Preferred Citation: Berger, Bennett M., editor Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft067nb02h/


 
Chapter Three— Columbia in the 1950s

Chapter Three—
Columbia in the 1950s

James S. Coleman

Introduction

When at the age of twenty-five I left a job as a chemist at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and took on a new life, the transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin, who lived far away in the Midwest and South) I shed all prior associations. The resocialization I underwent at Columbia University from 1951 to 1955 was intense; after that resocialization, I was a different person, with different goals, headed in a different direction.

It could be put differently; my life can be divided into two parts: before I first entered Fayerweather Hall (the building in which sociology is housed at Columbia), and after Fayerweather. I could, then, write about before Fayerweather to give a sense of how the first twenty-five years led me there. But what went on in Fayerweather Hall and vicinity during this four-year period is of more general interest, for during those years Columbia's importance for sociology was at its peak. Thus, to write about them is to do more than give a view of the resocialization that shaped my direction as a sociologist. It is to tell something about an important part of the history of the discipline at Columbia in the early 1950s.

Recognizing this, I will concentrate in this essay on that four-year period, which generated the orientations I had when I left Columbia. I will approach this examination by abstracting, successively, five kinds of information from the concrete reality that was sociology at Columbia


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from 1951 to 1955. The first three are necessary to understand what was going on at Columbia in sociology. The fourth and fifth give additional information relevant to my own development.

1. I will try to describe the social system of sociology at Columbia, the loci of power and authority, the distribution of attention, the status system, and the allocation of rewards.

2. Analytically distinct from the social system are the personalities of certain Columbia professors, in particular Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. While much can be understood about sociology at Columbia by knowing the social structure, more is revealed by learning something about the modus operandi of its two principal figures, Lazarsfeld and Merton.

3. But there was simultaneously a content to sociology at Columbia. To describe it constitutes a kind of history of ideas or sociology of knowledge to give an understanding of the relations, not between persons, but between ideas. It is this content, this interplay of ideas, that had special importance in shaping my (and others') work in subsequent years.

4. Certain of the ideas current in the Columbia sociology department in the early 1950s were especially important for me; to understand my intellectual development at Columbia requires knowing something about them.

5. Finally, I will try to describe my own trajectory through the social system of Columbia, entering as a neophyte and leaving as a professional sociologist.

To proceed in this way rather than more anecdotally and unsystematically may result in some redundancy and may even be less interesting. But I would not attempt such an enterprise without taking it as a sociological challenge, a challenge to describe and analyze the functioning of a social system.

The Social System of Columbia Sociology, 1951–55

In June 1951 I arrived at the steps of Fayerweather Hall to enroll in a course on the professions given by Everett C. Hughes, a summer visitor from the University of Chicago, and one on political sociology given by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Columbia graduate newly returned as an assis-


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tant professor. Those courses, my first in sociology, began to give me a sense of what the discipline was about. But it was not until fall that I got a sense of the social system of sociology at Columbia, for it was then that the department emerged from its summer hibernation. To a new student the social system of sociology at Columbia first appeared to be a planetary system with Robert K. Merton as the shining sun around which all revolved. The most intellectual of the graduate students from the hothouse that is New York City (who could brandish quotes from obscure authors whose very names were unknown to me, a chemical engineer from the provinces) thronged to Merton, crowding each lecture and hanging on each word. I followed at a respectful distance, entranced and enamored. Only slowly it became apparent that someone else was important as well, Paul Lazarsfeld, whose domain was not a lecture room in Fayerweather but the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Much later it became evident that the system was in fact governed by a triumvirate. Robert S. Lynd was the hidden member. Robert MacIver, a major figure in the discipline, but by then retired, continued to have an office in the Department of Government but played no role in a sociology student's life. There were a number of others, but in the peculiar social system of Columbia sociology they seemed to matter little, or mattered only to those who themselves seemed to matter little: C. Wright Mills in the college, William Goode in general studies, Theodore Abel, William Casey (with his own brand of social theory, shared by no one else), Kingsley Davis, Bernhard Stern, and the young assistant professors, Lipset and Herbert Hyman. The list may be as startling to others as it is to me as I read over it, for it includes not only persons whose importance to the discipline has subsequently become great (Goode, Lipset, and Hyman), but also some whose importance even at the time was great (C. Wright Mills and Kingsley Davis).

The authority of each member of this triumvirate gained legitimacy from a different source. Merton's authority gained its legitimacy first from the students, through the extraordinary attraction of his lectures, and secondarily from the strength of his position in the discipline, which was recognized by the university administration. Lazarsfeld's arose also from students, but not primarily through his teaching in formal courses. It arose, rather, from the quantity of empirical research he generated and his leadership of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which provided an institutional base for the research. But that base itself had only tenuous acceptance by the university. Such applied research as market research and communications research for radio networks,


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magazine publishers, and other business firms was an upstart activity with which traditional Columbia administrators were uneasy. Merton, by accepting, participating in, and sharing the governance of the bureau, was, it seemed, Lazarsfeld's protector, a shield against the university administration.

Lynd's rumored power was, from the students' point of view, the strangest of all because he held almost no interest for students and was not active in research. (I heard of his importance only indirectly, from Lipset, who was still close to graduate students in age and not far removed in status.) It seemed, according to students' second-hand information, to result entirely from the deference paid by Merton and Lazarsfeld to his views, thus deriving in the end from the bases of legitimacy that gave them their authority. (I attended a few lectures in a course of his one semester, but these were hortatory, more closely related to the style of the midwestern evangelists that were part of his background [and mine] than to that of a professor engaged in a search for knowledge. He preached his particular brand of homegrown leftism and had few student converts.)

It is relevant, in describing the concentration of power in this social system, to note the numbers of graduate students. If we had been fewer in number, there might have been less concentration. But in my year about one hundred graduate students were admitted. We were still part of the war-generated backlog, slowly making our way through the educational system. Indeed, for my first semester or so at Columbia I still had some GI bill benefits remaining. (The next year the incoming class was limited to fifty, and I congratulated myself on having entered when I did since I might not have made it after the limitation was imposed. I had applied also to Michigan and Harvard but was accepted only at Columbia.)

Certainly matters must have been more complex than this simple picture I have presented. Kingsley Davis (who left for Berkeley while I was at Columbia) had a smaller power base through a large Air Force contract which employed some students interested in demography. But his attractiveness was limited to the small set of demographically inclined students and was not spread throughout the student body, as was that of Merton and Lazarsfeld. He was outside the closed tripartite structure of power. (I took a course on the family from Davis but was unnerved by what I saw as his blunt manner. For example, in a draft of a term paper I used the growth in year-to-year variation in suicide rates to obtain a measure of the increasing interdependence [or common depen-


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dence on the same events] of apparently independent decisions of individuals. But I was afraid of a possibly caustic response to such a venturesome paper and instead submitted another, nonempirical paper, on which I received the comment, "A great deal of logic-chopping.")

To a student coming into Columbia, then, there were really only two persons at the apex, two persons whose attention one must try to get, two persons whose judgments mattered above all—Merton and Lazarsfeld. This concentration of attention was intensified by another fact as well: to the graduate student, there was no discipline of sociology outside Columbia. Instead we saw a self-confidence, a looking inward coupled with inattention to the outside. There was a sociological literature of some importance, a literature to which Merton especially directed our attention, but except for the work of Talcott Parsons, which Merton admitted to it, that literature was all written by Europeans no longer alive. The effective absence of a discipline west of the Hudson River was most strongly emphasized by the absence of interest in reading or publishing in the journals. Graduate students were not encouraged to read the professional journals; no self-respecting graduate student at Columbia entertained the thought of journal publication as a goal. To us, Lazarsfeld and Merton had no such interests (no matter that they did publish in the journals); the world of sociology was confined to Columbia. Graduate students followed suit, with no interest other than having a paper read by Merton or Lazarsfeld. Once that had occurred, there was little interest in having it read by others.

The interest of graduate students in gaining the attention of Merton and Lazarsfeld was strengthened by the imbalance in the supply of, and demand for, their attention. Appointments to see either during his office hours were made weeks in advance. The line outside Merton's door offered recurrent testimony to this imbalance. By contrast, a student could see and talk to other faculty, if not at will, at least with far less difficulty.

This small social system, with its abundance of eager and impatient graduate students, its periphery of young and also-ran faculty, and the concentration of attention on the two major figures in the department, had some special characteristics. One of them was the concentration of graduate-student prestige in only a few students. In my second year, at the Bureau's Christmas party, someone pointed out Maurice Stein, a figure whom I knew only by reputation—at the top of the heap a year earlier—who had returned to bask in his graduate-student glory. I stood in awe at the fringes and watched as he received homage.


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But reputations were unstable and could rise or fall quickly on the basis of one piece of work liked or disliked by Merton or Lazarsfeld. Hanan Selvin, in a cohort ahead of me, and the reader of my paper in Merton's lecture course the first semester, was one of the few favored by both Lazarsfeld and Merton and had an especially high reputation. But once, when he produced something Lazarsfeld or Merton found wanting, his reputation plummeted, and his lustre disappeared for a time; he was never completely to regain his lofty position. And there were those who, though potentially very good, never caught the attention of either Lazarsfeld or Merton and remained among the mass of graduate students who would have to make their reputations, if at all, after they left Columbia.

Students who worked with faculty other than Merton and Lazarsfeld were less neglected, but their reputations never soared (nor plummeted) as did those of Merton and Lazarsfeld favorites. Martin Trow is a good example. He and I worked together with Lipset intensively in analyzing the data of the ITU (International Typographical Union) study, and he largely managed the project. He was a course assistant for Mills as well. But he never worked closely with Merton or Lazarsfeld. Even though as the Union Democracy manuscript progressed, it began to have an internal reputation as something of interest, Trow never gained the reputational heights while in graduate school. His reputation came only later. Lazarsfeld once asked me about Trow as we were riding in a taxi, near the end of my Columbia period, after a frenetic meeting characteristic of his style. He knew me and my work, and knew Lipset and his work, but wondered about Trow, whose years at Columbia had failed to give Lazarsfeld any sense of his abilities.

There was another phenomenon as well. A number of sociologists with high status in the system were neither graduate students nor faculty but were brought by Lazarsfeld, Merton, or Davis to work on one of the projects. They included Renee Fox, Herbert Menzel, Natalie Rogoff, Samuel Bloom, and Duncan Luce. For some of these young social scientists the postdoctoral years at Columbia played a central role in their careers.

During my stay at Columbia the social structure was undergoing a kind of change. Earlier Lazarsfeld's students and Merton's students had been more distinct and separate. Many of Lazarsfeld's, trained in audience and market research through his projects at the Bureau, had never written dissertations and were employed in the emergent market research industry in New York; few entered academic sociology. The


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stellar graduates had been students of Merton or Lynd. They were products of the prewar intellectual ferment that was largely Jewish, largely from New York high schools and City College. They had constituted the first postwar cohorts at Columbia; they included Lipset, Philip Selznick, Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser and Rose Coser, Suzanne Keller, and Peter Blau. Maurice Stein, who left Columbia as I arrived, was a remnant of those cohorts. There were rumors of others, such as Seymour Fiddle—mysterious, with an unbounded reputation but some incapacitating flaw. (He came in the night, it was said, to practice his magic in a course in general studies.)

Peter Rossi was of that crowd, but he was a Lazarsfeld student and reflected the beginnings of Lazarsfeld's move toward academic respectability. The succeeding cohorts, mine included, lacked the rich ideological, historical, and intellectual pre-graduate-school background possessed by those who had grown up in New York high schools in the late thirties. Hanan Selvin, who was my age but came to Columbia before me, was one of the earliest Lazarsfeld-Merton students, a coeditor of a reader in bureaucracy with Merton but writing his dissertation under Lazarsfeld. Patricia Kendall was another. What was happening about the time I arrived at Columbia was a merging of two streams of activity that had been rather distinct. Lazarsfeld was becoming more academic, Merton was becoming more quantitatively empirical. The Bureau provided the context and the facilities for Merton's shift, and its increasing acceptance by Columbia (it moved uptown to Columbia, at 117th Street, shortly before my arrival) provided the setting for Lazarsfeld's.

During my stay the Bureau became increasingly important to sociology at Columbia. There Lazarsfeld began the Behavioral Models Project with an Office of Naval Research grant, brought Duncan Luce from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, enticed Theodore Anderson and Howard Raiffa from the Department of Mathematical Statistics at Columbia (Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions was born in this project). With the project they initiated an activity less stimulating, less frenetic, less innovative, but more like that of an academic research institute than the pickup projects in audience research that had built the bureau. Merton began the extensive and prestigious medical-school project with George Reader, Patricia Kendall, and Renee Fox. Kingsley Davis had his Air Force project in methodological research. Seminars involving graduate students and postdoctoral research associates were created around such projects as the medical-school project. In all these ways the Bureau was becoming respectable.


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Much of this change took place shortly before I arrived. But the Bureau's importance to sociology at Columbia continued to grow during my stay. That growth can perhaps best be illustrated by a development that, though it was temporary and depended on particular persons, exemplified the change. It was the formation of what Lazarsfeld and Merton called "Charlie Glock's Young Turks" and what the members themselves called "the traditions group."

Around 1953 Lazarsfeld turned over directorship of the Bureau to Charles Glock and became less active in Bureau affairs. Glock was not a dynamic figure, but there were a number of restless people, all involved in one way or another in Bureau projects. I was working with Lipset and Trow on the ITU project and occasionally on one or more of Lazarsfeld's projects; Elihu Katz was working on the Decatur study (which produced Personal Influence ), Herbert Menzel on concepts and indices, Lee Wiggins on Lazarsfeld's panel project, Philip Ennis on a popular-music project, and Rolf Meyerson on research in popular culture. Lazarsfeld had plucked William McPhee from a local polling organization in Denver to work with him and Bernard Berelson on the Elmira study (which produced Voting ). We all needed research projects to support us, and without Lazarsfeld to generate the small-market research and mass-communications projects on which earlier cohorts of graduate students had thrived, we set out on our own, with McPhee as the popular leader and instigator. We held a weekly seminar, circulated memos to one another about potential projects in mass culture, uses and gratifications of the mass media, contextual analysis, and methodological issues in panel studies. We saw ourselves not as working in the established traditions of Bureau studies but as starting new traditions. Despite our declarations of independence (I once wrote a first draft of a manifesto for the group, and McPhee wrote a programmatic paper on research in mass dynamics), Lazarsfeld found this enterprise interesting, and once or twice he attended the seminar as an observer. His and Merton's interest in it, and the attention of others that that interest generated, increased for us the importance of our enterprise. We gained the confidence of our own ideas, the sense that we were initiators, sociologists inventing the future of sociology. For us, there was no sociology east of Morningside Drive nor west of Broadway; and the Lazarsfeld-Merton domain between these limits was showing signs of aging. We saw ourselves as successors with our own ideas (even though grounded in theirs).


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The Power of Two Personalities

Though it was not quite proper to take Merton's course in theory as a beginning graduate student, I managed to do so in the fall of my first year. I found myself in a class of students from earlier cohorts; the classroom was completely full, with students sometimes sitting on the windowsills. Merton would enter and begin a kind of rhapsody. All were entranced. A few dared occasionally to ask questions. I did not.

What did Merton do? For all of us, he revealed a vision of sociology as a challenge to the intellect. He worked in detail through Durkheim's Suicide, showing the excitement of the problem and the methodical way Durkheim set about examining it. He demonstrated how Durkheim used the aggregate data that were available to examine deep questions about the psychic state of members of a social system—questions that could only be answered conclusively by disaggregated data but were turned this way and that until Durkheim had enough kinds of data to make firm inferences about the psychological states induced by social structure.

Merton's lectures were widely known. Nonsociologists from other parts of the city would steal into the room just to listen. Students, on meeting sociologists from other universities who knew him only through his writings, would smile condescendingly, armed with the secret knowledge that came only through presence at the lectures themselves. The word to describe his effect is one whose meaning he taught us, charisma, but that word is so loosely used that it fails to convey a sense of the almost electrical charge that pervaded those lectures.

Merton was excited by the publication in the fall of 1951 of Talcott Parsons's Social System, which he saw as the theoretical guide to the future of sociology. But when he set us to reading it, he demanded that we locate in the text every empirical generalization, every proposition, and every definition. In the end the enterprise—for me, at least—defeated the original goal, for I found definition after definition, with few empirical generalizations and few propositions that could be tested and confirmed or disconfirmed. Merton, by his demands that we analyze the text sentence by sentence, showed me that Parsons had designed a set of categories, a classification scheme, that might or might not be useful but could hardly be tested.

A part of Merton's impact lay in both the personal and professional distance he maintained and in the unreachable goal of sociological truth


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he held out. He brooked no compromise; his standards demanded perfection in what we did. A few of us formed a study group to discover together the precise meanings we fumbled for alone. He visited us once, and we were in awe, taking every comment as a command from above. We read, over and over, his essays in Social Theory and Social Structure . Merton held out to us a vision of a sociology that could understand society. That understanding, of which only the barest outlines had been discovered, lay in the future, and if we persevered, we might be part of that future. He captured us for sociology, even those who had come to sociology merely to be journeymen. He showed us that sociology could be—indeed, was—an intellectual challenge. We were affected by his singleness of purpose and his dedication to that challenge.

But it was important not to get too close. Some who attempted to work with Merton found themselves paralyzed by the incisiveness of his mind. One student reported in frustration that in writing a thesis for Merton, he felt a presence continuously perched on his shoulder, watching every sentence put down on paper, ready to pounce on the slightest fault.

I was not, during my time at Columbia, immobilized by this penetrating intelligence. In my third or fourth year I was a course assistant for him (not in the large theory course but in another), taking notes on his lectures, typing them up, and discussing them with him occasionally over lunch at the faculty club. On those occasions I continued to feel the awe of those first days, but he was perhaps more gentle with me, sensing my vulnerability. Once, as an outgrowth of Lazarsfeld's project on concepts and indices in the social sciences, I worked on a paper for him on the concept of social isolation and its use by social theorists. The paper was never completed in final form, and remained a learning exercise. Unlike Lazarsfeld's projects, for which a product was urgently needed to fill a specific niche, sometimes for a client, papers for Merton were finished for their own sake, or to complete a thesis, and the goal could stretch out into the indefinite future.

Much later, after I had left Columbia, I did feel the full thrust of Merton's critical intelligence. He and Robert Nisbet were gathering materials for Contemporary Social Problems, and had asked me to write a chapter on community disorganization. To gain the necessary state of mind to organize and develop the structure of the chapter, I went to the St. James Hotel at Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore (I was teaching at Johns Hopkins at the time) and isolated myself from the world for four days while I wrestled with the problem and finally devel-


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oped an outline for the chapter. When I finally completed it some weeks later and felt satisfied with the result, I sent it to Merton and Nisbet for editorial comments and critique. The single-spaced, many-paged criticism I soon received from Merton devastated me—not merely because of the depth of his criticism but also because, agreeing with most of it, I felt that my shallowness of thought and weakness of documentation lay wholly exposed. I was ashamed of the manuscript, angry at myself, angry at Merton. I was unable to touch the manuscript, able only to write Nisbet (certainly not Merton) that I had to resign the task, that there was obviously nothing I could do to the manuscript to make it acceptable. But through nurturance, reassurance, and urging, Nisbet induced me to go back to the manuscript, deal with the criticisms as best I could, and send him the result. I did so, and the chapter became part of the book.

My first impression, that fall of 1951, that Merton was the center of Columbia's sociological universe was approximately correct, though I was to modify that impression later. It was Merton who defined sociology as a challenge worthy of the intellect, a pursuit at least equal to any other in the university. He created the intellectual tension that energized students in pursuit of the chalice of sociology.

Lazarsfeld, however, was no less important. I had originally applied to Columbia because of someone there named Lazarsfeld or Lasswell—I was not sure which—whose work I had read in a course in social psychology I was taking in evening school. (I had never taken a course in sociology and had never heard of Merton.) In the spring of 1952, my second semester at Columbia, Paul Lazarsfeld accosted me for the first time. I had been in a methods course of his, which was uneventful. The problem he raised with me was that there was a biophysicist from the University of Chicago, Nicolas Rashevsky, whom he had invited to give a lecture in a series on mathematical sociology the year before, and now, for the book Lazarsfeld was attempting to put together from the lecture series, Rashevsky had written up his lectures, in Lazarsfeld's opinion unintelligibly. He had asked Allen Birnbaum, a Ph.D. student in statistics, to write an intelligible exposition of Rashevsky but did not like what Birnbaum had done. Could I give it a try over the summer? We talked, he outlined what he wanted, and for the first time ever in the educational system I felt that someone had given me a responsible task to do. We met twice during the summer—once at a typical Lazarsfeld breakfast meeting in a hotel where he briefly alighted on his return from Europe—and I delivered the product he wanted at the end of the sum-


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mer. Lazarsfeld's project was now complete—Rashevsky was exposited, and he could send the book to the publisher.

The incident is characteristic in one way especially: Lazarsfeld did not simply accept the paper of this distinguished mathematical biophysicist. It was unintelligible to him, and he wanted each of the papers in that book (which became Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences ) to teach him something. Until it did so, he was not willing to publish Rashevsky's lectures. Indeed, in many respects one could characterize part of Columbia at the time—certainly in mathematical sociology and to a considerable extent in Lazarsfeld's other areas of interest—as a collection of people he had gathered around himself for the purpose of teaching him. His appetite for learning—and thus for people—was insatiable. He brought the economist William Baumol from Princeton to a seminar to teach him how differential equations could be adapted to study the dynamics of qualitative attributes—and then remained unsatisfied. He brought the philosopher Gustave Bergman from the Midwest to Hanover, New Hampshire, to teach him about intervening variables and then so pestered him with insistent questions that Bergman, a round little man, ended up rolling on the floor, flailing with arms and legs in helpless frustration. He brought Harold Kelly, John Thibaut, and Leon Festinger to Hanover to teach him about how Lewinian and other social psychologies constructed concepts. He brought William Vickrey from the other side of the Columbia campus to teach him how economists treat the concept of utility. He listened intently to his students—Lee Wiggins, Allen Barton, Elihu Katz, Hanan Selvin, William McPhee—whenever he thought he could learn from them. He invaded the statistics department and got Theodore Anderson to teach him about Markov chains. He brought Duncan Luce and Gerald Thompson to work on mathematical problems he could not solve. He brought Merrill Flood from Rand and, unawed by Flood's previous distinguished work, immediately found Flood uninteresting.

The attention of those in Lazarsfeld's orbit, unconcerned about the outside sociological world, was directed to problems. Each was concerned only with convincing Lazarsfeld that he had solved one of the problems that Lazarsfeld had set. Each of us after we left (and I write now only of those who did, for some found it exceedingly difficult to break away from the attractive forces that the combination of Merton and Lazarsfeld constituted, and some were institutionally affixed to Columbia) encountered what seemed at first a strange and far less exciting world outside. We found no one in the new environment who cared


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as Lazarsfeld did. If there was a sociological community out there, it seemed a distant and impersonal one. No one seemed as interested as he in solving problems, and certainly no one was as interested in the problems that anyone else might solve.

Despite all this, many of us around Lazarsfeld felt extreme frustration because at times the problems themselves appeared spurious or unimportant. Lazarsfeld was not satisfied to see his protégés and colleagues solve problems that others outside considered important but was only satisfied when a problem he considered important was solved—and solved in a way that made sense to him.

Toward the end of my time at Columbia, in 1954, I experienced this insistence. Lazarsfeld showed me a sheaf of extended quotations from various qualitative studies, mostly community studies, many from the Chicago school of Robert E. Park, such as Black Metropolis and The Gold Coast and the Slum , and some from an anthropological tradition. These quotations were examples of what Lazarsfeld called global indicators—indicators of some concept or property of the community or the neighborhood that could not be derived from individuals by aggregation. They had been gathered by members of a seminar that he and Patricia Kendall had led, and he wanted somehow to systematize them, to create a transmissible method out of what had been art. Lazarsfeld had a continuing interest in such global indicators, an interest that he describes in "Notes on the History of Concept Formation," one of the essays that appeared in his Qualitative Analysis (1972). It was this interest that led him to induce colleagues and students to examine work they would never otherwise have looked at. For example, with this sheaf of global indicators he directed me to read such diverse authors as Wilhelm Dilthey (on the characterization of a cultural system), Harold Guetzkow (on properties of a group), and Meyer Shapiro (on the use of art to characterize the style of a period).

In this case, as in many others, Lazarsfeld saw the person he put to work (and I was not the first with this problem) as an extension of himself. When the work I did failed to reflect his ideas, he argued with me at length over it. He could not be persuaded that the way I had done it was right; he did not want to see it published as I had conceived it, and I would not change my views. (I saw his distinctions as too mechanical, lacking in substance; he saw mine as blind to the methodological differences.) So he went ahead and with Herbert Menzel developed his own ideas further and published them in a paper that later became well known. I, some years later, published my long paper separately. This


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example could be duplicated, with minor variations, by many of Lazarsfeld's students. Before I arrived at Columbia, the "Decatur study" was one on which C. Wright Mills, as well as others, had been tried by Lazarsfeld and found wanting. Elihu Katz was set to work on it and it ended successfully, as Personal Influence .

The extent of this invasion of self that Lazarsfeld practiced was so great that many of those who had worked most closely with him (or, more properly put, whom he had pursued and captured) remained permanently hostile or ambivalent. For several years after the global-indicator affair I myself was angry. And when in 1978, two years after his death, I gave a warm and appreciative account of Lazarsfeld's work, several people who had been close to him mentioned how surprised they were that I could give such a positive and unambivalent account of this predatory man. Yet some of those same people were bereft when they left Columbia and were free of him.

Lazarsfeld's dual concern with people and with problems led to unlikely combinations, some of which foundered while others, perhaps equally unlikely at the outset, flourished. When he set C. Wright Mills to work on the problem of personal influence in Decatur, Illinois, this did not last long. Or when he began to work with pollster Lou Harris on a study of college faculty, this aborted. (Lazarsfeld completed the study with Wagner Thielens as The Academic Mind .) His work with Martin Lipset on a review of political behavior was somewhat more productive but rather short-lived. No one would have predicted that he and Ernest Nagel would manage a successful series of seminars in mathematical sociology, or that he and David Riesman would come as close together as they did—even so, remaining at arm's length—in the study of college faculties. And who could have guessed that his association with Merton would flower and become so important? That was Lazarsfeld's personal style: he could not stand to have a bright person, whom he respected, whether colleague or student, in the vicinity yet not working on problems he saw as significant. He used his own time, flattery, and attention; he used money, he used summers in Hanover, New Hampshire, he used projects at the Bureau; he used all the inducements at his command to draw others into his orbit. This was not charisma, which could properly describe the attraction to Merton. It was more nearly a matter of pursuit.

To bring this about was costly to Lazarsfeld. The tactics did not allow a posture of knowing more than he did. To engage the efforts of others on a problem, he had to declare his own defeat. But that he was willing to do. For him, getting the problem solved was most important (or


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perhaps getting another to work on his problem was most important); the fact that another might be the one to solve the problem was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

This unassuming aspect of Lazarsfeld combined with another attribute to make him a perfect complement to substantive sociologists. For Lazarsfeld had a difficult time understanding sociological theory. In some of his writing (the best sampling can be found in Qualitative Analysis ) he exhibits his long-standing concern to understand action and his rich sense of the history of the theory of action. But substance that was more sociological came slowly to him.

The success of the Merton-Lazarsfeld seminars was this peculiar complementarity both in substance and in personality. Merton knew what Weber and others had written about bureaucracy, for example. He knew the theory. Lazarsfeld most explicitly did not know, and he asked questions. In part Lazarsfeld asked because he simply did not understand the substance. But in part he asked them because his desire for an answer outweighed any concern he might have had about being regarded as sociologically naive. In other cases the interaction was somewhat modified. Merton would lay out a substantive sociological analysis he himself had carried out, and then Lazarsfeld would pose the same or similar questions. In at least one case, having finally felt that he understood what the theorist meant, he attempted this understanding through formalization, in a joint paper with Merton.

This account of the personalities of Merton and Lazarsfeld does not do justice to the combination of the two and the impact of this combination on each of them and on those at Columbia. The difference in their personalities and the power of their personalities could have produced a standoff or an unending conflict. But each respected what the other could do, each deferred to the other in the other's realm of expertise, and perhaps each even yearned somewhat to have the other's talents. Whatever the complex character of this relation, its strength is what gave Columbia sociology its strength over the long period beginning in the 1940s and extending to the 1970s. Not surprisingly, its strength is what created such a vacuum in sociology at Columbia, a vacuum felt beyond the limits of that university once the combination was gone.

As has often been pointed out, at the same time Harvard had a counterpart to Paul Lazarsfeld in Samuel Stouffer, and to Robert Merton in Talcott Parsons. But there was never the joining of activities nor the joining of ideas between Parsons and Stouffer that occurred between Merton and Lazarsfeld.


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The Content of Sociology at Columbia

In the early 1950s sociology was undergoing a change, and Columbia was on the forefront of that change. (I write this from the perspective of the present, not from my perspective as a graduate student at the time. Then, the Columbia sociology of 1951 was all I knew as sociology.) The watershed at Columbia came with the decline of Lynd and the arrival of Lazarsfeld. (It is perhaps ironic that Lynd brought Lazarsfeld to Columbia and then watched with some disfavor the transformation of the discipline that Lazarsfeld helped bring about.) Before this watershed, the unit for most empirical research in American sociology had been a community or an organization. The Lynds' study of Middletown is an example, as are Columbia Ph.D. dissertations of a slightly earlier period, such as Philip Selznick's T.V.A. and the Grass Roots , Martin Lipset's Agrarian Socialism . At the University of Chicago, W. Lloyd Warner's Yankee City series and A. B. Hollingshead's Elmtown's Youth were studies that, although they used the new methods of sample surveys, focused on the stratification system of a given community and thus continued the Chicago school's focus on communities or neighborhoods as the units of analysis.

But the four volumes in the American Soldier series by Samuel Stouffer's group during World War II provided a strong stimulus for change to a sociology based on sample surveys with the individual as the unit of analysis and individual behavior as the phenomenon under examination. That stimulus was amplified by the immensely influential Continuities in Social Research: The American Soldier , edited by Merton and Lazarsfeld. The Merton and Kitt essay on reference groups and the Lazarsfeld and Kendall essay on methods of elaboration in survey analysis, which covered both the substantive and methodological flanks of the new individualist movement in sociology, were the centerpieces of that volume.

Lazarsfeld's work in radio research, and mass-communications research more generally, was a major force for this new individualist direction at Columbia. The appointment at Columbia of Herbert Hyman, a social psychologist who had done work on reference groups, was another indicator of the change. Even the research that was close to traditional sociological concerns began to take the same form. Lazarsfeld's voting studies, Merton's study of the Kate Smith war bond appeal (Mass Persuasion ), and Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence all took individual


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behavior or attitudes as the dependent variables to be explained; all were concerned with varying individual responses to a mass stimulus.

Other work at Columbia attempted to combine the new methods of quantitative survey analysis with studies of problems that involved the behavior of a social unit—a community or an organization. This work was in part due to Merton's influence always pulling Lazarsfeld toward sociological questions and in part due to the fact that the "community-study" period of sociological research had not completely passed. Even the two voting studies, precursors of national voting studies, were set in two communities, Elmira, New York, and Sandusky, Ohio, with the structured interviews supplemented by additional data on community organizations and the social relationships of the respondents. These attempts, reflecting a tension between the old problem and the new methods, met with variable success, though none was completely successful. In the voting studies the community data never came together with the interview data, and the problems studied remained those of individual voting behavior. In Personal Influence , set in Decatur, Illinois, snowball sampling led to greater success and to the concept of the two-step flow of communication. In Merton's medical-school project, questionnaire data from whole cohorts of medical students, rather than from samples, made possible the study of contextual influences on behavior, and the use of two medical schools rather than one allowed the study of school-level effects, though again on individual behavior. In the ITU study Lipset's focus on substantive problems of democratic theory at the system level led to an analysis that kept the behavior of the system at the forefront, but without fully integrating problems and methods. In all these ways sociology at Columbia in the 1950s contained a sizeable component of social psychology. In a large and steadily increasing fraction of the empirical research done at Columbia during the period, individual behavior was the phenomenon under study, not the behavior of a social system or any part of it beyond the individual.

Yet in large part this emphasis merely reflected the increasing individualism of society. In the 1940s Hollingshead had examined social stratification by studying Elmtown's youth, showing that the social position of the parent was transmitted to the child by way of the school. In the 1950s it no longer seemed sensible to study generational transmission of social stratification by studying Elmtowns; young people were changing their socila positions, not within the stratification systems of these towns, but outside them by leaving their hometowns. Thus it


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became natural to study the individuals rather than the towns. Sociology at Columbia reflected that change and helped develop the methods and redefine the problems of sociology in such a way as to make the academic study of society congruent with new social reality. Much of what is today regarded as the mainstream of sociology constitutes the further development of that paradigm. Path analysis as a logical extension of the ideas of elaboration in the Lazarsfeld-Kendall paper, status attainment research with nationally representative samples as the replacement for the Yankee City and Elmtown community studies, and national election studies as the replacement for community-based samples all suggest the extent of change of the discipline as it mirrors changes in society.

The change that was occuring in the 1950s at Columbia can be described in another way. As the discipline embraced quantitative methods to study America's changing social structure, it retained the ability to study the effects of social structure on individual behavior (in part through methods of contextual and relational analysis that were being fashioned at Columbia). But it lost the capacity to reconstitute—still quantitatively—from individual actions the behavior of the social system composed of those individuals. What can be done discursively, in describing how the interplay of actions by individuals leads to system-level outcomes (say, in community decision making or organizational behavior or in the election of a president), remains largely beyond our quantitative grasp. This uneven development of quantitative methods has led to a concentration of quantitative empirical research on determinants of individual behavior, a shift from problems that occupied the discipline before the watershed I have described.

The Impact of These Ideas on Me

Because I came to Columbia with almost no background in any social science, the frame of reference imposed by sociology at Columbia was the only frame I had. I reflected, both in the methodological skills I developed and in the substantive problems I saw as important, the then current Columbia definition of sociology. But my development as a sociologist reflected more specifically the confluence of three streams of activity: the activities of Lazarsfeld, the activities of Merton, and the activities of Lipset. From Merton came not only the vision of sociology as a calling but also a focus on sociological determinants of individual behavior, following in the pattern of Durkheim, on whose analysis of


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social determinants of suicide (not The Division of Labor or The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, both of which had more a systemic, less individual, focus) Merton lavished attention in his lectures on theory.

Whether it was Merton's own orientation, the individualist direction of sociology at Columbia, or a positivist orientation I carried over from the physical sciences, midway through graduate school I concluded that Durkheim was engaged in one kind of endeavor and Weber in an altogether different one, and that I would choose Durkheim's path. I saw that path as the study of the force of social structure and social organization on the individuals embedded in that structure. Weber I thought of as engaged in the other side: the study of consequences of individuals' values, and the actions following from them, for social organization. Parsons I saw as trying to realize a Weberian program of theory construction and research, and although I felt it might have been done better by another, part of Parsons's problem seemed to lie in the Weberian starting point.

I have subsequently changed my orientation toward social theory to one more consistent with the Weberian program by taking purposive action as a starting point for social organization rather than social structure as a starting point for individual action. This problem, which can be described as the micro-to-macro problem, was not what I took away with me from Columbia. The Durkheimian orientation was far more compatible with the quantitative methods and the mathematical sociology I was learning there.

My orientation toward mathematical sociology came from Lazarsfeld via three channels, in addition to the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar and the evening university seminar on mathematics in the social sciences. First was the project he gave me of translating Rashevsky's mathematical biology for a sociological audience. Although this work (published in Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences ) had little, if any, significance for the discipline, it was important for my development. Rashevsky was a mathematical biophysicist who had turned to sociological problems and had developed models of various social processes. What was important for me about Rashevsky's work was what was important later in Nagel's orientation and in some of the mathematical models we studied in the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar: it was mathematics dedicated to mirroring social processes . It was not just a compilation of statistical indices nor a static representation of structure (as was Lazarsfeld's latent structure analysis, a development that excited La-


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zarsfeld but left me cold). In this it was compatible with the applications of mathematics I knew from physics and physical chemistry and reinforced my belief that this mirroring of social processes was the most profitable application of mathematics in sociology. The orientation I found in Rashevsky, Nagel, and much of Herbert Simon's work (which influenced me while I was still in graduate school) is not one I have seen among users of mathematics in sociology whose background is in mathematics or statistics rather than the physical sciences or engineering. Nor did I find it in Lazarsfeld, whose preoccupation was with latent structure analysis and index construction.

The second channel was the Behavioral Models Project, for which I contracted to do a review and exposition of mathematics as applied to the study of small groups. In that work I learned about systems of nonlinear differential equations, beginning with Simon's modeling of Homans's propositions about small-group processes, and then discovering A. J. Lotka's work and Volterra's equations for predator-prey models—again a reinforcement of the process orientation I had found in Rashevsky. I also stuffed my head full of the work on random and nonrandom nets by Rashevsky's colleagues (Anatol Rapoport and others) at Chicago, which I applied to, and modified for, social networks. This work, however (which has recently been rediscovered by sociologists engaged in the study of social networks), attracted me far less than process modeling.

The third channel was Lazarsfeld's Panel Project, designed to develop methods for the analysis of panel data. The problem of panel analysis that Lazarsfeld posed was one I leaped on because it was hospitable to a model of a process; but his own solution to that problem involved index construction rather than construction of such a process model. It was the struggle to find a solution to this problem that led (with the aid of a suggestion from Richard Savage the year after I left Columbia) to the continuous-time stochastic process models that form the core (chapters 4–13) of my Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and to subsequent work in the same direction, as represented most recently in Longitudinal Data Analysis (1981). The compatibility of this direction of modeling with the substantive problems surrounding mass communications and mass behavior is not accidental, for those were the problems occupying Lazarsfeld as he formulated the problems of panel analysis.

Though Lipset was less important to the social system of Columbia sociology than Lazarsfeld or Merton, he was no less important than they to my development as a sociologist. Through a series of fortunate


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accidents I came in 1952 to be the third member (with Lipset and Trow) of the ITU research team. Lipset had started to plan the research as early as 1949, and it began as an organized research project in 1951. What was of central importance about the ITU study was the fact that it focused on a substantive macrosocial problem in political sociology (the social bases of political democracy) that had a rich history in sociological theory. Yet the research used quantitative data based on the new sample survey techniques to study the problem.

Macrosocial problems and sample survey techniques usually do not mix well in social research. How was Lipset able to bring about a successful mix? The answer, I believe, lies in the dominance of the problem over the data, a dominance buttressed both by the rich store of knowledge that Lipset had about the printers' union and by the fund of social and political theory bearing on the problem that he had at his fingertips. And as Union Democracy documents, the survey of New York printers was only one of a number of data sources, some of which (such as literature about printing unions and informant interviews with printers) Lipset had amassed before the survey project and some of which (such as observation of union meetings and chapel meetings, records of voting by locals in international elections, written material about union political issues gleaned from union publications) were obtained during the project itself. Although quantitative analyses of the survey data can be found throughout the book and indeed are central to the study, it was the framework of ideas from social theory that generated the analyses. Those ideas were, of course, modified by the results of the data analysis. For example, Lipset began with an idea of the importance of the occupational community for political participation in the union; but only in the analysis of the survey data did we discover the importance of certain formal clubs within the union for providing an organized base of opposition to the incumbents. Thus the initial ideas were richly developed, elaborated, and modified by the data. But the main point is that the framework of ideas was set by the macrosocial theory; the data analyses were forced to cope with those ideas, often partially testing a hypothesized macrosocial relation by testing the one or more implied micro-level processes necessary to generate it.

This data analysis, moving between theory such as that of the mass-society theorists and data that only indirectly bore on the theory, was far more important to the development of my data analysis skills than were any courses in research methods. It also led to orientations different from those I would have developed in such courses. One of these was a


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low level of interest in statistical inference (an orientation characteristic of Columbia sociology as a whole). The complexity of the linkage between, on the one hand, survey analysis involving relations between attributes of individuals and, on the other, the structure of macro-level relations they were designed to test made a prima facie case for ignoring standard tests and using other criteria to aid in drawing inferences about the social bases of political democracy.

Quite apart from these theoretical and methodological aspects, I found the ITU study appealing because it was consistent with, and reinforced my interest in, political pluralism, the social sources of political diversity, and the structural bases for opposition to an incumbent authority. It was partly these ideas that led to the proposal for a study of high schools that I tried to get funded when I was at the Bureau in early 1955 and finally pursued at the University of Chicago in 1957 (published in 1961 as The Adolescent Society ). Treating the social system of adolescents in a high school as a partially closed social system, I wanted to study the effects of monolithic and pluralistic status systems on the behavior of adolescents, and to study the sources of these variations in status systems. (The proposal is included in an appendix in The Adolescent Society .) The theoretical aims of the study were never realized; The Adolescent Society was written largely for a lay audience and education professionals, with the theoretical work deferred to a later publication that never materialized. The contrast of The Adolescent Society, in which the theoretical aims did not dominate the data analysis, with Union Democracy, in which they did, is instructive, showing the ease with which the constraints of survey analysis can come to distort the original goals of the research.

Besides Merton, Lazarsfeld, and Lipset, others were also important to the development of my ideas. One was Ernest Nagel, both in his courses (logic, and the philosophy of science) that I audited and in the seminar with Lazarsfeld. Herbert Hyman, remarkably ingenious in using survey data to test social psychological ideas, was another. Others included statisticians, particularly Howard Raiffa and Theodore Anderson. Still another was a visitor, Harold Pfautz, who late in my Columbia career introduced me to some of the sociological classics I would otherwise have missed, including Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, an extraordinary set of ideas about the self and society. (I had already been entranced by G. H. Mead's ideas, but I found Smith even more compelling.)

Quite apart from faculty, the set of fellow students and research associates at the Bureau was of considerable importance to each of us. It


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was, for example, in the traditions group seminars that the ideas about informal social structure and (as McPhee put it) the dynamics of masses began to emerge, ideas that strongly influenced my Community Conflict, the study that Herb Menzel, Elihu Katz, and I did (Medical Innovation ) on diffusion of a new drug through the medical community, a paper on relational analysis that described ways of capturing the effects of informal social structure with survey-type data, and other methodological innovations, such as snowball sampling. These and others were the ideas that emerged four or five years downstream from the watershed that substituted mass communication and social psychology for community studies and social structure at Columbia. This orientation toward the study of behavior in loosely structured social systems is not all of sociology; but it was an important direction, and one that emerged not only from the combination of inputs we had received from the faculty and the research at Columbia but also from the further development of those ideas through our interaction.

This intellectual direction, which I had when I left Columbia, has not, of course, remained unchanged over the years. It has taken at least one abrupt turn, along with other, more minor ones. That, however, is another story, for which there is no space here.

My Traverse through Columbia

I came to Columbia resolving to give the educational system one last chance. It had failed, I felt, through high school and the several colleges I had attended. My teachers had been engaged in transmitting information, but none (except for two at Purdue) had been interested in me, in what I might do with the information they had imparted.

From nearly the beginning at Columbia I felt a difference. I sensed that some faculty members had a personal (that is, selfish) interest in some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade: their interest seemed tinged with the interest that parents have in their children. If asked to explain that now, I would say it is because, as children do for parents, graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality, extending their influence beyond their own life span. In the then large sociology department at Columbia this interest was in conflict with another, the faculty's desire to protect itself from graduate-student demands, so that for many of my fellow students graduate school did not have this special—perhaps essential—quality. For me, from nearly the beginning, it did.


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I moved into an apartment at 111th Street and Broadway and sold my 1947 Chevrolet to a couple of Puerto Ricans, hoping they would not notice an ominous sound in the differential. I entered Columbia still a naive boy from Seven Mile, Ohio, and Herndon, Kentucky, with training as a chemical engineer and work experience as a chemist. I was not, however, in great awe of sociology. I had read enough by that time to have discovered that the density of ideas was not comparable to that in a book on physical chemistry. I wanted to progress rapidly, to skip background courses and proceed with the more advanced ones. As for statistics, I had had no courses but had read Quinn McNemar's statistical text over the summer so that I could enter the regular course on sociological statistics without preliminaries. But I decided after the first session to opt out of the course and take my statistics along with the statistics students in the mathematical statistics department. (It was the first of several courses I took in that department. My mathematical background from chemical engineering was strong enough to enable me to take courses in statistics that my sociology colleagues could not.)

As I have already indicated, Merton's theory course was riveting, a conversion experience for those of us eager for conversion. But my interest in coursework was largely confined to Merton's course and to the mathematical statistics courses. I did learn something about methods from Herbert Hyman and Charles Wright's research methods sequence. But with rare exceptions I have never found lecture courses particularly appealing as a medium for learning. Ernest Nagel's course in philosophy of science, which I sat in on, unregistered, was one such exception. The class always continued for ten or twenty minutes after its time with a group of students clustered around him, asking questions and arguing points. I stood on the periphery, verbally inadequate and unsure of myself, listening to the interchange and wanting to interrupt but remaining mute.

Seminars were another matter altogether. Some of the seminars were run by two faculty members, and the interchange was far more instructive than the lectures. In seminars we were induced to perform, to write and present papers, to show what we could do. The Lazarsfeld-Merton seminar in bureaucracy had both these components, as did the Lazarsfeld-Nagel seminar in mathematical sociology.

I sat in on a number of courses and seminars outside the department, stimulated by the extraordinary range of intellectual activity. One was Abram Kardiner's seminar, which I attended while I was reading his


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Psychological Frontiers of Society; a second was Greenberg's course on linguistics; and a third was George Stigler's course in microeconomics. In an informal course on operations research I found an interesting mixture of statistics, mathematics, and an engineer's approach to problem solving. And I took a course in industrial engineering from Albert Rubenstein in which we engaged in a kind of sociology of formal organizations with an emphasis on patterns of communication.

So much for coursework. In my second semester I learned that Lipset and Trow were looking for interviewers for the ITU project, which was just going into the field. I applied for a job interviewing printers and was hired. I learned New York this way, riding the subways to the World-Telegram, the Sun, the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the job shops, and printers' homes in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. I also learned interviewing. When the officials of the union were to be interviewed, Trow kept Joseph Greenblum and me on, and the three of us did those interviews. Then I helped in sending out mail questionnaires to get panel data on New York printers' voting preferences in the international union election.

That summer Lipset went to teach at the Free University in Berlin, and Trow went to help C. Wright Mills build a cabin on an island in one of the Great Lakes. The data were in, and they left me alone with it. At the end of the summer I had written up an analysis that I could show to them. Lipset read it, then asked me if I would like to be a coauthor of the book they were writing on the ITU. I said yes.

Thus began an enormously productive and instructive experience. We talked, wrote, tore each others' drafts apart and rewrote them. Lipset provided the intellectual framework and background for the study in the first chapters, and from there we shaped the analysis in extended discussions. Trow and I spent hours on the counter-sorters in the Fayerweather basement, pored over cross-tabulations together and separately, and in our extended arguments over data analysis, we taught each other. There were no long lines of students to curtail our interaction with Lipset. Nor was it all data analysis. We reread Michels, we read and argued over Mannheim, the mass-society theorists, Scheler, Emil Lederer, Hannah Arendt, and Selznick's The Organizational Weapon . I have coauthored books, but the interaction during the academic years 1952–53 and 1953–54 was unlike any other.

In the fall of 1953 Lazarsfeld asked me if I would work, for pay, on the panel project. I had to decide between that and continuing work without pay on the ITU project. I had a tuition fellowship and could


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manage without the extra money, so I said no and stayed with Lipset and Trow.

Lazarsfeld had three large projects, the Behavioral Models Project, the Panel Project, and the Concepts and Indices Project. In all three I was involved with Lazarsfeld but never was employed by him. Following the pattern of the Rashevsky paper, he paid me for products, not hours. One might say I worked as an independent contractor. It may have been this distance that made me less bitter at Lazarsfeld than those who had been closer. I stayed on the periphery of the Behavioral Models Project, never employed by it but attending seminars and, in the end, writing a report for the project on mathematical models of small groups. For the Concepts and Indices Project I wrote papers analyzing economists' use of concepts and analyzing economic indices (learning along the way more economics), and gained admission to the summer seminar at Dartmouth on concepts and indices. I was greatly interested in methods of panel analysis and wrote a paper attempting to extend those methods (which led some years later to my Introduction to Mathematical Sociology ). That paper got me into another Dartmouth summer seminar, on methods of panel analysis. These summer seminars were extraordinarily important to my socialization in sociology, for I watched social scientists in action, debating points, arguing methods, developing ideas. I began to see myself on the same plane, emerging as a professional among professionals.

After two and a half years at Columbia I had reached an apex of status, prestige, and deference that I have never approached in my subsequent career. I then took my oral qualifying examination for admission to Ph.D. candidacy. I had prepared for the exam over the summer and had a rich and well-organized set of ideas and information about social theory and theorists. I remember the first question of the examination, a statistical question asked by Howard Raiffa, which I bungled miserably. I remember nothing else except that when it was over after two hours, I knew I had failed. I waited outside the examination room; Lipset summarized the examination when he came out and said to me, "If we all had not known before the exam that you would pass, you would have failed." The others were equally grim-faced as they left the examination room.

I trudged disconsolately down Amsterdam Avenue toward my 123rd Street apartment but was hailed by shouts from Sidney Morgenbesser and others from an office window across Amsterdam, a Bureau office I shared with Morgenbesser, with whom I was working on Lazarsfeld's Concepts and Indices Project. My friends had prepared a party in celebration of my passing my orals, but I had decided to skip it. They would


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not let me go home, though, despite my agony. So I went to the party and shared my troubles with my friends. Soon the members of my examination committee, including Merton, came over to wish me well and have a drink in what was a muted, but relieved, celebration. The incident was, I am sure, not forgotten (and may have been responsible for my not getting the job teaching Lee Wiggins's statistics course a year and a half later), but it was put aside and perhaps attributed to my general oral ineptitude. I went on to other things—the ITU analysis, my small-group monograph for the Behavioral Models Project, and my paper on properties of groups for the Concepts and Indices Project.

I finished my dissertation in the fall of 1954 and submitted it in December. The defense was in January. But matters were not so simple. Students did not finish so quickly at Columbia. Certainly if I had done my dissertation under Merton, I would not have finished then. No more likely would have been a quick completion under Lazarsfeld. Even under Lipset alone, matters would not have been so simple. But in the spring of 1954, I met with Merton, and he asked me about my dissertation plans. I said I didn't know; I had none. He asked why not the ITU study? Did I have chapters that were largely my own and formed a coherent whole? I said I thought they did. So, armed with this proposal from Merton, I went to Lipset and reported the discussion. He agreed to the dissertation. He might have done so anyway, or he might not have—for he was a young assistant professor, and the ITU study was his first major work after his own dissertation. Then a graduate student proposes to carve a dissertation out of a portion of it. Even though I was the principal author of the chapters I proposed to use, and even though many of the ideas in them were mine, they nevertheless had resulted from long discussions among the three of us and extended critiques from Trow and Lipset. Because they were intended from the start as potential chapters of the book rather than as chapters of my dissertation, Lipset gave them far more attention than dissertation chapters ordinarily receive.

The waters of Columbia were difficult to navigate, at least with any speed. It helped to have a sponsor interested in one's well-being. But it helped more to have two. Still more did it help to have three. Lazarsfeld was my mentor, but I did not do my dissertation under him and was not beholden to him. Lipset was the faculty member under whom I worked most continuously, but the structure of Columbia demanded that he be attentive to Merton's or Lazarfeld's wishes. Merton was less close than either of the others to me but was ready and able to serve as my protector.


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I finished my dissertation quickly in the fall of 1954, making the necessary modifications to form dissertation chapters from what had been book chapters and adding one analytical chapter for good measure. But I needed work that fall to support myself. I was finished with the department, and it was finished with me. The Bureau would be, if anything was to be, my home for the academic year 1954–55. Charles Glock rescued me by offering a monograph on community conflicts from the Twentieth Century Fund, a task someone else had botched. I worked on that project, producing Community Conflict, which the fund did not like very much but nevertheless was published by Jeremiah Kaplan's Free Press. (Of everything I have written, this small, awkwardly published monograph has probably sold the greatest number of copies.)

In the winter, in part as an outgrowth of the traditions seminar, a drug company, Pfizer, gave a grant to study the way doctors introduce new drugs into their practices. That project occupied me during the spring (though I wrote most of my portion of the report during one tense, and intense, week in which my wife and I were for other reasons not speaking). Meanwhile, it was not clear what I would do the next year. I had no job offers. Herbert Simon at Carnegie Tech had offered me a job the previous year, but Lazarsfeld had induced me to remain at Columbia. Now there was nothing. Lee Wiggins was to be gone (at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences—its second year), and I hoped to teach his statistics course, a part-time job that would be enough for support. The department, however, decided I was not a sufficiently able teacher.

My time at Columbia was approaching an end. One day I stopped to see Lipset to discuss details of the Union Democracy manuscript, and he introduced me to his new research assistant, Immanuel Wallerstein. He was a bright, energetic, and self-confident member of a new cohort of graduate students. Through his eyes I saw myself no longer as a member of the elite among graduate students but as a former graduate student, outside that system, in limbo, Maurice Stein of 1955.

My destination for the next year was still unclear. I was preparing myself for another year at the Bureau, with hopes of getting funding for my new project, a study of adolescents in high schools. Then, at the beginning of the summer, I received an invitation from the Center for Advanced Study (occasioned by the last-minute defection of a more deserving scholar but also due in part to Lazarsfeld's and Merton's influence). Late that summer I set off for California with a two-week stop along the way at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, at Herb Simon's


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invitation. (My wife and son had left earlier, stopping to visit her family in Indiana.) I packed the station wagon with all my belongings and stayed overnight at Philip Ennis's apartment on Ninety-sixth Street. The next morning I found my car plundered; the clothes I had left in the front seat were gone. I didn't much care. I was a journeyman sociologist, off to Pittsburgh and to the Center.


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Chapter Three— Columbia in the 1950s
 

Preferred Citation: Berger, Bennett M., editor Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft067nb02h/