A Promising Soil for a Synthesizing Mind: Lessons from Social Relations (Soc Rel)

August 4, 2022

Ever since I realized that the identity of “synthesizer” was an appropriate descriptor for me (Gardner, 2020 - link here), I have wondered about the origins and development in my own life of that particular role, occupation, stance.

When I was a student at Harvard College in the early 1960s, it was clear to me that the relatively new field of Social Relations (or “Soc Rel”, as it was commonly abbreviated) was a good academic home. It was broad—it encompassed sociology, psychology, and anthropology. I liked the professors and the courses, and thanks to a generous department administrator (George Goethals, by name) I was allowed to pursue whatever line of study I wanted to—in effect, to create my own major, or concentration as they call it in the College. (For an excellent introduction to the history of Soc Rel, see Schmidt, 2022 - link here).

As portrayed in my memoir, I loved my educational experiences in college. But when I finished college, my career line was by no means determined. I considered law school and medical school and took appropriate courses. And because I was so influenced by my tutor, the distinguished and charismatic psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, I applied to graduate school to become a clinical psychologist.

But clearly, my heart was not in clinical psychology. After a stimulating summer job working with psychologist Jerome Bruner in the areas of cognitive and developmental psychology, I determined to pursue a doctorate in psychological research, and not to become a clinician—a decision that, in retrospect, was clearly the right one… for me. And so, even though I had never taken a course in experimental psychology (and so had to “cram” for the Graduate Record Examination in Psychology), I applied to study psychology at Harvard—and that meant, that I would be receiving a doctorate in the Department of Social Relations (which soon changed its name to the Department of Psychology and Social Relations).

Earlier I mentioned that I loved college—the option to explore a very wide panorama of social science. In sharp contrast, I disliked graduate school—indeed, so much, that I seriously considered quitting. In a phrase, I was being trained to carry out experiments in developmental psychology—pure and simple—and any other pursuit was frowned upon. Indeed, one of my professors—he was very distinguished—wanted to drop me from the program. I was only “saved” by a sympathetic mentor, Roger Brown. I chose to remain in the doctoral program only when I realized that I could ultimately use it to achieve my own goals.

Though they are clearer in retrospect than they were fifty years ago, what were my goals? Briefly, to able to continue to survey topics, issues, and methods across the social sciences, broadly construed—in other words, in effect to continue being an undergraduate in Soc Rel; and, though again this is clearer in retrospect, to write books.

Indeed, while my classmates in the developmental psychology program were busy carrying out experiments with infants in the laboratory or traveling to schools or summer camps where they could collect data on different age cohorts, I was actually working on three books. One of them—a text in social psychology that I was commissioned to write for someone else—was published in 1970, a year before I received my doctorate. The other two—one more scholarly (The Arts and Human Development), the other more of a trade book (The Quest for Mind: Piaget, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement) had been drafted about the time I had finished my doctoral work. They were published shortly thereafter—both in 1973.

And so, in graduate school, I was, so to speak, a square peg in a round hole.

Until this point, these reflections are only of academic interest and probably chiefly of interest to me. But let me now present a much broader picture. Doctoral study is—and perhaps should be—an apprenticeship in being a scholar in a defined area of study—biochemistry, nuclear physics, modern European history, behavioral economics. Most graduate students are aspiring to enter the professoriate, and so they should acquire the knowledge and skills that are needed for advancement in that field, as it is currently defined.

At least in the United States, where we offer an education in the liberal arts, the goal of college should be much broader—to expose students to a variety of topics, disciplines, and approaches—even cutting across the traditional families of humanities, social sciences, and natural (or physical) sciences. And indeed, in Wendy Fischman and my study of contemporary colleges, (Fischman and Gardner, 2022 - link here), we nurture and applaud those students who are willing to explore broadly and those schools that encourage—or at least enable—them to do so. Liberal arts should not be seen as an oppressive requirement or an option only for those not ready to choose a profession.

In its quarter century of existence, the Harvard Department of Social Relations achieved these goals for many of its undergraduate students. And many of us continue to be grateful, even decades thereafter. Little if anything that I have accomplished as a scholar and writer would have been possible without the department, its administrators, and its leaders—which included such eminences as my own teachers Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, Erik Erikson, and David Riesman—and such legendary figures as Gordon Allport, Clifford Geertz. Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, Talcott Parsons, and Neil Smelser.

The names I’ve mentioned are not accidental—they were broad thinkers, they did not hesitate to cross disciplinary boundaries—and, importantly, they wrote books—that is the principal reason why their names are known to a wider public.

But as a doctoral program, this conception did not cohere. It was not clear what it means to have a doctorate in Soc Rel (except that you were allegedly broad) and, in effect, once enrolled in the program, most of us were simply carrying out traditional work in one of the three disciplines that made up Soc Rel—whether it was in social anthropology, socio-metrics, or social psychology—just as were our peers in other institutions—who had never heard of Soc Rel. And this narrowing occurred because pursuing doctoral work means mastery of a specific field rather than synthesizing across disciplines—though of course, synthesizing across disciplines can come later, post-PhD, but first one must master at least one field deeply.

My conclusion: Cross-disciplinary studies work well for undergraduate majors, but not so well for doctoral programs. Indeed, in its wisdom, Harvard has in effect recognized that. For longer than Soc Rel, Harvard has featured an undergraduate concentration in “Social Studies.” It’s like Soc Rel—broadly speaking, in the softer social science, except that its intellectual center is closer to history and philosophy (Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx, as examples), than in empirical social science.

I can’t help posing this hypothetical question: If Soc Rel had been just created as a major for undergraduates (like Social Studies) might it still be here? And proudly and strongly so? If it had endured, many more students would have had the experiences and options that I have had—and perhaps would have created and stretched knowledge in novel and fruitful ways.

References

Fischman, W., & Gardner, H. (2022). The real world of college. What higher education is and what it can be. The MIT Press.

Gardner, H. (2021). A synthesizing mind: A memoir from the creator of multiple intelligences theory. The MIT Press.

Schmidt, P. (2022). Harvard's quixotic pursuit of a new science: The rise and fall of the department of social relations. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Addendum - August 12, 2022

I am grateful to Patrick Schmidt for his fine book about Soc Rel. In reading it, I was reminded of experiences—some long since forgotten—that I had had and written about as one of the very few individuals who had studied in the department both in college and in graduate school. I was also motivated to contact peers who had had the Soc Rel experience: I’ve elicited some very thoughtful notes on the part of colleagues. My heartfelt thanks to Robert Barsky, William Damon, Claude Fischer, Mark Granovetter, Stanley Katz, and Richard Shweder (all listed by their full names).

Overall, my colleagues wrote very positively about their experiences as students (usually doctoral students) in Soc Rel in the late 1960s. They valued their exposure to experts in different disciplines, to students who came from different backgrounds, and were headed toward academic careers in one or more of the social sciences. My colleagues believed that their own work was different and better because they—unlike peers in other more traditional graduate programs—were exposed to a range of social scientific perspectives, scholars, and—important point—fellow students. Indeed, in one case, exposure to a mentor from a different discipline actually catalyzed the line of work for which this student has become best known.

My experience, unfortunately, was far less positive. I was in the doctoral strand of Developmental Psychology within the Soc Rel Department, and this was more like a traditional psychology program than an interdisciplinary one. The difference is embodied in this paraphrase of noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz (who had studied with the founders of Soc Rel), who said: "I was educated as an undergraduate at Antioch College; I was trained as a doctoral student at Harvard university." I was nostalgic for my undergraduate experiences with the likes of Erik Erikson and David Riesman. The program heads of Developmental Psychology had not been exposed to Soc Rel, and were probably annoyed by my interests and allegiances. I was fortunate to secure as my thesis adviser Roger Brown, a social psychologist whom my colleagues from sociology and anthropology venerated—he embodied the ethos of Soc Rel. 

There may also be an issue of personality, temperament, and fit. While I am quite independent, I did not feel at home—indeed I felt quite alienated from the Developmental Psychology program. By good fortune, I was invited by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to join a new interdisciplinary organization—Harvard Project Zero (link here) and by colleagues from other departments (and from other years) in the graduate school.

Comparison with other institutions of higher education can be instructive. Some universities (for example, Princeton) have been very conservative about adding departments, especially hybrid ones.  In comparison, the University of Chicago has a long tradition of creating interdisciplinary committees. Not to be ignored is the relative prestige of long-standing disciplines, as contrasted with more recent creations. Aspiring graduate students are often advised to study in a traditional department—like history, or, more frequently, psychology—rather than in new entries, like American Civilization or Cognitive Science. These newcomers may not survive, and that will hamper the ability of graduates to obtain professorial appointments.

What about my contention that Soc Rel was better as a wide-ranging undergraduate experience than as a holding company for doctoral work? While my colleagues valued their graduate experiences in Soc Rel, they all agreed that the dissolution of the Department was inevitable—for a variety of reasons, chief among them being the disappearance from leadership positions of the Department’s founding generation. How to convert an exciting experiment into a lasting and significant part of a larger institution is a tremendous challenge—as I have had recent reason to note with respect to the interdisciplinary organization with which I have now been associated for 55 years—the aforementioned Harvard Project Zero.