Word: bellah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...immediate issue is whether Sociologist Robert N. Bellah, 46, a professor at Berkeley, is worthy of being named to the institute's permanent faculty. Sociologists Talcott Parsons and David Riesman of Harvard, where Bellah once taught, consider him an "extraordinary" scholar in his field, the sociology of religion. Now, however, he is caught in a contest between the "hard" scientists in mathematics at the institute and the "softer" social scientists. The real issue is only partly his credentials as a scholar: the larger question is who will chart the institute's future...
...being consulted on his plans, but at first Kaysen calmed them by moving slowly. Not until 1970 did he make his first appointment to the School of Social Science-naming Anthropologist Clifford Geertz as head-and it received no opposition. Last October, however, when he decided to nominate Bellah, he aroused that special combination of incandescent anger and pettiness of which large intellects are sometimes capable...
Symbols. For a "hard" scientist, Bellah's work made an easy target. He does not rely on mathematical models or statistical samples. He is a comparative and historical sociologist who "makes sense of other people's data." His interest in religion, in fact, may be one reason he is held in low esteem by some scientists. As Institute Physicist Freeman Dyson notes: "There are a lot of scientists who consider religion as a childhood disease." Logician Morton White dismissed Bellah's work as "pedestrian and pretentious." Mathematician André Weil called him "not of the intellectual...
...resolve the dispute, the opinion of five outside scholars was sought. Three experts in his specialty endorsed him heartily; the other two had reservations. That convinced the mathematicians that Bellah could not be first rate. By 14 to 7 the faculty urged Kaysen to withdraw the nomination. He refused, and the trustees appointed Bellah...
...Both Bellah and Kaysen have former ties to Harvard. Bellah taught here between 1955 to 1967. Kaysen was a professor of Economics here between 1957 and 1966 and the associate dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration from 1969 to 1966. He left Harvard to assume the Institute's leadership...