Word: programing
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...THERE were some rationale for a Social Studies program in the 1960's when Sociology was a part of the Social Relations department, that rationale vanished with the creation of the Sociology Department in 1970. It is preposterous for anyore to argue that Harvard's Sociology Department was not qualified to teach social thought at any time during the sixties and seventies, since we had on our faculty several of the world's foremost social theorists--Talcott Parsons, George Homans and Seymour Martin Lipset, to list only three--and, in our junior faculty, any number of social theorists of different...
Indeed, the Social Studies program has always relied heavily, and still does, on the junior faculty and graduate students of the Sociology Department to perform the core of its teaching. In the late seventies and early eighties, the Sociology Department strongly reinforced the quantitative side of its program, in this way correcting one of its deficiencies...
...only possible justification for Social Studies as a separate concentration. But to justify Social Studies in this way is to expose, further, its redundancy, since there already exists an excellent department at Harvard which is well qualified to do this: it is called Philosophy. In fact, the Social Studies program does not try to be a philosophy, or even a social philosophy, department. Rather, it is a competing sociology department, engaged in the practice of a discredited Anglophile sociology...
Committing resources to this misguided educational mission is bad enough; but the Social Studies program is wasteful in another way that is equally serious. It is a graveyard of academic careers. In the 30 years of its existence, not a single member of its jointly hired junior faculty has received tenure at Harvard. With its excessive teaching demands, even the most organized and brilliant of young scholars have found it nearly imossible to produce at a level that would have given them a passing shot at a tenure slot...
...experiencing serious problems attracting the best young talent to its faculty because of our tenure policy. The Dean has announced new policy initiatives to change this, which the Sociology Department strongly supports. It is hard to see how any young scholar can take these pronouncements seriously, however, when a program such as Social Studies is allowed to flourish...