Word: patterson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hurt by the antics of its head tutor and department chair. How many first-year students will be attracted to a department where senior professors are reduced to petty name-calling? How many graduate students will want to join a department that brands them "disloyal"? If Davis and Patterson know what is best for their department, they will apologize for this irrational incident and get back to work...
Crimson reporters can attest to the great reluctance that I have hitherto shown to add fuel to the dispute between Sociology and Social Studies. But Acting Sociology Department Chair Orlando Patterson's "commentary" does suggest that a few words--half in anger, half wracked with laughter--from a teacher with a foot in both camps may cast light on some of the issues involved...
...before answering some of them, one more personal comment is in order. I very much hope that Professor Patterson has only recently realized that my appointment amounts to my committing academic suicide. The arguments that he made in late 1986 and early 1987 played a large part in my accepting a position at Harvard. I was most swayed by the general insistence that it would enhance my academic career, and by the specific one that tenure was now a possibility for someone such as myself...
...might expect a professor at this university--at any university--to lament the virtual destruction of a great center of learning. The sufferings of British sociology are no worse than those of other subjects--indeed, were Professor Patterson better informed he would realize that philosophy and anthropology have suffered most...
These figures were key in my own intellectual formation--for I am a British sociologist, wondering somewhat why Harvard hired me; and I am doubly puzzled by memories of Professor Patterson admitting that his own intellectual development had been crucially aided by a celebrated seminar at the London School of Economics on the sociology of development. There is no truth to the notion, avidly propogated by Margaret Thatcher, that British sociology (and British academia more generally) has brought troubles on its own head. It seems to me shameful that a sociologist repeats such slander: Surely some solidarity is owed...