Emergence of the Modern Research University: Harvard and M.I.T., 1945–1970

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Freeland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Research University ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Institutional Model

Harvard and M.I.T. were ideally positioned to exploit the advantageous possibilities for development that arose after World War II. Both did so, pursuing routes that reflected their different histories, stages of development, organizational characteristics, and current priorities. Both became, in the process, contrasting versions of a modern research university, together helping to define a new institutional model for the nation’s academic community. For most universities, World War II continued the difficult circumstances of the Depression, but the wartime role of academics also fostered hopes for recognition and growth in the postwar years. This optimism prompted organized planning for institutional development well before the end of the war. As Conant put it in 1943: “The period immediately following the cessation of hostilities ... will be a time when [Harvard’s] educational house can be put in order, when changes perhaps long overdue can be made most readily.” The leaders of M.I.T. anticipated even more dramatic gains. Referring in 1944 to the Institute’s contributions to the war effort, Compton observed that “the value, effectiveness and prestige of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have never been at so high a level; this is certainly a strategic vantage point from which to initiate the next advance.” The prewar years at Harvard had left little doubt about the “changes ... long overdue” on which Conant would focus. From the beginning of his presidency, he had insisted that Harvard’s goal should not be expansion but “intensification”: the raising of intellectual standards within established programs and the reducing of concern with the social, localistic values associated with Harvard’s Brahmin traditions. The two major expressions of these policies prior to 1940 had been the efforts to tighten scholarly standards for promotion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and to attract more able undergraduates by recruiting in public and non-northeastern secondary schools. As Conant anticipated the postwar years, especially in the context of the veterans’ program, he was aware that the new popularity of higher education might support a level of growth that had not been possible during the Depression, but he continued to oppose expansion. If demand for admission increased, Conant argued in the mid-1940S, Harvard should raise standards, not increase in size.

World War II

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
Wartime Experience

This chapter discusses the role of social science in the war effort. As the Second World War demonstrated, sophisticated social science methods are certainly sometimes applicable to policy. In particular, economists demonstrated that they could employ these tools yet remain directly relevant in some realms. However, the failure of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to employ them successfully on noneconomic issues constitutes a cautionary tale for those who think that discipline ought to serve as a model for the rest of the social sciences. Strikingly, even social scientists themselves who served in government came to realize that disciplinary dynamics worked against policy relevance. Nevertheless, the social sciences' wartime experience had a positive impact on them. This wartime experience had effects across the social sciences, but it was particularly evident in the areas relevant to national security.

scholarly journals Why is there no philosophy of international relations

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-41
Author(s):  
Andrzej Gałganek
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Social World ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Rela Tions

Why is there no philosophy of International Relations? Why, despite the significant intellectual and institutional development of International Relations after World War II, has IR failed to generate any ‘grand ideas’ that would influence the broadly understood humanities? None of the theories of international relations indicates the exceptional features of interna- tionality as its foundation. None of these theories formulates a fundamental claim to its subject matter in International Relations the way geography, history or sociology do. This leads to the conviction that international relations do not have to be formed by aspects of the social world that are specific to them, and can be interpreted in terms of ideas imported from the disciplines that deal with examining aspects relevant to them. The basic disadvantage of this openness of International Relations to other disciplines is the lack of reflection on its own ‘deep ontology.’ This seems to be the most important reason for the lack of a philosophy of International Rela- tions. The author accomplishes two basic goals in his text. Firstly, he undermines the legitimacy of the three attitudes prevailing in IR on understanding internationality, which he calls internal- ism, externalism and correlationism. Secondly, he presents the essence and consequences of the negative character of IR, which involves the absence of the philosophy of IR and studying internationality in the same manner as political science does. The author argues that understanding this ‘strange orthodoxy’ can be a means to overcom- ing it, thereby opening up the possibility of conceiving the ontology of IR, or outlining the path leading to the philosophy of International Relations. Finally, the author refers to the proposal of Justin Rosenberg, to then present an idea for an ontology on which the philosophy of Interna- tional Relations could be founded.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
World War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

Do We Need a Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World?

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Rynkiewich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Abstract There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a ‘missionary anthropologist’ with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

Stabilizing American Society: Kenneth Boulding and the Integration of the Social Sciences, 1943–1980

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.

The Elusive Search for Evidence: Evgenii Khaldei’s Budapest Ghetto, Images of Rape, and Soviet Holocaust Photography

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Social History ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

The Instrumental University

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Schrum
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Research University ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Procedural Rationality ◽  
Academic Leaders ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Clark Kerr ◽  
The Social ◽  
Managerial Knowledge

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.

‘Japan Fight. Aboriginal People Fight. European People Fight’: Yolngu Stories from World War II

2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Noah Riseman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
World War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Australian Soil

Abstract Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in World War II. This paper presents “highlights” from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defence of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.

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