Founding the University of California at Irvine

Chapter 6 shows how the University of California at Irvine, planned under Kerr’s guidance, exemplified the instrumental university in its attempt to install perhaps the most pervasive high modern social science program ever attempted on an American campus. UC Irvine’s planners designed it to be a new kind of land-grant institution, in which social sciences replaced the agricultural sciences. Kerr and his colleagues placed tremendous expectations on interdisciplinary social science for leading humanity to a brighter future. This chapter tells how three related UC Irvine units—the Division of Social Sciences, the Graduate School of Administration, and the Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO)—attempted and failed to realize these expectations.

Fieldwork on the American Campus

Duchan examines the process of doing fieldwork “at home,” so to speak, by exploring the musical life on American college campuses--where ethnographers often live but seldom reflect upon. In recent years, the field of ethnographic analysis has expanded from a traditional non-Western geographic locus and cultural concept to include urban and suburban Western sites and the internet. Duchan addresses two pertinent questions: What are the distinctive challenges (social, cultural, bureaucratic, and so on) the ethnographer faces in such domestic ethnography? And how might a researcher’s data be affected by historically established social structures, such as those of academic class and rank, traditional campus mores, or the politics of representation and reciprocity that play out in this setting?