Science: What Are We Doing?

Since the first World War, determined efforts have been made by several U. S. universities—notably Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, Stanford —to put social investigation on a scientific basis. In 1929 the University of Chicago dedicated a new building, financed mainly by the Rockefeller Foundation and designed to house Chicago's Division of Social Sciences. Last week social scientists from all over the U. S. assembled there to celebrate its tenth anniversary and take stock of their work. They did not pile up detailed reports of social research. They discussed techniques, viewpoints, "frames of reference," spheres of influence. They seemed to be asking themselves, "What are we?" and "What are we doing?"

Social scientists have a story about the social scientist who measured the intelligence of convicts in prison. He found it just as high as the intelligence of the civil population, delivered a popular lecture on his finding. A woman in the audience got up and asked him what intelligence was. "Madam," said the scientist loftily, "intelligence is that which these measurements measure."

The question has often been raised whether the social sciences are sciences at all. Certainly they occupy a place on the fringe of the physical and biological sciences, from which they must draw much of their nourishment. "Sociology," a term coined about a century ago by the French Philosopher Auguste Comte, has been described as "the science of leftovers"—that is, a science which picks up crumbs spilled from the groaning table of the other social sciences.* But it has also been suggested that sociology be enthroned as the basic social science—a sort of central switchboard which would coordinate the others. Today sociologists are concerned with such things as family relations, social organizations, city life, crime. If cultural anthropology has concerned itself largely with the quaint customs of primitive tribes, sociology has concerned itself largely with the quaint customs of civilization.

Speakers read formal papers in the mornings, in the afternoons the scientists gathered at "round tables" for informal discussion. Some of these sessions grew so heated that they finished in the hall outside the conference room. From the sidelines University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins rather tartly reminded the delegates that in 1929 the world had a much greater sense of social well-being than it has today. Henry Bruere, onetime U. of C. social worker, now president of Manhattan's big Bowery Savings, pointed out that the first time social scientists really got their teeth into national affairs was under the New Deal—an experiment not everywhere regarded as an entire success.