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-