“Comment on Sociology at Dartmouth…”
(1) REGARDING WHY ITS SPECIAL
“I took a course, I don’t even remember the name of it, but it was the study of the rise and fall of societies. And what the elements would be. I can remember saying to my professor that everything that he was teaching us tells us that right now we are in trouble in this country [1950s].”
Michael Choukas Jr., D ’51
“We are the only ones that study very seriously the people […] we study the people and we defend issues of inequality, injustice, issues of people’s struggle like labor movement, women movements, popular movements, class conflict.”
Professor Parsa
“The best thing about [the department] is the scholarship that everyone is producing. That is just what I love most about it.”
Professor Parsa
“Sociology has a way of asking questions that we can explore just about anything. That I have yet to find something that there is not a sociological way of talking about it and examining it, even if it strikes other students as odd […]. We can ask sociological questions about anything.”
Professor King
“Dartmouth at the time and probably still is unusual because you have a graduate level faculty, the kind of faculty who would be teaching at a large university with lots of graduate students–but, there aren’t any graduate students!”
Professor Marsden, D ’73
“Well, one of the things I remark on most often is that you have an extraordinary range of choice and discretion of what you are going to study. There’s sort of no boundaries on what a sociologist can legitimately study. You’re not roped in by a particular subject matter or anything like that. It’s free in its flexibility in that respect.”
Professor Marsden, D ’73
(2) REGARDING WHY YOU DO IT
“Everything that I did I know that what I learned in sociology was really at the basis of forming my values and everything else.”
Michael Choukas Jr., D ’51
“[In] sociology… you study society, you can study every aspect of society. Sociology gives you a chance to study the economic institutions, political institutions, but also the people and how they are affecting all of those things… you can look at deviance, emotions, issues of war, issues of economic downturn or crises and all that […]. I came from a background, we were poor… very poor… and then we were also politically powerless, we had no rights to speak of because we were a religious minority […]. So, all those things–talk about political power and lack of freedom, poverty and discrimination on religion, and persecution. A lot was going on and I needed to find something that would provide answers as to why these things were happening, […] I took a few classes in sociology and decided that sociology could help me figure out what happened in my life.”
Professor Parsa
“I think it’s really the small things. It is the exchanges in conversations I’ve had with students in my office. Sometimes about courses and sometimes just going lots of different places. I think of constructive exchanges with colleagues […] as well as, the times there have been intellectual arguments and debates. A place for synergy that is really wonderful. Those are things that you don’t advertise.”
Professor King
“Where is the computer? There is data I want to analyze.”
Professor Winship, D ’72
“I think sociology has the potential to bring quantitative and qualitative research methods together. In so many careers, that’s really important.”
Professor Winship, D ’72
“Unlike many other undergraduates, maybe this is changing a little, I had never heard of sociology until I got to Dartmouth […] I ended up wandering into a course in quantitative data analysis, I think it was Sociology 7, that both sort of resonated with public opinions and issues about race relations that were very much in the wind at the time, but also required quantitative skills and it sort of gave a place where some of my inclinations could be put use on something that seemed relevant and interesting, in the way that mathematics for me at least didn’t at the time. Certainly sociology was very much in tune with the sort of social change and social instability that was in place in the late 60s and early 70s. And seemed like a place where one could do meaningful studies that were nonetheless academic.”
Professor Marsden, D ’73
(3) REGARDING WHAT HAS CHANGED
“The students had great participation… but, that gradually changed, in part because students were mostly interested towards the end of the 60s in issues of war and stuff like that, so they would come and encourage the faculty to take anti-war positions and so forth.”
Professor Parsa
“Before I came, there were many faculty members here that were really quite radical, […] Much more strongly a Marxist curriculum. There was the People’s Republic of Sociology.”
Professor King
“But then, the thing that surprised me and I continually continue to be surprised by up to that time the department by 1997-8, the department had a lot more resources, although it was a smaller department.”
Professor Parsa
“Sociology had a state-of-the-art computer lab to do data analysis. So Introductory Sociology was one of a few in the country actually doing data analysis as a way of testing the hypotheses that were generated from the course and the reading. So, that’s one way that faculty were interacting with students that was really different and gave students who were taking, perhaps, their first sociology class a very different view of sociology and what it means.”
Professor King
“At that time, Dartmouth was like way ahead of the curve on computing. […] In that period of time Dartmouth was really unusual in that it had a timeshare interactive computing system where if you would ask for an answer you would get an answer in two seconds… now that’s not usual in the life you’re leading because we all do that now, but it was really unusual then. Most people when they were doing computing at all would have to make a request one day and if they were lucky got the answer the next day. There were computing and educational aspects of computing–That was something that Dartmouth in the 60s and early 70s was a real leader on. President Kemeny was someone who was really visionary in that respect.” Professor Marsden, D ’73
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the alumni and professors who took time out of their days to speak with me regarding their experiences with sociology at Dartmouth.
Special thanks to Michael Choukas Jr., Deborah King, Misagh Parsa, Chris Winship, and Peter Marsden for all your help.