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."