism-gone-crazy? Or, more grandiose, was my conception an omen for the tragedy?) I never entertained the more reasonable explanation that my parents decided to have another child because they had recently gained the promise of longer-term economic stability. Later in youth I was told that my parents drove back to Missouri in the early summer of 1930 so I could be born on my mother’s parents’ farm. (In fact, I was born in the same bed as my six-year-older brother, Bill, and indeed in the same bed as my mother—more raw material for my fantastic elaborations.) At the end of that summer, the little family of four made the return trip to Phoenix. While we were driving outside Kansas City, our car was struck head-on by another driven by an inebriated, uninsured driver. We had no seat belts in those days, obviously. In the crash my older brother Bill was thrown forward and cut his head on the broken windshield, yielding a life-long scar. I was in a baby-basket on my mother’s lap in the front seat, and, it is told, I would also have been thrown forward in the car, perhaps with fatal results, if my mother had not been grasping the basket and me tightly as the collision was looming. Later in my childhood another profound birth-and-death event was related to me. About three years after Bill was born (and three years before my birth), my mother conceived a child but lost it through miscarriage. The fetus was a girl. By the time I learned of the event it was past history and reported without the great sadness it surely occasioned.
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