College of Social Studies - Newsletter 2000

Table of Contents:

Reader's Guide and Status Report

This, our sixth Newsletter, appears on the 40th anniversary of the College Programs at Wesleyan. It is therefore appropriate that our focus this year is upon things academic.

Paul Halliday has written the major piece on CSS alums in the professoriate. It is followed by a pleasingly long list of known scholarly publications of our graduates. Their authors come not only from the academic world, but from Law and Public Policy as well. In another perhaps more important branch of education, many CSSers are engaged in teaching in the primary and secondary school sector; we hope to tell their story in a later issue. A second most interesting article by Richard Stoller compares the CSS to similar programs in other institutions around the country.

The CSS prospers, although it does so with the bumps and stresses that have long been part of daily life. The scramble to recruit suitable tutors continues to be a matter of high concern. As to retaining our students, last year we bragged about what a good incoming Sophomore class we had recruited, and how unprecedently not a single member of the rising Junior class had been lost. Our hubris was repaid by the loss in this year 's Sophomore class of fully one third !! (Our four-decade history suggests that an event of this magnitude happens about once every eight years.) But there are many good things to report as well. Seven students earned "Honors" or better on their theses; there were three Phi Beta Kappa; plus the items noted in "Blowing our Horn." And we have just learned that Lari Ortiz '97 has won a Fulbright.

The Fall Banquet speech was delivered by Teddy Shaw '76. Vice Chair of the Wesleyan Trustees, Teddy is currently the Associate Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. His talk on "Race at the Millennium" and the follow-up engrossed the audience for nearly two hours.

 CSS Alumni in the Professoriate

Paul Halliday '83

 

[Comprehension] consists in thinking together in a single act, or in a cumulative series of acts, the complicated relationships of parts which can be experienced only seriatim…At the highest level, it is the attempt to order together our knowledge into a single system—to comprehend the world as a totality. Of course this is an unattainable goal, but it is significant as an ideal aim against which partial comprehension can be judged. To put it differently, it is unattainable because such comprehension would be divine, but significant because the human project is to take God’s place.

Louis Mink did not intend to describe the College of Social Studies here in his 1974 essay, "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," but he may as well have. There is intellectual confidence, an enthusiasm, even a spiritual compulsion in Mink’s words that might easily be applied to the CSS, or at least to its aspirations. As Mink explained, "comprehension"—or CSS—"is an individual act of seeing-things-together." Separate tutorials and colloquia, different batteries of comprehensive exams: when taken together, these separate acts comprise a single act of seeing-things-together. In recent months, as I have communicated with alumni in the academy about the impact of CSS on their lives, this ambition to see things together, in their scholarship and in their teaching, connects them together. For all of us, CSS appears to have been "an unattainable goal" as we have passed through and beyond it, yet it has clearly outlined "an ideal aim" for us.

While idealism motivates the CSS and its graduates, most of us come out of the College as committed empiricists. When we observe the actual workings of CSS and its impact on our lives, the view we get is not always rosy: social realities, as we all know, can be pretty messy. In particular, CSS’s early years produced some messy realities. More than one early graduate felt keenly his status as "a guinea pig" of the CSS experiment in the early 1960s. But the inevitable growing pains were compensated by the idealism of Mink and Gene Golob, and by President Victor Butterfield, who, as one graduate put it, saw CSS as "a gamble on the maturity of Wesleyan students." Nearly all the CSS alumni who went on to graduate study and the professoriate report that CSS has been a remarkably successful gamble, both for Wesleyan, and for themselves personally.

Despite the diversity of this alumni group, the most striking thing about them is the commonality among their views about how CSS shaped their intellectual development. Again and again, for better and for worse, they stressed the impact of the College’s interdisciplinary impulse. This impulse reveals itself in the general stance they take toward most of what they do. While many feel that a concern for the points of connection between disciplines enlivens their scholarship and their teaching, they have felt frustrated at times that their ecumenical approach to the world is not always valued in the contemporary academic world, where institutional arrangements and disciplinary commitments can be stifling. Noah Pickus ‘86, now an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke, notes that "so much of academic life is about specialization. [Editor's note: The scholarly production of the 14 alumni sampled in this article can be found in the segment below.  We would remind our readers that we have yet to complete our collection of articles and books. Please help us.]  That doesn’t mean that CSS should change, only that it can lead you astray; as much as folks love to talk about interdisciplinary work…it’s rarely rewarded in the current academic system." Paul Roth ‘70, chair of the philosophy department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, like other alumni, bemoans the fact that "the academic world [neither] seeks out or warmly embraces people with strong interdisciplinary interests..."

So, as much as CSS’ers value it, the interdisciplinary legacy has not always made life easier for them, especially as they started graduate school, which is normally a period when one is indoctrinated in the mysteries of a particular discipline. "Graduate education in particular remains one of the great stagnant backwaters of educational method," writes William Everett ‘62, articulating a complaint echoed by many. The joy of omnivorous learning one imbibes in CSS sometimes breaks down in the confined world of graduate study. But most alumni have found ways to come to terms with this, and ultimately, to retain their intellectual flexibility, turning it into an asset in the long run.

I for one certainly felt a bit awestruck by the grounding in historiography that many of my peers from large university history departments displayed during my early days of graduate school. But like other CSS’ers, aware that we had some catching up to do in certain narrowly defined areas, it soon became apparent that this liability was more than compensated by strengths we developed in CSS. As my classmate, Rey Koslowski, now assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, remembers from his own early days as a graduate student of politics, he was well ahead of his cohort in having cut his teeth on Hobbes, Rousseau, and Weber. Particularly for those of us who went on to study law, politics, history, or philosophy, this general grounding proved in-valuable. Economists, owing perhaps to the more specialized skills required at advanced levels in that discipline, seem to have found the early going more difficult. John Hanson ‘64, a specialist in economic history at Texas A and M, recalls that the inter-disciplinary stance of CSS meant that "I had a great deal of remedial work to do after Wesleyan… Modern economics likes specialists, so my interdisciplinary cast of mind, fostered by CSS, is a liability. Still, I do credit CSS with providing a certain amount of intellectual stimulation and encouraging breadth, which I still value even if my colleagues don’t." Steve Sheffrin ‘72, dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California at Davis, noted that he too was "at a bit of a disadvantage" when he began his graduate work at MIT compared to those with BA’s in economics, "but after a few years, the skills and perspectives I developed in the CSS became very valuable. It helped me keep my eye on the big picture…and gave me the confidence to take a broad overview of the field."

Big pictures, broad overviews: Mink’s "seeing-things-together." For many, the effort to see-things-together has taken them well beyond the disciplines taught in the College. Numerous alumni remark on the fascination for all things that they acquired while at Wesleyan, a fascination that took them outside CSS into the arts, science, and religion. Bob Rugg’s interest in Africa, which he explored in the music department as well as in the CSS, encouraged his pursuit of graduate work in urban studies, a paradigmatically interdisciplinary enterprise, leading him to a faculty appointment in the Department of Urban Studies in Virginia Commonwealth University. As he notes, his interest in urban studies seemed "the logical outgrowth of the interdisciplinary education of a1960’s activist." Spiritual questions pulled others beyond CSS while they still built on the foundations laid there. For William Everett ‘62, the Herbert Gezork Professor of Christian Social Ethics in the Andover Newton Theological School, this has meant a life-long interest in "the political character of worship", resulting in books such as God’s Federal Republic: Reconstructing our Governing Symbol and Religion, Federalism and the Struggle for Public Life. Like Rugg, Everett too notes the impact of Wesleyan’s unusual music department on his development: the years during which John Cage and Richard Winslow worked in Middletown were obviously extraordinary ones (I too found the music department an important complement and antidote to my life in CSS). Other alumni have focused on the spiritual component of politics, among other scholarly interests: Noah Pickus, who, after writing his senior thesis on religion and politics in the U.S. and then spending a year in South Africa as a Watson fellow, continues to explore the religious element, among others, in the makeup of national identity and ideas of citizenship. David Garrow ‘75 has written widely read and highly regarded books on Martin Luther King, the first of which arose from a tutorial essay with David Titus and then became his CSS thesis, and another of which won him a Pulitzer Prize. Garrow, who is the Presid-ential Distinguished Professor in the Law School at Emory University, has also done notable work in the history of reproductive rights and assisted suicide, as well as other aspects of American legal history.

Such range—a concern for the big picture—characterizes the scholarly and teaching interests of virtually all the CSS graduates who have gone on to a career in academia. Even a brief perusal of the lengthy bibliography of alumni publications drives this home. Paul Roth’s Meeting and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism highlights a tendency common among CSS authors: the pursuit of overarching explanations of things, or at least the consideration of ways we might go about developing such explanations. Steve Sheffrin, in addition to extensive publications on the points of contact between public policy and economics, has also undertaken that most CSS of exercises: an essay on the theoretical problems confronted by so-called social sciences. In Sheffrin’s case, this has led to a widely read book on the rational expectations assumption about economic activity. It’s not every day that writing on economic theory is praised for its "verve and style." Work like this reflects CSS scholars’ efforts to write with an eye to larger epistemological or other philosophical concerns raised by the study of those aspects of society that concern them. The spirits of Mink and Golob seem to lurk everywhere, as do more general lessons drawn from tutorials about the connectedness of things. Thus Thomas Spragens ‘63, professor of political science at Duke, has written on the thought of Thomas Hobbes and on problems in contemporary political theory. His 1981 book, The Irony of Liberal Reason, took on the chaffing between liberal political philosophy and scientific rationality, impulses which, historically speaking, grew together yet seem often to collide. By crossing lines between philosophy, social science, and history, he composed a wide-ranging "excursus in therapeutic intellectual history," as he put it so well in his preface. Similarly, Nicholas Dirks ‘72 has spent a career moving so easily between history and anthropology in his work on South Asia that he holds appointments in both departments at Columbia.

Everyone coming out of the CSS recalls moments, books, and ideas that left a deep imprint, but more important for all of us has been the broader "skills and perspectives" to which Steve Sheffrin refers. While interdisciplinary range was sometimes a problem to overcome as we became specialists, the experience of CSS provided tools, and more important, intellectual confidence that many of our more narrowly educated peers lack. CSS alumni seem to have gone forth with a high comfort level in the face of the unknown and resilience under the crushing work loads of graduate school: there’s nothing like a few years of weekly essays and comprehensive exams as an under-graduate for making graduate work seem familiar and thus manageable. After all, as Rey Koslowski put it, "graduate school has less to do with intelligence than it does with persistence. Read 300 pages. Write a seminar paper. Sound familiar?" While we could easily figure out what we needed to do to fill gaps left in our knowledge after CSS, we never could have acquired the confidence and flexibility fostered in CSS on our own. Randy Stakeman ‘71, a historian and former dean at Bowdoin College (and briefly my colleague when I was a visiting member of the faculty there in 1993-94), notes: "I still feel that I can move into whatever discipline the problem I am investigating takes me…CSS provided me with a broad set of tools and self-confidence in the use of those tools." For myself, the comfort I gained in CSS in exploring new areas encouraged me to do a graduate examination field in 18th-century literature and led to one of my most satisfying experiences as a teacher when I was a lecturer in Harvard’s program in History and Literature, where the delights and problems of interdisciplinary teaching were constantly on the table. That same confidence continues to help me move in other directions, particularly into the law, which formed a crucial element of my first book and which now consumes my interest as a scholar of English social history. As much as I appreciate the opportunities I enjoyed as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and the guidance of a marvelous dissertation advisor, I am always aware that my intellectual confidence was made in the CSS. For me and for others, this has been the foundation of our creativity as teachers and as scholars.

Confidence and broad abilities result less from the stuff of CSS—history, economics, philosophy, and government—than from the CSS approach to that stuff. David Garrow stresses that "for me it wasn’t to a considerable extent any of the particulars or content of what we did in CSS that has had such a huge impact on me, but the amount and intensiveness of the WRITING. I think the weekly papers are the best thing that ever happened to me." For William Everett, the constant writing underscored his "care for language, concise expression, and logical argument." This, in turn, shapes the teaching of his own students: "even today I bear down on my students to write with the focus and critical temper those early tutorials required of us." At Emory’s Law School, where David Garrow teaches, and in colleges and universities around the country, CSS alumni assign their students lots of writing. For Randy Stakeman, "CSS has influenced my pedagogy tremendously. I still assign those short papers that we had to write every week." My own students are sometimes puzzled by my commitment to constant writing, but there are few things in my professional life that give greater satisfaction than to read on student course evaluations—and I quote—"I had to work damned hard for this class, especially on the writing, but it was worth it because it helped me understand the material better and my writing became more forceful." My guess is that other CSS alumni get a similar response from their students.

Tutorials and tutorial essays have always been central to CSS’s pedagogy, and many graduates have taken this emphasis with them to other institutions. But the short essay is not the only unusual thing about CSS. Many alumni mention the significance of close interaction among the same students for three years. The pressure of Thursday night essay writing and preparation for comps—both of which we did in collaboration with classmates—encouraged an ongoing dialogue among students that virtually no other kind of major program can sustain. As Noah Pickus noted, "My experience [teaching] at Middlebury, Williams, and now Duke, is that students rarely really work with one another, or talk to one another about ideas." William Everett sums up a uniquely CSS pheno-menon that has long astonished me: "[we] became so familiar with each other’s intellectual idiosyncrasies and perspectives we could ask each other’s questions in our public gatherings… Gradually we were able to develop some common grammar and vocabulary in this unusual public." It has always been with a sense of sadness for my own students that I watch them part company at the end of a stimulating course at just the moment when they know one another well enough that they could begin to work together on some serious thinking.

Likewise, student/faculty contact in CSS makes a difference. Noah Pickus put this rather elegantly: "Peter Kilby drove me in that first trimester. Sophomore Economics was my weakest tack and I sought a path of risk-minimization. He forced me to reach farther, to raise my spinnaker and suddenly I was planing." The intellectual challenges and academic demands of CSS result in large part from the commitments and concerns of the tutors who pushed, cajoled, and supported in a way that even most small liberal arts college departments cannot hope to mimic. Low student/teacher ratios, heavy work loads for tutors and students alike, and constant contact for months, even years, create an unusual learning environment. CSS graduates express frustration that such opportunities for teaching and learning are almost impossible to create elsewhere owing to the competition for scarce resources on every college or university campus. Yet it is the personal contact over time which, more than anything, seems to have produced CSS alumni scholars of an unusual cast. William Howell ‘93, who is finishing a dissertation in political science at Stanford, is still puzzling over a question asked years ago by Cecilia Miller; for Rey Koslowski, it was an experience as a preceptor for Nancy Schwartz that gave him his first important understanding of teaching. Students have long squirmed under the assaults on complacency launched by Rich Adelstein, and I know that even as a historian, twenty years later, I still rely on the view of things opened to me by Brian Fay’s and Don Moon’s sophomore philosophy colloquium, not to mention the music and bird watching I enjoyed with David Titus.

But for graduates of CSS in its first 25 years, it was Louis Mink and Gene Golob who made the greatest difference, and not only because between them it seemed like we had Collingwood as an extra tutor. Their constant emphasis on the problem of how we know anything pops up throughout the work of CSS alumni: note how many have written on epistemology in one form or another. This emphasis shapes everything I do in the classroom, where the question "how do historians know" is always more interesting than "what do historians know?" The influence of Mink and Golob was at least as much personal as intellectual. Randy Stakeman writes: "It is hard to describe how much I learned from Gene Golob…His ability to connect with and understand someone from such a different background…has become a model for me in dealing with students." Paul Roth’s poignant observation sums it up: "I do miss Louis Mink."

Roth observes that "Wesleyan in general and CSS in particular remain models for me of what a liberal arts education should be." Many alumni comment on this: more than anything, the intensity of tutorials, frequent writing, and close interaction among students and between students and faculty remain ideals that guide them as they teach. I thus note with interest that the vast majority of CSS alumni are teaching in major universities, not in the small liberal arts college environment from which we sprang. This probably reflects nothing more than the fact that large universities employ more faculty than small colleges. Yet despite the rather different environment of the large university, most CSS graduates seem to have done everything they can to take the best aspects of CSS’s breadth, rigor, and intimacy with them to settings that are perhaps less supportive of such a labor intensive approach to undergraduate education. This has become a very real issue for me as I contemplate my own move from a small liberal arts college to a large research university, a move I undertake with both excitement and ambivalence about what it means for the kind of teaching I can do. But that is another story that has yet to be written, unless—as Louis Mink might have provoked us to do—we should contemplate writing a history of the future.

In many ways, this has been the most diabolical of tutorial assignments: to synthesize the divergent experiences and ideas of the dozens of people who have gone from CSS into the world of scholarship in fields running from theology to law. As in any brief essay, I have smoothed over rough patches in hopes of making some compelling yet defensible generalizations about the place of CSS in the diverse professional lives of its graduates. I did not mean for this to become a panegyric in blank verse. But after hearing from numerous alumni about their experiences and poking around in their writings, I have to contend that there is something distinctive about this group of academics, something that unites them, and that much of what makes them distinctive and that unites them relates to their undergraduate years. As a historian, using memoirs for evidence of anything makes me nervous. But the consistency with which alumni in the academy point to the importance of CSS makes a compelling case for the idea that something extraordinary has been going on in tutorial for four decades now.

Rest assured, I wrote this--at least most of it--on a Thursday night.

Anne Cresciamanno (1919 - 1999)

Peter Kilby

The Spring Banquet on April 26th was dedicated to the memory of Anne Cresciamanno. The speaker, a practicing psychiatrist and Adjunct Professor at Harvard, delivered a riveting lecture to a large audience. The subject was "Healing Childhood Trauma: Interacting with Landscape in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children." That speaker, Dr Sebastiano Santostefano, was Anne's younger brother. Her daughter Paula and Paula's daughter Rebecca were in attendance, as were her sister Gloria, her brother Tony and a niece, Karen. It was a marvelous evening.

As you all learned, Anne died October 23rd of last year. She had had breast cancer in 1976-77 and licked it completely. She retired a decade later in 1985, the same year Gene Golob stepped down. Anne led a very active life in retirement - doing voluntary social work, baking for all of us, swimming, corresponding with CSS Alums and, of course, her specialty - ballroom dancing! It began again in late 1995 shortly after she and I began paying Gene weekly visits - and so it became a soothing ritual every Tuesday, frequently joined by John Driscoll, a ritual we followed for three years up until Gene's death.

Our main topic was almost always the CSS. First came news about the alums (from Anne's correspondence and that elicited by the Newsletter) about their careers, their achievements, their families. We also spoke of current CSS issues - the size of the applicant pool, the ups and downs of recruiting tutors, the possibility of restoring the leadership of earlier years through internal appointments a la COL.

With extraordinary support from her daughter Paula, Anne continued to pursue an active life as her difficulties multiplied - she kept up her swimming and baking, and was still driving around town at her habitual "60-miles-an-hour" as late as six months before she died. The last two years were unrelentingly hard. Anne was a fighter with a remarkable will to live; thrice she came out of the hospice. She was given but six months; she lived four and a half years. 

A major ingredient that sustained Anne was her concern for, and the love she received from, her CSS brood. Literally hundreds of you wrote over those years, many called, many visited. Presents, flowers, pictures. Among those I knew of who repeatedly phoned and visited were Bruce Snapp, Ed Lee, Mary Moran, Mike Demicco, Milt Schroeder, Chuck Work, Cliff Saxton, Dick Cavanagh, and Bruce Duncan. Joy D'Amore, herself seriously ill, made a special trip across the country to see Anne in her last month. David Boeri (who spearheaded the special fund in her honor five years ago), after the end of his broadcasting day in Boston, made innumerable trips (two-hours-down, two-hours-back) to raise her spirits. And, of course, at the head of the alphabet in the first class, was the ever-present John Driscoll. A magnificent outpouring of love and good works, and it meant all the world to Anne.  

Some Alumni Books

David Boeri, '71, People of the Ice Whale: Eskimos, White Men, and the Whale, E.P. Dutton, 1983

__________, and James Gibson, "Tell It Good-Bye, Kiddo," The Decline of the New England Offshore Fishery, International Marine Publishing Co., 1976

Charles L. Bosk, '70, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure, The University of Chicago Press, 1979

Richard E. Cavanagh, '68, and Donald K. Clifford, The Winning Performance: How America's High-Growth Midsize Companies Success, Bantam Books, 1985

Gray Cox, '74, The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace As Action, Paulist Press, 1986

__________, The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant's Moral Philosophy, University Press of America, 1984

Nicholas B. Dirks, '72, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, University of Michigan Press, 1993

 __________, editor, Colonialism and Culture, University of Michigan Press, 1995

__________, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, editors, Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton University Press, 1994

__________, editor, In Near Ruins: Cultural theory at the End of the Century, University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Leonard P. Edwards, '63, and Inger J. Sagatun, Child Abuse and the Legal System, Nelson Hall Publishers, 1995

William W. Everett, '62, Blessed be the Bond: Christian Perspectives on Marriage and Family, Fortress Press, 1985

__________, and T.J. Bachmeyer,Disciplines in Transformation: A Guide to Theology and the Behavioral Sciences, University Press of America, 1979

__________, God's Federal Republic: Reconstructing Our Governing Symbol, Paulist Press, __________, Religion, Federalism, and the Struggle for Public Life, Oxford University Press, 1997

Diana Farrell, '87, and Lowell Bryan, Market Unbound: Unleashing Global Capitalism, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1996

Stephen C. Ferruolo, '71, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris, 1100-1215, Cambridge University Press, 1982

David J. Garrow, '75, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Morrow, 1986

__________, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From "Solo" to Memphis, W.W. Norton and Co., 1981

__________, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe V. Wade, University of California Press, 1998

__________, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Yale University Press, 1978

Thomas L. Greaney, '70, Health Law, West Publishing Co., 1995

Paul D. Halliday, '83, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730, Cambridge University Press, 1998

John R. Hanson, II, '64, Trade in Transition: Exports from the Third World, 1840-1900, Academic Press, 1980

Robert E. Hunter, '62, and John E. Riley, Development Today: A New Look at U.S. Relations with the Poor Countries, Praeger Publishers, 1972

Robert Hunter, '62, Security in Europe, Indiana University Press, 1969

__________, The United States and the Developing World, Overseas Development Council, 1973

Gary Jeffrey Jacobson, '73, and Susan Dunn, editors, Diversity and Citizenship: Rediscovering American Nationhood, Rowman and Littlefield, 1996

J. Stephen Lansing, '72, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali, Princeton University Press, 1991

Mark Liniado, '91, Car Culture and Countryside Change, The National Trust, 1996

J. Dean O'Donnell, Jr., '65, Lavigerie in Tunisia: The Interplay of Imperialist and Missionary, The University of Georgia Press, 1979

Matthew Rees, '90, From the Deck to the Sea: Blacks and the Republican Party, Longwood Academic Press, 1991

Barry Reder, '66, The Dusty Road, The Make A Wish Foundation , 1994

Paul Roth, '70, Meeting and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism, Cornell University Press, 1987

Brian L. Schorr, '79, and Martin I. Lubaroff, Forming and Using Limited Liability Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships--1994, Practising Law Institute, 1994

Milton R. Schroeder, '72, The Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions (Volumes I and II), Warren, Gorham & Lamont, 1989

Steven M. Sheffrin, '72, Rational Expectations, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1996

__________, '72, The Making of Economic Policy, Basil Blackwell, 1989

__________, Markets and Majorities: The Political Economy of Public Policy, The Free Press, 1993

__________, Arthur O'Sullivan and Terri A. Sexton, Property Taxes and Tax Revolts: The Legacy of Proposition 13, Cambridge University Press, 1995

__________, Rational Expectations, Cambridge Surveys of Economic Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1983

__________and Arthur O'Sullivan, Economics: Principles and Tools, Prentice Hall, 1998

Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., '63, Dilemma of Contemporary Political Theory: Toward A Post-Behavioral Science of Politics, Dunellen Publishing Co., 1973

__________, The Irony of Liberal Reason, The University of Chicago Press, 1981

__________, The Politics of Motion: the World of Thomas Hobbes, University Press of Kentucky, 1973

__________, Reason and Democracy, Duke University Press, 1990

John Stremlau, '66, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970, Princeton University Press, 1977

__________, and Greg Mills, The Privatisation of Security in Africa, The South African Institute of International Affairs, March 1999

Arthur T. Vanderbilt, II, '72, and Carla Vivian Bello, Jersey Justice: Three Hundred Years of the New Jersey Judiciary, The Institute for Continuing Legal Education, 1978

__________, and __________, New Jersey's Judicial Revolution: A Political Miracle, New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education, 1997

_________, Changing Law: A Biography of Arthur T. Vanderbilt, Rutgers University Press, 1976

__________, Fortune's Children, William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1989, reprinted in The Reader's Digest, 1990

__________, An Introduction to the Study of Law, Gann Law Books, 1979

__________, Order in the Courts: A Biography of Arthur T. Vanderbilt, New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education, 1997

__________, Treasure Wreck: The Fortunes and Fate of the Pirate Ship Whydah, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986

Mark I. Wallach, '71, and Bracker, Jon, Christopher Morley, Twayne Publishers, 1976

Scott M. Wilson, '63, edited by Jonathan Axelrad and Gail Clayton, Husick,The Limited Liability Company: A New Form of Business Organization, Wilson Sonsonin Goodrich & Rosati Corporation, 1994

__________, Organizing for Power and Empowerment, Columbia University Press, 1994

Some Alumni Articles

Leonard P. Edwards, '63, "The Case for Abolishing Fitness Hearings in Juvenile Court, Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 17, 1977

__________, "A Comprehensive Approach to the Representation of Children: The Child Advocacy Coordinating Council, Family Law Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3, Fall 1993

__________, "The Defense Attorney at the Dispositional: The Need for Social Worker," NLADA Briefcase, December/January 1976-77

__________ ,(Chairman, Advisory and Editorial Committee) "Family Violence: State-of-the-Art Court Programs," National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, 1992

__________, "Improving Implementation of the Federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980," Juvenile and Family Court Journal, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Vol. 45, No. 3, 1994

__________, (Chairman, Advisory and Editorial Committee)"The Juvenile Court and the Role of the Juvenile Court Judge, Juvenile and Family Court Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1992

__________, '63, "Reducing Family Violence: The Role of the Family Violence Council" Juvenile and Family Court Journal, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Vol. 43, No. 3, 1992

__________, "The Relationship of Family and Juvenile Courts in Child Abuse Cases," Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 27, 1987

__________, and Inger J. Sagatun, "A Study of Juvenile Record Sealing Practices in California

__________, "Who Speaks for the Child," Roundtable, The University of Chicago Law School

Diana Farrell, '87 et al, "The Color of Hot Money," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2000

Thomas L. Greaney, '70,"Managed Competition, Integrated Delivery Systems and Antitrust, Cornell Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 6, Sept. 1994

__________, "Transforming Medicare Through Physician Payment Reform: An Introduction to the Symposium Issue," Saint Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, 1990

__________, "Quality of Care and Market Failure Defenses in Antitrust Health Care Litigation," Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring 1989

__________, "When Politics and Law Collide: Why Health Care Reform Does Not Need Antitrust 'Reform,'" Health Law Symposium, Saint Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, Fall 1994

John R. Hanson, II, '64, "Diversification and Concentration of LDC Exports" Victorian Trends," Explorations in Economic History 14, 44-68 (1977)

__________, "Education, Economic Development, and Technology Transfer: A Colonial Test, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. XLIX, No. 4 (Dec. 1989)

__________, "Human Capital and Direct Investment in Poor Countries," Explorations in Economic History 33, 86-106 (1996)

__________, "Third World Incomes before World War I: Further Evidence," Explorations in Economic History 28, 367-379 (1991)

__________, "Third World Incomes before World War I: Some Comparisons," Explorations in Economic History 25, 323-336 (1988)

__________, "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed'? A Traditional View," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3 (Sept. 1988)

Jeffrey W. Hayes, '91, and Seymour Martin Lipset,

"The Social Roots of United States: Protectionism," Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 1995

John S. Holtzman, '74, and Merle R. Menegay, "Urban Wholesale Marketplaces for Fresh Produce in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore: Lessons Learned and Potential Applications for Asia," Technical Report No. 9, Regional Agribusiness Project (RAP), May 1995

__________,and Ismael Ouedraogo, Thomas Wittenberg, Merle R. Menegay and Kimberly M. Aldridge, "Market Information Systems and Services: Lessons from the AMIS Project Experience, Abt Associates, March 1993

__________, "Rapid Reconnaissance Guidelines for Agricultural Marketing and Food System Research in Developing Countries," MSU International Development Papers, Working Paper No. 30, 1986

Robert E. Hunter, '62, "Presidential Control of Foreign Policy: Management or Mishap'?," The Washington Papers/91, Volume X, 1991

Andrew Kleinfeld, '66, Court Rulings (6 cases)

__________, "A Divorce Reform Act," Harvard Journal on Legislation, Vol. 5, No. 4, May 1968

John Stephen Lansing, '72, "Evil in the Morning of the World: Phenomenological Approaches to a Balinese Community," Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia No. 6, 1974

Nicholas W. Puner, '64, "Civil Disobedience: An Analysis and Rationale," New York University Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 4, Oct. 1968

Barry Reder, '66, and Zane Gresham, "Federal and State Securities Aspects of Employee Stock Ownership Plans," The Business Lawyer, Vol. 31, No. 3, April 1976

__________, "Measuring Buyers' Damages in 10b-5 Cases," reprinted from The Business Lawyer, Vol. 31, No. 4, July 1976

__________, "The Obligation of a Director of a Delaware Corporation to Act as an Auctioneer," reprinted from The Business Lawyer, Vol. 44, No. 2, February 1989

Jeremy David Sacks, '91,"Culture, Cash or Calories: Interpreting Alaska Native Subsistence Rights," Alaska Law Review, Duke University School of Law, Vol. XII, No. II, Dec. 1995

__________, "Monopsony and the Archers: Rethinking Foreign Acquisitions after Thompson-LTV," Law and Policy in International Business, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring 1994

Brian L. Schorr, '79, "Testing Statutory Criteria for Foreign Policy: The Nuclear Non-proliferation Act of 1978 and the Export of Nuclear Fuel to India," (3 copies) New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 1982

Milton R. Shroeder, '62, "The Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions," Vol 2, 1995

Richard Stoller, '85, "Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo and Liberal Radicalism in 1930s Colombia," Jn. of Lat. Am. Studies, 1995

John Stremlau, '66, "Antidote to Anarchy," The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994

__________, "Clinton's Dollar Diplomacy," Foreign Policy, No. 97, Winter 1994-95

__________, "Dateline Bangalore: Third World Technopolis," Foreign Policy, Spring 1996

__________, "Security for Development in a Post-Bipolar World,"The World Bank, November 1989

__________, "Sharpening International Sanctions: Toward A Stronger Role for the United Nations," A report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Nov. 1996

__________, Editor, "Soviet Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 481, Sept. 1985

 

CSS and Its Competition

Richard Stoller '85

Being in the college admissions business, one of my responsibilities is "environmental scanning," a new name for the time-honored process of checking out the competition. Coordinating admissions for a comprehensive undergraduate honors program at a large (indeed, huge) public university, I have had the opportunity to gather information about several programs which bear comparison to the CSS. While I make no claims to comprehensiveness--in fact, I would be glad to hear about other comparable programs--here are a few observations that may be of interest to CSS alums and current students alike.

There is an important distinction to be made between interdisciplinary social science programs at the graduate level, and those which actually shape and govern undergraduate programs. The University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought comes to mind: it is the principal departmental identity for many of its faculty members, and it grants the Ph.D., but it is not an undergraduate program. I suspect that a lot of nominally CSS-like programs at research universities are like this, i.e. not CSS-like at all.

Not that I wish to be the bearer of bad news, but I must note first that Harvard University has a BA-granting Committee on Social Studies that's strikingly like our own CSS, even in era-of-origin (c.1960). The University of Virginia's Program in Social and Political Thought is also one that any CSSer would recognize--although unlike CSS and the Harvard program, theirs is a junior-year sequence only. Binghamton University, ex-SUNY Binghamton, has a program in "Philosophy, Politics, and Law" that is like CSS in substance, and that has a name which some of our more careerist students might find more congenial. Some other institutions (e.g. Yale, Emory) would permit an undergraduate to build a CSS-like curriculum on her own, although such a path would deprive the student of the comradery that is such a part of CSS as we know it.

Even if we cast a relatively wide net, it's interesting to note that CSS-like programs are not very common, at least among the (mostly eastern) universities that I have checked. To be sure, they are more common than interdisciplinary programs of the College of Letters sort. However, it is interesting to note of the three Wesleyan interdisciplinary programs usually spoken of together, it is Science in Society that has the most fellow-programs elsewhere. For instance, it's the only one to have a counterpart at my institution, Penn State.

If we humor ourselves with the notion of CSS as a de-facto honors curriculum within Wesleyan, then we might look to honors programs at Boston College, Maryland, UT-Austin (the Plan II Program) and elsewhere for heuristic purposes. (I've omitted my own program, the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, because we're not at all prescriptive when it comes to coursework--students take whatever honors work suits them.) Even the "great books" approach, for which the two St. John's Colleges (Maryland and New Mexico) are known and which some larger institutions have as a lower-division component, would be worthy soulmates. The CSS emphasis on extensive written work as an evaluative tool, punctuated by oral examinations, articulates with the recent movement towards evaluation reform at institutions big and small: the Sophomore and Senior Comprehensive Exams are, in a sense, the ultimate (pre-graduation) "outcomes assessment," a phrase which is much in the news at all levels of the educational system.

Closer to home, I was surprised to find in my web-searching that Trinity College has just installed a sophomore seminar program very much like our CSS Sophomore year in form, but encompassing all academic divisions (humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences). Were any strangers seen snooping around the CSS offices recently?

The utility of this kind of exercise depends on our assessment of the current situation of the CSS. If we felt its status at Wesleyan were a bit uncertain, we could invoke the existence of broadly similar programs elsewhere--to which we might well get the reply, "Well, if all those other institutions played in traffic, would you do it too?" Mercifully, we're not in that situation at present, so I think we should be in learning mode when we look at what others have done. I work at a large institution where sheer size leads many to disdain learning from other institutions, since "surely we have enough lessons right here." Wesleyan is small enough not to have that hubris, and CSS is only a small chunk of Wesleyan. Just to get the ball rolling, I note that Harvard's version of CSS has a substantial anthropological content that was missing in the CSS of my day at least, and that I for one would have enjoyed.

Richard Stoller (CSS and Latin American Studies '85, Ph.D. Duke '91) is Coordinator of Selection and International Programs at the Schreyer Honors College, Penn State University, University Park PA 16802 (rjs27@psu.edu). He has taught Latin American History at Dickinson College and at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University).

 

Blowing Our Horn

Peter Kilby

It is sometimes true that if you do not blow the heraldic horn announcing your accomplishments, no one will. It is the opinion of the editors that this aphorism seems to apply to the College of Social Studies. Yet, absent the institutional muscle of its own faculty, it is of signal importance that the wider community be aware of the disproportionate accomplishments of our graduating seniors and our alumni/ae. These precious few represent about 3 percent of the Wesleyan population.

It was to remedy this deficiency that we recounted the CSS record, inter alia, in collecting the lion's share of Rhodes Scholars and other sought-after fellowships in our article "Something to be Proud of" in the 1998 Newsletter. In the paragraphs that follow, we aim to convert that innovation into a tradition.

To begin with our Seniors, Dan Tobin was one of just three individuals in the university graduating class this May to be awarded "University Honors." The quality of his thesis--"China Under the American Lens: Five Americans view China in War and Revolution 1919-1949"--and the breadth of his academic work qualified him as one of eight finalists to undergo a grueling oral exam. And he succeeded! And we have also just learned that the Honors thesis of Stephen Engel '98 joins that of a small group of CSS'ers (Mark Wallach, David Garrow, Matt Rees come to mind) to go directly into publication. The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay & Lesbian Movement is being published in the next few months by Cambridge University Press.

Stephen Engel's book is yet another building stone in that breath-taking intellectual edifice recorded in pages 4 to 10 of this Newsletter.

Our next stop is graduate school. The NYU Law School has a very high-profile three-year award, the Root-Tilden Fellowship. Larry Green '72, now with the law firm of Perkins, Smith & Cohen, won the coveted fellowship in his day. He reports that candidates are screened by an external selection committee which has been given the same three-page instruction for the past two decades. Indeed the instructions are also applied to the newer Soros Fellowship. One paragraph in that document reads as follows:

There are two honors majors of which you should take special note. The Swarthmore Honors Program and the Wesleyan College of Social Studies are among the country's most selective and demanding undergraduate programs. In both programs students take most of their course work in small seminars taught by top faculty. Both require significant independent work including a thesis, and both require comprehensive examinations by outside examiners. The quality of work produced by these students in these programs often exceeds that done in master's programs. Transcripts from both, however, include significant portions of ungraded work. In evaluating these records, give special weight to recommendations and to graduation honors.

Our final item pertains to one of Wesleyan's more renowned departments, that of Economics. Some fifteen years ago Jan Hogendorn '60 noticed that his students at Colby College were much inspired when they attended a faculty seminar where the distinguished presenting professor was one of their own alumni. The impact on their self-esteem and motivation was palpable. Applying this thought to his alma mater in Middletown, he most generously endowed an annual economics faculty seminar to be given by a distinguished Wesleyan graduate. This past year Steve Sheffrin '72 delivered the Hogendorn and he will be succeeded this year by David Montgomery '67. Neither took more than two Departmental courses!

Attending Reunions
Is Class the Right Concept?

George Raymond '78

In 1975, the only thing I wanted to do more than join CSS was to go to Paris. So CSS let me disappear for a while and then start the sophomore tutorials as a junior. Over the next two years, my CSS classmates became the group at Wesleyan I knew best. So 20 years later, instead of going to my Wesleyan reunion in 1998, I decided to wait one more year and attend my CSS reunion in 1999.

John Driscoll (CSS '62) graciously put together addresses of the other members of CSS '79, and I wrote them from Switzerland saying I was coming and encouraging them to do the same.

Two of my CSS classmates--Peter Sanders and Brian Schorr--did attend the reunion. The CSS gathering was on Saturday afternoon, June 5 in the top of Harriman Hall. The weekend's other events and meals were also very enjoyable, but a bit less personal: I found myself mostly talking with new acquaintances rather than old ones.

Why did I see so few of the people I had known two decades before? As I once may have said in a tutorial paper, a basic problem is the concept of class. A reunion this year for classes -4 and -9 and next year for -5 and -0 segregates people arbitrarily. It's almost like a reunion for names starting with A to D. In Wesleyan courses and living units, you get to know people in seven classes. But a reunion brings only one of the seven.

How about an All-Class Reunion once every three years? Some advantages of this might be the following:

  • Wesleyan could concentrate its resources on an even better reunion.
  • Every class would have a few tables under one of the tents, and people could expect a sample of "their" seven classes.
  • CSS and other departments could expect bigger turnouts and therefore offer say a seminar in addition to a gathering.

Anyway, it was nice to see two CSS classmates, and I hope to see--or meet--more of you in 2003 or 2004.