To be sure, there is great worth in studying social, or any other, ideas solely for their truth value. This is the only possible justification for Social Studies as a separate concentration. But to justify Social Studies in this way is to expose, further, its redundancy, since there already exists an excellent department at Harvard which is well qualified to do this: it is called Philosophy. In fact, the Social Studies program does not try to be a philosophy, or even a social philosophy, department. Rather, it is a competing sociology department, engaged in the practice of a discredited Anglophile sociology.
Committing resources to this misguided educational mission is bad enough; but the Social Studies program is wasteful in another way that is equally serious. It is a graveyard of academic careers. In the 30 years of its existence, not a single member of its jointly hired junior faculty has received tenure at Harvard. With its excessive teaching demands, even the most organized and brilliant of young scholars have found it nearly imossible to produce at a level that would have given them a passing shot at a tenure slot.
After five, or eight, years of hard, yeoman service to Harvard, these once promising young scholars are tossed out of our community to fend for themselves, their careers treated like so many soiled tissues upon which America's future leaders have cut their intellectual teeth.
Harvard is already experiencing serious problems attracting the best young talent to its faculty because of our tenure policy. The Dean has announced new policy initiatives to change this, which the Sociology Department strongly supports. It is hard to see how any young scholar can take these pronouncements seriously, however, when a program such as Social Studies is allowed to flourish.
Several of us in Sociology have serious reservations, indeed qualms of conscience, recruiting young faculty to this program. There does come a point when one feels guilty of something intellectually sinful, in inviting, and persuading, a talented young scholar to academic suicide.
WE ARE now at a time when we can least afford this waste and misdirection of our best undergraduate and academic talent. The nation is going through a painful structural transition, both externally, in its position in the world, and int ernally, in the changes in its industrial base, its modes of organization, its basic social institutions and its dominant values. This is reflected not only in the poverty of our political culture, but in the seemingly intractable social problems that beset the nation--the problems of chronic poverty, crime, racism, inequality, gender discrimination, an aging population, inadequate public health, and environmental deterioration.
Modern sociological investigations are at the forefront of our efforts to understand what is going on, and to suggest policy options in our attempts to do something about it. It is therefore nothing less than tragic that some of the nation's brightest students are being misled, at its foremost institution of learning, into thinking that they are engaged in studies with a view to understanding their social world, when all they are learning is an outmoded "Channel 2" sociology that has brought that version of the discipline to ruin and disgrace in its British homeland.
Our students deserve better. The nation certainly deserves more.
Orlando Patterson, Professor of Sociology, is Acting Chair of the Sociology Department.