Word: patterson
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...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...
...interventions of Professors Davis and Patterson seek to run down what they cannot understand--a horrible example of academic thuggery. I suspect that tenure has not been given to Social Studies teachers for the brute reason that it is an undergraduate concentration. My own opinion is that the best way to remedy that is to expand one of the jewels in Harvard's crown...
...cannot laugh everything away, even though that can help to keep despair at bay. The matters at issue are serious. It is always distressing to see people out to destroy when they could be creating. My experience convinces me that Professors Davis and Patterson are badly wrong. Social Studies is terrific, imaginative, rigorous, serious and high-powered. I hope my two colleagues in Sociology will have the good grace to apologize to the Social Studies community as a whole. John A. Hall Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Studies