Harvard's Department of Social Relations and its audacious goal of
creating a new science was a unique experiment in American
academia, and its rise and fall is a little-known story. Among its
faculty were some of the most eminent social scientists of the
time, including some who became notorious for dubious research
methods, such as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (reborn as Ram
Dass), who haphazardly researched the effects of psilocybin on
students, and Henry Murray, who traumatized undergraduate Ted
Kaczynski (later the Unabomber) in a three-year long abusive
psychological experiment. But the real story of the department is a
fascinating instructive tale of hubris, ego, and academic politics
overlaid on famed sociologist Talcott Parsons's obsessive quest for
an all-encompassing theory of social behavior - the white whale to
his Captain Ahab. The idea for Social Relations was hatched in the
1930s. Scorned by traditional interests in their Harvard
departments, rising faculty stars in anthropology, sociology and
psychology fled their oppressors, seeking to create not merely a
new department but a new social science. The refugees were Talcott
Parsons, Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, and Clyde Kluckhohn. They
promised an interdisciplinary science that would supplant the elder
social sciences of history, government, and economics in its
ability to explain human behavior. An audacious aspiration, critics
found it as imperious as it was implausible. Inspired by the new
and controversial works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Max Weber and
Emile Durkheim, the group met clandestinely to plot the bold
venture, giving their efforts a conspiratorial air. They called
themselves the "Levellers" in recognition of the many levels they
believed the study of behavior required. Their big break came when
their vision was legitimized by interdisciplinary research during
World War II by the Research Branch of the War Department and the
Foreign Morale Analysis Division of the Office of War Information.
Government agencies employed teams of clinical and social
psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists to study
issues important to the war effort, such as assessing the morale of
the Japanese, as well as the spirit of our own troops. Twenty-five
years later, some at Harvard referred to it facetiously as the
Department of "Residual" Relations. The grand experiment had run
its course. Failing in its early years to develop a unified
theoretical foundation, Social Relations was unwieldy, more
multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary. It became a three-ring
circus with distinct acts from psychology, sociology, and
anthropology. After an early burst of enthusiasm from faculty and
graduate students to create a new discipline, hopes faded. The
single most ambitious attempt to integrate its component
disciplines, the Carnegie Project on Theory and its work product,
Toward a General Theory of Action, missed the mark. Without an
integrated theory, the department failed to create "social
relations" as a new science. The saga engendered controversies that
became national, even international, scandals. From the psilocybin
"research" of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert to the infiltration
of the teaching staff of the department's (and one of Harvard's)
largest courses by the radical Students for a Democratic Society,
fierce arguments raged about what was a proper subject or method of
inquiry and just how far academic freedom should extend.
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