Social Work

In May, 1921, the Regents of the University authorized the establishment of a curriculum in social work. This was in response to an urgent request from leaders of social work in Detroit that the University undertake to encourage students to enter this field and give them the necessary training. A “curriculum,” in terms of University organization, meant a group of courses selected from various departments and so arranged as to constitute a unified program centering about a given subject. It was thus that the courses in business administration were first organized within the Department of Economics. The staff teaching courses in sociology, then within the Department of Economics, was given charge of the curriculum in social work, which covered courses in sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and history. Elementary courses in these fields might be elected as early as the sophomore year, but the main convergence of the program was upon the junior and senior years, with additional offerings on the graduate level. Besides the courses in the various social sciences there were later added to the curriculum certain professional courses specifically related to social work, such as case work, medical social work, psychiatric social work, and child welfare. A final aspect of these developments was the provision for supervised field work, designed to give students actual contacts with social agencies in Ann Arbor and Detroit, under the direction of a supervisor of field work who joined the staff in 1927. Thus, the three major aspects of education in social work were provided for in the curriculum, viz., background courses in the social sciences, specialized professional courses, and field work.

On the foregoing basis the training program of the University was carried on for a period of fourteen years. Scores of students within this period were graduated to positions with social agencies throughout Michigan and in other states, adding thereby to their academic training actual experience on the job. Many persons who have since become leaders in the profession acquired their initial interest and training through facilities established by the University. In 1927 a certificate in social work was authorized by the Regents, to be granted to those who had added to their academic work in the curriculum a year’s experience in a responsible agency under supervision of both the agency and the supervisor of field work on the University staff in charge of the curriculum in social work. This certificate, analogous to that awarded in journalism or nursing, was adopted instead of a specialized degree, which as yet had not been authorized.

Meanwhile, important developments were taking place elsewhere in this new educational field, emanating largely from leaders and teachers of social work. Even before the University curriculum for the training of social workers was established the Association of Schools of Professional Social Work had been organized. In this association the staffs of the New York School of Social Work and of the Chicago School of Social Service Administration, established by the University of Chicago, took a leading role. Throughout the decade 1920-30 the demand for training in social service had greatly increased, and a large number of schools or curriculums had come into being, both within and outside established educational institutions. Obviously there was a very great need for the authorized expression of educational standards as to types and content of courses and the personnel engaged in giving them. To this task of developing educational standards the Association of Schools of Professional Social Work applied itself. Its efforts were aided by the appearance of such significant monographs as Education and Training for Social Work, by James H. Tufts of the University of Chicago, and by the organization of the American Association of Social Workers, a professional group which seeks to do for social work what professional organizations have accomplished in the respective fields of medicine, law, and education. The University of Michigan, by virtue of its curriculum in social work, became eligible for membership in the Association of Schools of Professional Social Work and was admitted in 1925. In 1940 there were thirty schools in this Association, all of them having met the requirements as to courses of instruction and personnel.

For continued membership in the Association of Schools of Professional Social Work it has recently been required that all instruction of a professional or technical character be raised to the graduate level and preceded by undergraduate work in the social sciences. Consequently, in 1935 the University reorganized its program in this field through the establishment of what was first called the Institute of the Health and Social Sciences, and later, the Institute of Public and Social Administration. The purpose of organizing this new graduate unit has been to correlate the training program in public administration, which has its backgrounds in the Department of Political Science, with the program in social administration, which, as we have seen, was long organized as a curriculum in the Department of Sociology.

In social work a two-year graduate program within the Institute has been established leading to the degree of master of social work. For entrance upon this graduate program the student must have had thirty hours of credit in the social sciences during his undergraduate period. The graduate work is for the most part of strictly professional or technical character. The work is now given entirely in Detroit at the Horace H. Rackham Educational Memorial, on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Farnsworth Street.

In some academic circles these training programs for public and social service are criticized as being outside the field of formal intellectual interests which should, it is held, be the primary concern of our educational institutions. Over against this contention it may be urged that the needs of our democratic civilization are many, not the least of which is the existence of a body of trained personnel in the various fields of public service. The depression has served, as nothing else could, to throw into strong relief the multifarious social problems which must be dealt with sympathetically and expertly if even greater chaos is not to ensue. It would seem as if a democratically supported state university would be under the necessity of devoting some of its attention and resources to the recruiting and training of students for public service in the field of social work.

– Arthur E. Wood

The Earhart Foundation

In the autumn of 1930 the Earhart Foundation (a family enterprise established by H. B. Earhart of Ann Arbor) offered the president of the University a sum of money to finance an experiment in the training of a selected group of University students for more intelligent and effective leadership in the affairs of the modern American community. The sum assigned by the foundation was not to exceed $10,000 annually, and the period of experimentation was set at four years.

The president decided that the Department of Sociology was the logical unit to set up and administer this project. R. D. McKenzie was assigned the position of director of the enterprise by the president and the Board of Regents.

The plan of operation proposed and followed throughout the four-year period was as follows: a limited number (from eight to twelve) of advanced graduate students from the various social science disciplines were chosen each year on the basis of scholarship and personality, and were awarded fellowships in the Graduate School, each bearing a stipend of $500 for the academic year. In addition, a somewhat larger number (from twenty-five to thirty) of selected undergraduate students, most of them in their senior year, were awarded scholarships averaging around $100 for the academic year. Both fellows and scholars thus selected were required to devote a stipulated minimum amount of time each week to the investigation of some community problem in the field, primarily in the Detroit metropolitan region. The problems selected were carefully chosen, and the scholars, for the most part, worked under the field guidance of the fellows. Two seminars, each meeting for a two-hour period once a week, were set up, one for the fellows and one for the scholars. The two seminars were closely interrelated. The scholars working under the direction of a particular fellow always attended the senior seminar when the fellow in question reported on his work, and frequently the fellows made reports in the junior seminar.

One feature of these seminars was rather unique; namely, the participation in them by members from the various social science departments and also by invited persons from the outside community. As each student reported in the seminar, those most closely associated with his research project, both professors and outsiders, attended the seminar and took part in the discussion. This, together with the fact that the student members of the seminar represented different social science disciplines, and were engaged in the study of different types of community problems, made for a cross-fertilization of ideas and for a broader perspective of the interrelationships of human activities in our modern social order. It tended to break down the narrow academic divisions which characterize university specialization and to focus attention upon the interrelationships of social phenomena.

The period of this experiment terminated at the close of the academic year 1934-35, but in recognition of the value of this type of activity, the University has continued the project, though on a somewhat more limited scale, by setting aside a number of specially designated fellowships in the Graduate School to be awarded to students selected for this work.

Aside from the student-training feature of this work, which, of course, was the main objective, a considerable amount of research material has been collected which is made available to interested parties and which, when amplified and interpreted, will be presented in published form.

– Roderick D. McKenzie [Died May 6, 1940.]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Bernard, Jessie. “History and Prospects of Sociology.” In: Trends in American Sociology. Ed. by George A. Lundberg and others. New York: Harper and Bros., 1929. P. 13.
• Calendar, Univ. Mich., 1881-1914.
• Catalogue …, Univ. Mich., 1914-23.
• Catalogue and Register, Univ. Mich., 1923-27.
• Cooley, Charles H.Sociological Theory and Social Research. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1930. Pp. 3-14.
• “Curriculum in Social Work Is Success.”Mich. Alum., 39 (1933): 401-2.
• General Register Issue, Univ. Mich., 1927-40.
• Jandy, Edward C.Charles Horton Cooley; His Life and His Social Theory. New York: Dryden Press, 1942.
• President’s Report, Univ. Mich., 1881-1909, 1920-40.
• Proceedings of the Board of Regents …, 1881-1940.
• Wood, Arthur E., and Others. “Charles Horton Cooley.” In: University Council and Senate Records, 1929-1932. Ann Arbor: Univ. Mich. Press, 1932. Pp. 54-64.

The Origins of Sociology at Michigan

Sociology at the University of Michigan has a long and distinguished intellectual history. The University was introduced to the emerging discipline through the teachings of faculty member John Dewey, the eminent political philosopher, whose graduate courses in the last decade of the nineteenth century covered many of the now-classic works in the field. One of Dewey’s students, Charles Horton Cooley, taught the first classes bearing the name sociology; he taught both Principles of Sociology and Problems of Sociology in 1894-95. Though Cooley taught out of what was then the Political Economy Department, he was instrumental in laying the groundwork for sociology at Michigan and beyond, becoming a co-founder of the American Sociological Society and one of its early presidents.

Cooley had a major impact on the new discipline. He rejected the views of his American contemporaries who saw sociology as a branch of the natural sciences with the goal of discovering natural laws. In fact, Cooley was the only leading early American sociologist who insisted “that social science knowledge was basically different from the knowledge acquired by the natural sciences” and who did not believe in “the discovery of social laws.”[1]

His lasting contributions include the concept of the “looking glass self,” the idea that society and the individual are interwoven and codetermining, or in his words, “twin-born,” and his recognition of the inherently meaningful character of social practice. For Cooley, sociology was at once science, philosophy, and art. Under his leadership, Michigan’s was the only major American sociology department that was initiated on a non-scientistic footing.

Cooley’s personal disinterest in academic administration meant that he never pushed to form a separate department of sociology. Yet the period 1917-1930 was a time of expansion and specialization for the teaching staff and curriculum of sociology despite being housed in the Department of Political Economy. By 1929, the year that Cooley died, there were some eight faculty associated with the program who were oriented to sociology. Yet the program continued to remain a part of Political Economy due to Cooley’s lack of investment in administration.

The Early Years of Sociology at Michigan

In 1930, upon Cooley’s death, Roderick McKenzie was lured away from the University of Washington to become head of Michigan’s new Department of Sociology. (The Department was granted budgetary autonomy from Economics the following year). McKenzie was known for his work on the dynamics of change that many American cities underwent during the first few decades of the 20th century, “when cities were characterized by large-scale influxes of ethnically diverse populations, uncontrolled competition for space, rapid obsolescence of physical structures, and almost continuous redistribution of land uses.”[2] He introduced the human ecology perspective, which would remain a cornerstone of the department’s strengths in demographic methods and analysis. Along with Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, McKenzie established the sociological subfield of human ecology and wrote the first monograph rooted in that perspective. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Department grew dramatically during the 1930s, doubling its undergraduate enrollments, developing a more serious graduate curriculum, and expanding the size of its faculty.

The year 1940 saw McKenzie’s premature death. His successor as chair was Robert Cooley Angell, a nephew of Charles Horton Cooley. Angell had joined the Department in 1929. During his initial years as chair, and under the shadow and reality of World War II, the Department operated at a reduced level until 1945-46. Angell then presided over the Department’s dramatic post-war growth and transformation.

Immediately after the war, Angell positioned the Department to capitalize on the two major trends shaping the national discipline. The first was driven by the explosion of research funding from government and private foundations. These agencies showed “a marked preference for quantitative analysis as opposed to historical, qualitative, or other forms of social research.”[3] While maintaining this commitment, Angell also explicitly emulated the Harvard Social Relations model, which reflected an integration of cultural anthropology, psychology, and area studies with sociology. His first hire in 1941 was social psychologist Theodor Newcomb. His first move after World War II was to recruit the anthropologist Horace Miner, who wrote extensively on northern and west Africa. In 1952 Angell hired Columbia anthropologist David F. Aberle, a specialist in Hopi, Navajo, and Ute Indian culture. Some of Angell’s other appointments reflecting this direction between 1945 and 1952 included Guy E. Swanson, Gerhard Lenski, and Morris Janowitz.

The intensive period of research funding at Michigan also led to the formation of the Survey Research Center (SRC) in 1946. The Center was a precursor to the Institute for Social Research. In that year, a research team from the Federal Bureau of Agricultural Economics (including Rensis Likert, Angus Campbell Leslie Kish, Charles Cannell, and George Katona) formed the SRC under the direction of Rensis Likert. Kish’s appointment was in Sociology, while Likert’s and Campbell’s were jointly in Sociology and Psychology. Furthermore, in 1948 the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) was brought to Michigan by four Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors under the direction of Dorwin Cartwright. Soon thereafter, the SRC and the RCGD were brought together to form the Institute for Social Research (ISR) in 1949. Likert was named its first director. The Institute would become the world’s leading center for quantitative social scientific research.

Angell’s term as chair of Sociology also was notable for his commitment to area studies and internationalism, which were expressed in his activities with UNESCO’s social sciences department and as president of the International Sociological Association.

After Angell’s term as chair of Sociology ended in 1952, the Department hired Hubert Blalock, a statistician and sociologist, and Otis Dudley Duncan, a demographer and statistician. With these distinguished appointments, Michigan emerged as the leading center for survey research and quantitative methods.

The addition to the faculty of a number of distinguished social psychologists suggested the creation of a doctoral program in social psychology jointly supported and administered by the Sociology and Psychology departments. In the 1940s, Angell and Donald Marquis persuaded the dean of the Rackham School of Graduate Studies to authorize an interdepartmental program in social psychology. Such a program was approved by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies in 1947. Theodore Newcomb, a member of both departments, was selected as the program’s director. Faculty members were recruited as teachers from both departments. Bridging the two disciplines, it became one of only a few programs of its kind, similar to the one at Harvard University.

This innovative program was an immediate success. Admission to the new joint degree program required a year’s successful graduate work in either of the departments, so the students were doubly screened. The number of admissions per year rose from twelve at the beginning to twenty in the mid-1950s. In the early 1950s, only three or four departments at Michigan were exceeding this program in the number of Ph.D.s awarded yearly. Over the next twenty years, Philip Converse, Robert Zajonc, William Gamson, Robert Kahn, Elizabeth Douvan, and James House would be some of the reputable scholars to benefit from it. By 1975, because of a breadth of preparation unmatched at other institutions, Michigan graduates were found to be more frequently cited for their scholarly work in professional books and journals in social psychology than the graduates of any other institution.

In 1927, another major programmatic development in the Department had been the creation of a certificate of social work for undergraduate students. In 1937-38, professional training in social work was separated from the Department and placed in a special curriculum in the Graduate School. That training led to a Masters of Social Work degree. In 1956, on the initiative of the School of Social Work and with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation, a new doctoral program, the Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science—with a subplan in sociology—was established under the direction of Henry Meyer. The first candidates were admitted in the fall of 1957. This program was the first of its kind and proved successful in producing broadly trained workers for the field of social welfare. By 1980, well over 100 Ph.D.’s in Social Work and Sociology had been awarded.

1950-2000

Following Robert Angell’s term, Amos H. Hawley was appointed chair in 1952 and served until 1961. During that period, five new scholars of professorial rank were brought in from other institutions and two Michigan Ph.D.’s began careers of distinction here. The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s was a time of rapid expansion of the Department. The number of graduate students rose and the number of advanced degrees earned correspondingly increased. During this time, three organized centers and programs of research activity were established: the Detroit Area Study (DAS), the Population Studies Center (PSC), and the Center for Research in Social Organization.

In 1951, the Department approved the proposal of Angus Campbell, then head of the Survey Research Center, and Ronald Freedman to set up the Detroit Area Study, a research practicum for first-year graduate students. Typically, each year a professor was authorized to conduct a sample survey on a subject bearing on his professional interest for which interview data would be fruitful. The students in the class received training by participating in the planning of the interview schedule, taking interviews, coding the resulting schedules for machine analysis, and writing individual reports on some aspect of the investigation. For the next fifty years, the practicum served to train graduate students in the intricacies and labors of sampling, questionnaire design, interviewing, and the preparation and analysis of data. Several acclaimed books and articles and numerous dissertations were based upon the research conducted through the DAS.

Ronald Freedman was instrumental in securing funds from the Ford Foundation to establish the Population Studies Center in 1961. This was a natural development out of three circumstances: the growing interest in demography because of the population explosion; the grants coming to Department members from the Population Council and the Rockefeller Foundation for studies in fertility; and the need for a workplace for graduate students, including many foreign nationals. In 1962, a leading demographer, Otis Dudley Duncan, was recruited to join its staff. Since its founding, the Center has played an important role in training demographers the world over. Significant contributions to the study of population issues have been made by sociologists and economists associated with the PSC.

While the PSC received its major core financial support from the Ford Foundation in the early years, in 1976 it received a major grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. This grant has been the major source of core funding for the Center since that time; it has competitively renewed every five years. The grants administered by the Center fund an array of demographic research topics both in the United States and in several other countries. These projects cover a wide range of substantive issues, including aging, health, fertility, sexual behavior, education, mortality, stratification, race relations, urbanization, migration, and family structure. They also provide numerous opportunities for the involvement of graduate students.

Although PSC had begun as a sub-unit of the Department of Sociology, in 1991 it became a free-standing interdisciplinary center in the College of Literature, Science, and Arts (LSA). This official designation as an autonomous center formalized the de facto administrative independence that the Center had enjoyed for many years. It also recognized and facilitated the increasing interdisciplinary orientation of the center. While sociology continued to be the discipline most represented at the Center, the number of economists at PSC increased steadily and the Center soon had research faculty with appointments in the School of Public Health, the School of Social Work, and the Department of Anthropology. A number of PSC faculty had appointments in both an LSA department and the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research. In 1998, PSC moved out of LSA and became a formal part of the Institute for Social Research.

In 1961, Guy E. Swanson became chair of the Department. He served until 1964. He was followed by Albert E. Reiss (1964-70), Howard Schuman (1970-74), William Gamson (1974-78), Reynolds Farley (1978­-1981), and Mayer Zald (1981-1986). During the first part of that period, it was recognized that what was missing from Michigan, and from American sociology more generally, was historical sociology of the sort that had been pioneered by Max and Alfred Weber and that had dominated interwar German sociology. At the beginning of the 1960s, interest in a merger or exchange between sociology and history was growing. In 1969, Michigan was able to hire the rising star of this movement toward a historicization of sociology, Charles Tilly. Appointed to a joint position, Tilly was the first scholar to be hired by both a sociology department and a history department at a major American university.

Anchored solidly in both traditions of sociological scholarship, Michigan steadfastly pursued its distinctive “twin-born” vision of the field in which research excellence and methodological pluralism are inextricably linked to one another, as exemplified in the work of such influential faculty such as Farley, Gamson, Reiss,Schuman, Tilly, Zald, and William H. Sewell, Jr. A development that facilitated this growth was the creation of the Department’s Center for Research in Social Organization (CRSO), which was established in 1960. In the following decade, Albert Reiss attracted funds and graduate students primarily to do research on the police and criminal courts. Over the years, CRSO expanded to support a wide variety of research activities by social organization faculty as well as other faculty with related interests. It also housed interdisciplinary programs involving large numbers of faculty and students from other departments and units. David Sezal, Edward Laumann, Gamson, and Tilly were central figures in CRSO. By the 1990s, the CRSO’s faculty were taking part in a number of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding areas in sociology, including studies of gender, power and sexuality; race and ethnicity in comparative historical perspective; and cultural, hermeneutic and critical sociology.

Michigan’s work in historical sociology received a further boost in 1976 with the hiring of Jeffrey Paige, author of Agrarian Revolution, which won the American Sociological Association’s Sorokin Award. Tilly and Paige, along with Zald, Gamson, Howard Kimeldorf, and others, created the nation’s leading center for the sociological study of social movements at Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. After Tilly’s departure for the New School in 1984, William H. Sewell, Jr., author of Work and Revolution in France, joined the Department with a joint appointment in History, further consolidating the links between historians and sociologists. Additional historical sociologists were hired from the 1980s though the 1990s: Margaret Somers, Julia Adams, Michael Kennedy, Sonya Rose, Muge Gocek, John Lie, and George Steinmetz. Thus, in addition to being at the forefront of the discipline’s demographic and quantitative research traditions, the Department assembled a leading program in historical sociology.

By the 1970s, the Department was a large organization offering instruction in diverse areas of sociology, but the faculty was composed almost entirely of white males. In the mid-1970s, forty-one faculty members had academic titles in the Department. These included one white female among seventeen full professors, one black male among ten associate professors, and one white female among five assistant professors. The Departmental Personnel Committee began to emphasize in announcements of openings their interest in locating African American or female applicants. From the 1970s through the 1980s the Department began to attract and increase the number of faculty from both groups.

The first African American to join the Department was Ozzie Edwards, who arrived in 1972. He was followed by Donald Deskins (who transferred to Sociology after the closing of the Department of Geography in 1982), Jeanette Covington, Aldon Morris, and Walter Allen, all of whom joined the Department in the 1980s. The number of women in the Department rose as well. They included Karen Mason and Viola Hamilton (who arrived in 1973 and 1975, respectively), Guillermina Jasso, and Barbara Reskin. By the 1990s, the Department also had attracted a small number of Latino faculty, including Miguel Guilarte and Tomas Almaguer, and Asian-American and Asian faculty, including John Y. Takeshita, Azumi Ann Takata, and Yu Xie.

The Department Since 2000

From the 1980s until the late 1990s, the main fields of specialization for graduate studies were social psychology, social organization, and human ecology and population. The faculty group in social psychology was largely associated with the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research. The joint program established with Psychology was phased out in the 1970s because of differences in educational philosophy between the two departments. However, social psychology remained a formal part of the Department of Sociology as many faculty associated with that area of research drew upon associations with and resources from the SRC to sustain their research. The faculty group in social psychology offered an annual preliminary examination as well as courses in deviance, micro-level social interaction, and personality and social structure.

Planning for social psychology training remained fluid from the demise of the Joint Program through the 1990s. Demand for social psychology offerings within the Department remained strong through the late 1980s. Even in the 1990s, there were discussions about reconstituting the full Joint Program. By 2000, however, these discussions had failed to bear fruit. Ultimately, the social psychology faculty group disbanded in the new millennium as leading figures such as David Featherman and Andre Modigliani retired, James House reduced his service to the Department, and Ronald Kessler and David Williams left the University.

The group in human ecology and population was made up of faculty primarily associated with ISR’s Population Studies Center. Aside from this association, this faculty group offered a preliminary examination for graduate students in population studies as well as a consistent set of courses in that area.

The faculty cadre in social organization was the most diffuse of the Department’s three groups. They were associated with the Center for Research on Social Organization which, unlike the Survey Research Center and the Population Studies Center, never gained independence from the Department. In the early 1990s, CRSO sponsored the Program in the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST). With faculty and students from the Departments of Sociology, Anthropology, History, and units in the humanities, this was a program of seminars, speakers and conferences. Mayer Zald led the establishment of the Inter-university Committee on Organizational Studies (ICOS), an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students. The ICOS represented another substantial cluster of activity and funding within CRSO, and like CSST, involved large numbers of faculty and students across campus (particularly from the Business School and LSA). The Center also housed the Program on Conflict Management Alternatives, directed by Mark Chesler. Although that program ended in the 1990s, until that time it represented another important cluster of funding and activity providing research, intervention and curricular innovation that examined and challenged conditions of social injustice that underlined protracted conflict.

Throughout the 1990s, although some faculty in CRSO continued to work in a style requiring large-scale data collection supported by sizable external grants, most faculty in the Center worked more on their own, conducting comparative-historical or ethnographic research that did not attract significant external research grants. Despite the historic achievements of CRSO, by the late 1990s challenges loomed, particularly limited resources. The diversity of research at the Center made it difficult for its leaders to define a common substantive core that might attract large-scale funding, so the CRSO lacked the overhead funding that might come from external research grants.

In addition, like the social psychology and population faculty groups, the social organization group offered a preliminary examination as well as various graduate courses, yet these courses were broad and varied as was the research and intellectual foci of the faculty in the area. Accordingly, by the late 1990s, a sardonic definition of the program in social organization circulated—that it functioned as sociology with population and social psychology left out. The relatively large size of the social organization cluster guaranteed a lively diversity among students, course offerings and faculty, but this size and diversity, combined with the indefiniteness of the subject matter, created perennial problems for this graduate program, including fragmentation of research efforts; uncertainty and disagreement about the core of knowledge, skill and experience to be expected of graduates; and the tendency to respond to these first two problems by multiplying and diversifying degree requirements.

Efforts emerged to revise the social organization preliminary examination so as to capture the breadth and depth of the current faculty’s interests. This resulted in a multiple-sectioned examination that allowed students to choose questions from various areas of inquiry. Such extreme breadth led the Department to create a series of cluster areas that allowed for more focused examinations as well as cross-fertilization with faculty in the social psychology and population areas. The new clusters included race and ethnicity, health and aging, gender, and (for a few years) family and life course. In the 2000s, the Department settled on eight preliminary examination areas: power, history, and social change; culture and knowledge; gender; race, ethnicity, and immigration; demography, health and aging; economic sociology; and social psychology (although the last became dormant by the middle of the 2010s.). By 2013, graduate students were required to complete preliminary examinations in two of these areas, thus ensuring that they acquire depth and breadth in their core research sub-fields prior to starting their dissertation research.

In the 1970s, it had been determined that, as social facts derive from participant observation, from small groups experimentation, and from archives, not all departmental needs for research training could be met through the Detroit Area Study, which was a required sequence in methodological training in Sociology almost since its inception. The realization that methodological breath was essential for the training of graduate students resulted in the creation of counterparts to the survey research practicum. They were introduced in the 1980s and enhanced since then. These changes entailed the establishment of methods practica in ethnography and qualitative analysis and in comparative and historical sociology. Ultimately, the large costs of the Detroit Area Study relative to the number of participating students led to its discontinuation in 2004. By the year 2000, the Department’s methods training consisted of a series of quantitative methods courses that paralleled the two qualitative tracks (ethnographic and comparative/historical methods).

Since the 1970s, relationships between the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Social Research have been numerous and positive. While outstanding sociologists had been affiliated with the Institute from its beginnings, Sociology had been underrepresented at the Institute relative to members of the Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. However, the representation of Sociology at the Institute increased dramatically during the 1970s as ISR externally recruited a strong cadre of young sociologists and provided a research home for scholars who were already members of the Department. From that time, the Department and ISR worked closely in the recruitment and retention of faculty. A substantial number of joint appointments were made, and the two units cooperated closely and productively in the retention of faculty. These cooperative efforts played a significant role in the recruitment and retention of multiple sociologists and, overall, were successful enough that the number of regular Department members associated with the Institute grew to twelve by the 1980s. This cadre of ISR sociologists played important teaching, research, and administrative roles in the Department, included teaching courses, administering programs, and supporting and mentoring graduate students. ISR sociologists conducted and published research on a wide variety of issues, from physical and mental health to stratification; from survey methodology to gender studies; from aging and the life course to statistical methods; and from migration to family studies.

In 2013, fifty-one faculty members were formally affiliated with the Department of Sociology—twenty-nine holding tenured or tenure-track lines; sixteen across campus holding adjunct or courtesy titles; and six lecturers. Of the twenty-nine tenured and tenure-track faculty, more than half (sixteen) were women. There were six faculty of color (Gocek, Lacy, Pedraza, Tsutsui, Xie, and Young), all of whom were tenured.

The Undergraduate Program

During the 1960s, the discipline of sociology, like other social sciences, thrived both nationally and at Michigan. As more students enrolled and more chose to concentrate in the field, faculties grew to accommodate them. But in the early 1970s, enrollments and concentrations began to decline, at U-M as elsewhere. So the Department restructured, improved its undergraduate program, and tried to attract more concentrators.

In 1979, the Department made the first major change in the undergraduate program in more than a decade by introducing a series of more specialized introductory courses. This not only improved the quality of instruction but helped to foster a steady and continuing increase in sociology enrollments. To stimulate interest in teaching the introductory courses by experienced faculty members, the Department decided to offer introductory sociology in different forms. Courses under the rubric of Sociology 100: Introduction to Sociology were surveys of the principles and theories of the discipline. Courses given as Sociology 102: Introduction to Sociology—Special Topics introduced the discipline through topics such as nationalism, childhood, sports, or religion. Class sizes ranged from 150 to 225.

The second major change was instituted in 1988, when the Department reorganized the concentration by establishing areas of specialization. The Department offered seven areas of specialization, or tracks: law, criminology and deviance (the largest track); international social change; economy, business and society; social welfare, organizations and social services; social inequality: race, class, and gender; health, aging, and population; and methods of research. The tracks were initiated to give coherence to a student’s choice of electives within sociology. Each led to a formal designation on the student’s transcript. While it is likely that implementing these tracks encouraged more students to concentrate in Sociology by offering a sense of certification, it became difficult to staff sufficient numbers of courses across the various areas. So the tracks were discontinued in 2010 and replaced by informal curriculum guides.

The third major change was administrative but crucial to the improvement of undergraduate education in Sociology. In 1990, to better support undergraduate teaching efforts and to provide concentrated and coherent attention to concentrators and the undergraduate curriculum, the Department added the position of undergraduate program coordinator—a person who would work under a faculty member serving as undergraduate program director. This allowed the Department to provide information sessions for undergraduates; newsletters and course announcements; career and academic programming; and academic advising. Issues requiring academic judgment (course equivalencies, independent study requests, advice regarding applying to graduate school) were handled by the faculty director.

These improvements contributed to a steady increase in the numbers of undergraduate sociology concentrators. In the late 1960s, the number of undergraduate concentrators had averaged between 125 and 150. By 1982-83, that number had declined to a low of fifty. In the 1990s, the mean number of concentrators returned to 150 each year, and in the early 2000s another boom ensued. By 2008, the number exceeded 200. Then another decline began, and by the early 2010s, the number of Sociology graduates had fallen to numbers not seen for a decade, the result of competition from programs such as Organizational Studies, Public Policy, International Relations, and the Ross School’s Bachelor of Business Administration program. New minors in crime and justice (in the Residential College) and Community Action and Social Change (in the School of Social Work) also drew students interested in issues traditionally covered in sociology courses. The Department continued to focus on improving undergraduate education by developing a formal program to train graduate student instructors (GSIs)—a seven-week pedagogy course, including discussions on classroom authority, leading effective discussions, and diversity in the classroom. Each GSI was given a formal classroom observation and feedback session. This became one of the most comprehensive GSI training programs in the College.

The Honors Program in Sociology, after becoming dormant in the late 1970s, was reestablished in the 1990s. At first the number of students was small, but by 2013 there were roughly a dozen honors students in Sociology each year. In order to apply for the program, students were required to provide letters of recommendation and to write a brief essay about their interests in the field. Beginning in 1996, the G.P.A. requirements for admission to the program were increased to a cumulative overall G.P.A. of 3.3, with a 3.5 average in the concentration.

The Honors Program consisted of a three-semester sequence. Students began the sequence during the second semester of their junior year at which time they took Sociology 497: Proposal Writing, a seminar devoted to exploring potential topics, defining research questions, and writing a research prospectus. By the end of the semester, they were expected to connect with a mentor in the Department who would work with them as they did their research and wrote their theses during the senior year, when they would take Sociology 498: Data Collection and Analysis and Sociology 499: Thesis Writing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Angell, Robert C. “The Joys of Modest Success.” Society 18 (November:December 1980a.):72-81.
• Angell, Robert C. “The Sociology Department, 1940-1975” Departmental Memorandum 23 January 1980b. (Typewritten.)
• Angell, Robert C., Wood. Arthur E., and McKenzie, Roderick D. The University ofMichigan: An Encyclopedic Survey, Part IV (pp. 72.5-733). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1944.
• Hawley. Amos H. Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Newcomb. Theodore M. “The Love of Ideas,” Society 17 September/October 1980 :76­
• Reeves, Jesse S, The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey, Part IV (pp. 702-708). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1944.
• Whitney. Allen S. The University of Michigan–An Encyclopedic Survey, Part I. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1941.