1984 - an interview with

An Interview with Robert K. MertonAuthor(s): Caroline Hodges Persell and Robert K. MertonSource: Teaching Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1984), pp. 355-386Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1317796 .Accessed: 27/05/2013 17:39

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Robert K. Merton is one of sociology's outstanding scholar-teachers. In this interview he explores how his teaching ideas and practices developed, his views on teaching strategies and approaches, how he combined scholarship with heavy teaching loads in his early years, and the personal and institutional rewards for teaching.

An Interview with Robert K. Merton

CAROLINE HODGES PERSELL New York University

The theoretical ideas of Robert K. Merton have had a major influence in such substantive areas of sociology as strat-

ification, deviance, and delinquency, status and role analysis, education, medical sociology, sociology of science, and knowledge. In addition to his scholarly renown, Merton has the reputation of being an excellent teacher, and one whose scholarly work enhances rather than detracts from his teaching. Indeed, he might be said to epitomize the scholar-teacher ideal.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia in the late 1960s, I looked forward to Professor Merton's classes in sociology. He invariably came to class magnificently prepared. He not only brought his manila folder of notes and his pitcher of water, but he had his thoughts impeccably in order. His lectures were beautifully crafted works of art that illuminated and enriched our understanding of Comte, Spencer, Simmel, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, status sets and role sets, role strain, and other theoretical ideas. Graduate students studying for orals used to sit in on his classes two or three different years because each year was usually quite different from the one before. These lectures were an exhilarating experience.

The editors of Teaching Sociology believe that it is important to learn as much as possible from examples of teaching and scholarly excellence such as this. As a result, when Michael Bassis mentioned, at an editorial board meeting of Teaching Sociology, TEACHING SOCIOLOGY, Vol. I I No. 4, July 1984 355-386 ? 1984 Sage Publications, Inc.

355


356 TEACHING SOCIOLOGY / JULY 1984

that he would like to continue the series of interviews with great teachers and scholars in sociology, perhaps with an interview with Robert Merton, I eagerly expressed interest in doing the interview.

I interviewed Bob Merton on September 27, 1983, in his apartment overlooking Riverside Park and the Hudson River. The late afternoon sun streamed into his book-lined study. One long wall of the study contained a worktable along most of its length. Above the table hung photographs of famous scholars, teachers, and other creative intellects Merton knew and admired: Alfred North Whitehead, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, George Sarton, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, L.J. Henderson, Corrado Gini (Merton was his assistant for a year), W.I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, Sam Stouffer, the sculptor Jacques Lip- chitz, the chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, the physiologist Andre Cournand, the physicist and mathematical statistician E.B. Wilson, the physicist-biologist Leo Szilard, the entomologist William Mor- ton Wheeler, the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Janeway, and the classicist Gilbert Murray. There was also a portrait of a great psychologist he did not know: Freud.

Seeing these pictures made Merton's adopted phrase, "stand- ing on the shoulders of giants" come alive. Here was a scholar- teacher who saw himself as part of a noble tradition of individuals pursuing the life of the mind with every fiber of their being and seeking to transmit the fruits of their efforts to others. Here were some of the significant others in Merton's life, his reference group. Herein, I suspect, lay one source of nourishment for his eloquent lectures.

The following is an edited transcript of the two-hour taped interview I had with Bob Merton that afternoon. After tran- scribing the tape, I gave a typed copy to Bob, who edited it for style, syntax, and length.

The purpose of the interview is to explore how Merton's teaching ideas and practices developed, his views on teaching strategies and approaches, and ways of encouraging excellence in


Persell / INTERVIEW WITH MERTON 357

teaching. In this interview, he reflects on the variety of experiences he had teaching both undergraduates and graduates at three universities, through tutorials, seminars, and lectures. He describes the way he thought about his teaching, how and why teaching was exciting and rewarding for him personally, how he combined his scholarship with the teaching of heavy course loads in his early years, and he discusses the institutional reward structures that support or fail to nourish good teaching.

Professor Merton studied sociology as an undergraduate at Temple University, in his home town of Philadelphia. In 1931 he went to Harvard for graduate work in the first year of its Department of Sociology. He taught undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard for five years, taught at Tulane University from 1939-1941, and then moved to Columbia Univer- sity in 1941, where he has been ever since. Throughout his teaching career, he has continued to write and to publish scholarly papers and books. His bibliography to 1975 runs to 39 pages (Miles, 1975; see also Gieryn, 1980) and the list of publications since then runs to a good many more pages. One can imagine a person of this scholarly stature feeling that his other work was more important than teaching. The tremendous impact of his scholarship not withstanding,' Merton is noteworthy because he has remained so vitally interested in teaching. For him scholarly acclaim has not preempted the satisfaction he feels in reaching out and engaging a developing mind through the process of teaching.

Merton's influence as a teacher extends through his work as editor and correspondent. Both Garfield (1983) and David Caplovitz (1977) have developed portraits of Merton, the editor extraordinare, in which they describe the thought and care he put into editing other people's work. Also behind the scenes, Merton as correspondent maintains contact with a number of former students and current colleagues. This role is well-illustrated in his public farewell to Alvin W. Gouldner (1982) and in his cor- respondence with Louis Schneider (1984).

All of these activities are consistent with the identity of scholar- teacher. Some measure of public acknowledgment has come to



Merton from a variety of sources. To capture just a glimpse of the various recognitions he has received, it is worth noting that he was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1957, he was profiled in the New Yorker by Morton Hunt in January 1961, and he was named at MacArthur Prize Fellow for 1983-1988. Clearly this scholar-teacher has had an influence, in the classroom and beyond.

INTERVIEW

MERTON: Had I remembered that we were to talk about teaching, I would have invited you to the seminar earlier today, which Harriet Zuckerman and I give. This is an advanced seminar in the sociology of science which has faculty members as well as graduate students in it. I had put together a file accumulated over a 20-year period-a file of notes, observations, queries, readings, that sort of thing-on scientific controversies and conflicts in science. As I said to Harriet, while sifting this scatteration of notes, I find myself becoming more and more deeply interested in the structures and dynamics of scientific controversy, something that has plainly interested me for some time. At the seminar session, I put them on notice that, unlike other sessions, I would be talking most of the time, perhaps all of the time, except for welcomed questions, comments, interventions, and the like. They were also warned that this would be anything but a methodical, carefully organized lecture. I had some idea of the main themes but had no way of knowing in advance how much time I would be devoting to any one theme. That I would discover only as I started talking. The process of talking itself, would reveal to me as well as to them, whether I had anything new and worthwhile to say.

It soon became clear that few of the students, at any rate, had ever had the experience of listening in on someone thinking aloud. Of course, ill-prepared lectures have something of that unorganized, not necessarily disorganized, character. But his



session did not purport to be a lecture. It was reproducing in the seminar what takes place at this desk [in his study at home] in the phase before I had seriously defined a problem and had decided on the main tacks for investigating it. I decided that it would do them no harm to be exposed to the way in which at least one sociologist goes about his work in a preliminary phase. It might lead them to recognize that the linear thinking reported in published work dows not necessarily reproduce the typically nonlinear character of the initial effort to clarify and locate a problem.

I assume that spontaneity of presentation has its own merits. I counted on having some ideas emerge in my remarks and in the conversation that would be unpredictable. Such moments interest me. The presentation had the further value of dealing with a subject we had been discussing in several sessions in which I hadn't drawn much upon the accumulation, these past 20 years, of thoughts I had had on the generic subject of scientific controversies.

I enjoyed those two hours although I found myself quite weary at the close. I believe that the others also enjoyed it. Their periodic questions, observations, and criticisms of fomulations indicated questions, observations, and criticisms of formulations indicated that they were deeply engaged. It was a most satisfying experience. An hour or so afterwards, I ran into two members of the seminar in the corridor, who reported discovering how very much they liked this sort of thing. This account of the seminar session is imperfect but it at least hints at the nature of the experience. Reflecting on it further, its quintessential feature was my own intense interest in the problem and my interest in stirring up their interest in it. My own interest comes from having learned over the decades that even in formal lectures, I become most interested when I hear myself saying something quite unexpected. The rest of the lecture had typically been thought out as best I could; it had been laid out in reasonably organized form. In the classroom, that brings no new cognitive experience. It is the tacit interaction between the class and myself that makes things happen.



I don't know if you have ever run across the deep aphorism which the English novelist, E. M. Forster attributes to his mythic "Old Lady": "How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" Incidentally, Wittgenstein has a far less satisfactory version: "One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is." Perhaps I prefer the Forster dictum because I found myself writing an uninhibited 15,000-word Shandean letter about it.2 Anyway, note that Forster has her remark "till I see what I say," not, mind you, "till I hear what I say." We are being directed to a deep psychological and cognitive truth. Creative cognition is an ongoing process. It's very different from having a routinized, carefully scripted, linear mode of analysis. That's a quite different kind of cognition. When one is thinking anew, the essential is to discover what one is thinking as it moves along. It's a process and not a conclusion. Thinking is not a thought; it is an activity giving rise to thoughts, presumably governed by tacit and explicit norms of what makes for consistency and coherence. The creative thought is registered by one's being surprised by what one says. It is quite another kind of enterprise to discover whether that thought is truth or nonsense.

INTERVIEWER: So teaching is a kind of creation, that is, something new is occurring while you do it.

MERTON: You may remember that years ago, when you were in my class, I prepared every lecture with great care. I did so even when I had ostensibly lectured on that "same" subject many times before. But, of course, it was never twice the same. Not for me and I liked to think, not for the class. The intensive preparation involved new ideas, new aspects of old problems, new materials developed since the preceding version. My carefully organized notes incorporated a considered version of new thoughts developed in the interim. This required elabor- ation of some parts, condensation of others, deletion of still others. It was seldom, very seldom, that I walked into a classroom in the same state in which I walked into the seminar today, having spent 15 minutes or so glancing at this great, unorganized accumulation of notes.

Still, whether it's a "lecture class" or a "seminar," when I come away saying, "now that was a good session" or "that was



a terrible session," those judgments generally hinge upon the extent and character of unexpected ideas deriving from the give-and-take between the class and myself. Quite often in the lecture class, I'm the only one that knows there is a give-and- take. There may be no active discussion. I proceed with my closely organized lecture and don't let anyone get a word in edgewise because I'm too interested in what I'm saying and seeing for the first time. Nevertheless, there's often intense interaction going on for me. Facial expressions and bodily movements of members of the group I am addressing carry cues for me. Whether rightly interpreted or not, they make for interaction. The imputed responses affect my own behavior. Today's seminar session provides an example. After a half hour or so, I noticed that one student member of the seminar seemed to be inert. She wasn't rising to the occasion nor was she taking notes. That was unlike her previous behavior in the seminar. I paused and remarked: "As I warned you, some of you might take my thinking aloud as a bad case of rambling incoherencies. I see that I have lost one of you (pointing to the student)." I knew this would not embarrass her. We have an easy, first-name, rapport in the seminar. She looked up at me and said, "That's what you think. Actually here's the question I was thinking about, something you said ten minutes before." She reiterated the question and that started a new train of thought. Now that's prima facie evidence that I sometimes do misinterpret reactions, perhaps, though I doubt it, even more in the classroom. But whether I do or don't, there are corrective mechanisms that experienced teachers learn to utilize. In my case, at any rate, the interaction need not be verbal. Even a seeming lecture monologue can involve a great deal of interaction. This has generally been the case in my own experience. As you know, I have never been a great believer in what's called "discussion" in a lecture as distinct from a seminar session. Perhaps I draw too sharp a distinction between the lecture and the seminar. Still, I think that they serve different functions. I've not taken kindly to classes in which students engage in diffuse talk that never does come into focus. Not, mind you, that it needs to be focused all the time, but there are degrees of informed relevance in such discussions, as every teacher knows.



INTERVIEWER: I'm glad you brought that up because it enlarges the vision I have of the way you teach, which is of these carefully crafted presentations which are marvelous and exhilarating to hear. Some people even wondered if you were presenting a paper to us because it was so beautifully done in every respect and every word was chosen so carefully. The thoughts were so well-developed and organized. We knew it was not a spontaneous creation and we respected that you cared enough about your classes to come in having spent an effort making it ready for us as best you could at the time, and the best was really superb. That was a different style of teaching from the seminar you describe happening today.

MERTON: Entirely different, though they do overlap in one respect for me. No matter how carefully prepared the lecture, I have always derived the greatest satisfaction from hearing something said, even hearing myself say something, that was wholly unanticipated and interesting. The kind of observation that grew out of the sheer experience of pursuing a thought or problem that had been formulated to the point that it was in my notes, but which I hadn't been able to carry any further until that moment in the classroom.

INTERVIEWER: It's as though putting it into your notes, put it into the incubation phase, so that it was still cooking in your unconscious and then in class something else comes out.

MERTON: Yes. I think if I hadn't had that experience over the decades . . . (I've always enjoyed teaching until the last few years when I began to get bored with formal classroom teaching. That's why I stopped; why I now teach only through seminars or individual tutorials.) But I am sure that I wouldn't have been motivated to continue all those years had it not been a very rewarding experience. Among other things, it forced me to do the preparatory work which again had this quality, of course, of leading me to work some things out that I would probably not have done otherwise. But the ultimate reinforcement was through the rewards which came from the unexpected but interesting, the unexpected but relevant, developments taking place right there in the classroom. I came to count on that. When it didn't happen, I felt let down.



As I think back on the papers I've published over the years, the ones that engaged me most deeply derived from the lectures I developed for courses. That was true from the very beginning of my teaching, and has continued throughout my life as a teacher. Let me see if I can reconstruct it. The first major course I gave, as a youngish instructor at Harvard back in 1937, was entitled Social Organization. I still remember its number, Sociology 4. In a way, that was the seedbed for the course you took long afterward, what became the "Analysis of Social Structure." It all started back then. In the first year or two of teaching, I had remarkable students. Harvard had intermediate courses wisely arranged to include undergraduates and graduates. The undergraduates included Bernard Barber, Albert K. Cohen, the future anthropologist Albert Damon, Glenn Frank, J.R. Pitts, H. W. Riecken (and the disappointing youngest son of FCR, John Roosevelt); the graduates included Robin Williams and the future diplomat, Paul Nitze. I continue to be a great believer in such intermediate courses.

At any rate, the published papers that derived from the lectures I worked up for the early course include "Social Structure and Anomie,""The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action" and the fundamental ideas (although not yet well developed) of "Bureaucratic Structure and Per- sonality," a paper I published in 1940. Those three papers mattered much to me at the time I wrote them, and have had a life of their own ever since. They all came out of the intensive preparatory work for a one-semester course. I could go through my bibliography over the decades and identify a considerable batch of papers which also derived from work focused on one or another course. That means that one took lectures very seriously. After all, teachers as well as students can benefit from carefully developed lectures. Lectures con- stitute the major form of "oral publication" in which ideas are developed tentatively (as you can see from my piece on oral publication in the volume which Matilda Riley and I put together (1980)). Those ideas that do survive critical examina- tion are then ready for publication in print. This means that



only most rarely does one move directly from oral publication to printed publication. I once estimated that modally 11 or 12 years intervened between the time I frist began to work on an idea and the time it appeared in print. (Of course, this estimate precludes those very early publications.) Oral publication allows you to make your ideas available to a local and limited public while those ideas are being developed and subjected to critical appraisal. Coming back to one's ideas year after year but doing so in developing ways essentially amounts to new editions of a still unprinted paper. For some of us, teaching is a form of scholarship. The effort to think a problem through carefully in advance of a lecture is often capped by the spontaneous emergence of new ideas about the problem in the course of presenting the lecture. That has been the peak experience in teaching. It has been a source of pleasure; even more, of joy.

INTERVIEWER: It also helps to explain one of the questions I had, which was how do you see teaching and research as strengthening each other and how you think they detract from each other in your own experience? This is a beautiful example of how they fed each other. Your lectures were better because of the commitment you put into them, and yet you didn't have to set aside your own work; this was your own work. There was no separation. Your intellectual concerns were carried on in both arenas.

MERTON: I don't think there is much to be gained by becoming even more specific. But we could go through Mary Miles' compilation of my bibliography to identify the published articles which had long incubations during the phase of oral publication before I ever thought of putting them into print. That, of course, is even more the case with seminars than with lectures.

You're right that at times the curriculum requirements and personnel resources of a department require separation between teaching and research, for example in the phenomenon of the basic required course. We know that. In those ancient days when 15 hours of teaching a week was the norm in many universities, that meant' you were giving five courses each



semester. Somehow, you managed to do it. Obviously, one can't be teaching five distinct courses and be doing intensive research in each of them; there was an enforced separation between some teaching and research. That probably still occurs to some extent even with reduced teaching schedules. One doesn't always have the leeway to choose to teach only those courses in which you are doing research. But even during my two years at Tulane in 1939-41, I didn't insulate my research from my lectures.

INTERVIEWER: And you feel that has been a fruitful arrange- ment for you?

MERTON: I can't imagine an alternative that would be equally satisfying.

INTERVIEWER: I also can't imagine you teaching something without bringing some of your intellectual interests to it and somehow seeing the possibilities in it that were interesting to you, that you could pursue. I don't know if you ever taught the family, or comparative economic systems, or whatever you had to teach, you would begin to think about it in ways that would lead somewhere for you.

MERTON: This is what happened during the periods of preparation. At the same time that I gave the early course on social organization, I remember giving another course on ethnic and racial relations. I'd had an excellent education in that field. I began as an undergraduate at Temple with George Eaton Simpson who had that as his field of primary interest. Indeed, I had been his research assistant on his doctoral dissertation: "The Negro in the Philadelphia Press," a content analysis covering a 25-year period. I elected to teach ethnic relations as a second course-this was in the latter 1930s-on the basis of a little research and a great deal of intensive study of monographs, census data, life history materials, and so on. In it, I tried to develop some new questions along with the standard questions in the field. It would be a bore to go into further details, but I might add that, once again, oral publication through lectures led to publication in print. The research and theorizing developed for that course led to my papers published a few years later: "Intermarriage and the Social Structure" and



"Fact and Factitiousness in Ethnic Opinionnaires" (in which I had the cheek to challenge some assumptions allegedly under- lying the great Thurstone's mode of attitude measurement).

To my mind, the two forms of publication, of making ideas public, have much in common. For me to get involved in giving a new course has meant trying to have new thoughts about old problems and trying to identify new problems that hadn't been worked on. This did not always work out. When I first came to Columbia in 1941, Bob Lynd had left the field of urban sociology and I was asked to try my hand at it in the form of a graduate seminar and a lecture course. In truth, I wasn't deeply engaged by the subject and never got far with it. As I recall, I developed a seminar focused on ancient cities which required me to look into a literature I had not studied before. It was not a great success. I soon lost interest in the subject and dropped the seminar.

INTERVIEWER: Can you think of any ways in which teaching and research detract from each other or pull in different directions?

MERTON: That has been true at times when I did not introduce new courses directly tied to work in progress. I recall becoming deeply involved in the mid-1940s in field work in three planned housing communities which took me far afield from my teaching at the time. And again, there have been times when my energies were centered on completing a piece of research at the expense of my teaching. I simply did not have the energy to manage the teaching and the research with equal intensity. Something had to give. However, a focus on teaching usually reinforced research interests. One of the most memorable seminars I ever ran (memorable to me at least) was on bureaucracy. It derived from my earlier work condensed into the papers, "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality," and "Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy." The interaction between the students and myself was so intense that sessions would often run on and on, long after the appointed time. We could not distinguish teaching from research. As I recall, the series of Columbia dissertations on bureaucracy did



not grow directly out of that seminar. For the most part, they came later. Alvin Gouldner's dissertation work was reported in two monographs, Wildcat Strike and Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, both published in 1954. Peter Blau's Dynamics of Bureaucracy appeared a year later.

INTERVIEWER: What about Union Democracy? MERTON: That didn't emerge from the seminar, although

Marty Lipset had of course been trhough the "Columbia tradition" as Paul Lazarsfeld liked to call it. Phil Selznick had done his field work in the early 1940s but, owing to the war and other less notable derailments, TVA and the Grass Roots didn't appear until 1949 or so. It too was in the tradition of examining unanticiapted consequences of action, as his splen- did concluding chapter makes clear.

But to return to the seminar. I surely learned a great deal from it. There are indications that it had a lasting influence on at least some other members of the group. This particular seminar involved both teaching and research. We could not distinguished the two.

INTERVIEWER: When students would go on field projects with you, it might be just a few students, but you are teaching them as you are going out there.

MERTON: That gets into quite a different mode of teaching and learning: apprenticeship. I distinguish that first from lectures, which as I say, have always taken first place with me, and second, from research seminars. (The latter I often gave in collaboration: early on with Paul Lazarsfeld on a variety of subjects and, more recently, with Harriet Zuckerman in the sociology of science. I have always found these joint seminars instructive.) A fourth mode of teaching is the tutorial, a one-to- one relationship between teacher and student. That I learned at Harvard which had a very highly developed tutorial system for undergraduates back then. It vaguely resembled the system that obtains in the Oxbridge tradition. The tutee writes an essay, at its best, based on careful inquiry which becomes the basis for intensive discussion. I still have personal ties with some of my tutees from the 1930s. I take pleasure in hearing



Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American, remark to a mutual friend: "I was one of Bob's first tutees." Bernard Barber was another. The one-to-one releationship of the tutorial focused on problems drawn from one or another literature differs substantially from the training of apprentices on a research project. Paul Lazarsfeld was the past master of that mode of teaching. I learned something of the art from him but never measured up to his achievement. The training derives from work on the research. One learns by doing; one teaches by showing how it is done.

INTERVIEWER: We haven't mentioned so far any factors that interfere with or impede, doing one's job well as a teacher. You've mentioned fatigue and energy level, and other com- mitments.

MERTON: I can't easily dredge up many memories of classes that went poorly-I don't mean individual lectures, but an entire semester or year. (of course, there was that early course on the sociology of ancient cities.) But I have had the experience of a poor class hour or two, in which I would become bored-bored with the sound of my own voice and with members of the class-and they, in turn, mut have responded with boredeom. I like to think that that occurred only when I was weary on other counts, but that's probably wishful thinking. At any rate, it had little or nothing to do with the size of the class.

INTERVIEWER: So size alone doesn't affect it for good or for ill?

MERTON: Not in my case. I don't know whether you have seen my little introduction to Sociological Traditions from Gener- ation to Generation. Do you know that book which Matilda Riley and I edited recently?

INTERVIEWER: I know of it. MERTON: Well, if you do read it, you'll find the story of the

philosopher A. N. Whitehead (you see him there on the wall [pointing to his portrait]), who once gave a course of lectures at Cambridge to a class of one. One! These, mind you, were lectures, not tutorial sessions. But what a class of one it was, the 21-year-old J. Maynard Keynes. I happen to believe that



prepared lectures have a distinctive place in teaching but I couldn't muster the discipline to give prepared lecture to one or two students, any more than I would enjoy lecturing regularly to monumental classes of 500 or a thousand (I never have).

At the extremes, class size does matter to me. After World War II, when the G.I. students came along in huge numbers, we had what I considered immense classes. For a time, I found myself lecturing to classes of a hundred graduate students drawn from several disciplines. Some of the very best students we ever had came from that postwar generation. As a result, those large classes did not keep me from interacting with students. I know that some are convinced that classroom size is all important; I have never had occasion to feel that way. But then, I've never had the experience of lecturing to several hundred students or even more by video!

INTERVIEWER: Well, you wouldn't get the interaction from a video presentation.

MERTON: My favorite contrast experience goes back to the days before television. Though some act as though they doubt it, there really was a time when there was not TV, just something called radio. I would give occasional radio talks. I found them deadly, whether I read a script or spoke from notes, because I missed the interaction with an audience which was all important for my getting something from the experience.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, there's just that mike, that doesn't do anything.

MERTON: The room just absorbs sound, and there your are. The solitude of radio hasn't even the merit of your being alone in your study, where you can talk at yourself in an effort to work something out. Teachers in particular must be irritated by those corrupt substitutes for audience response: make-believe audiences, make-believe laughter, canned responses. That surely represents the ultimate corruption of something that has its own unreplaceable quality: the give-and-take between a speaker and an audience.

INTERVIEWER: Or holding up the cue cards saying 'LAUGH,' or applause, or whatever.



MERTON: That kind of contrived experience can of course alienate countless numbers of people and rightly so. It has a special meaning for teachers who have had the experience of the genuine article, and know how basic such interaction is. I can easily romanticize the experience. I have only to remember that a good number of the papers I have written grew out of consecutive years of lecturing on the given problem or subject. Putting it in romantic terms, I could say that I didn't write the papers alone, that the students were my collaborators. That would be overstating it, of course. Still, there is a grain of truth in that claim. I am persuaded that some of the development of those ideas would not have come to mind had I not presented them to what is being called these days "a live audience." (Obviously as opposed to a dead one.)

INTERVIEWER: This is interesting because you have been reflecting a lot on the personal rewards of teaching, the personal satisfactions of this interaction. Yet in your own research and writing you have done a lot of work on institutional rewards and recognition as motivators for scientists. Do you see a role for those institutional rewards in teaching? How do you put those pieces together into a coherent whole without corrupting the process?

MERTON: That's a perceptive question. I'll turn it around, if I may: how does one manage to go on enjoying teaching in the absence of institutionalized as distinct from direct reinforcement? Rewards are of varying kinds and have different sources. I would not have continued to enjoy teaching if students weren't inadvertently providing reinforcement. That's fundamental to the entire process of teaching and learning. No doubt people differ greatly on this score. Some may become even more deeply engaged when they receive the more visible institutionalized rewards or public recognition; others may experience such great rewards from the interactive experience of teaching itself that the other form becomes redundant. That's a matter of considerable personal variation.

Still, it is a notorious fact that our institutions of higher learning do not commonly provide institutional rewards for great commitment to teaching and great achievements in teaching. The public rewards are so limited as sometimes to be



embarrassing. A good many colleges and universities have some sort of "Great Teacher" award but in the aggregate, those are in very thin supply. There may be one each year or one in a field; that doesn't reverberate much throughout the reward system. It doesn't provide much by way of second-order rewards.

As for the primary institutional reward in academia, promo- tion to tenure, it is another notorious fact that few universities and colleges take good teaching strongly into account when making a tenure decision. Some universities, I understand, have bureaucratized the decision. They have a formula and assign points to teaching and academic administration as well as research. Perhaps good teaching is accorded more institutional attention than I realize. The great private universities, however, have surely not used such formulaic calculations to arrive at tenure decisions. And though the reputation of being a good teacher does spread in a university over the years, that takes second place to research reputation and research accom- plishments.

Your question becomes this: How does it happen that, despite so little institutionalized reinforcement, there are sub- stantial numbers of unusually effective teachers? My guess is that they obtain such direct rewards from student response that they are sustained in putting great effort into teaching. For them, the secondary institutionalized rewards add very little to motivation. These are people who would be unhappy doing anything else. This involves a notion of a threshold of rewards: when you pass over it, further rewards add nothing significant. Perhaps part of the reason why colleges and universities haven't gone further in institutionalizing the rewards of teachers is they get a certain amount of good teaching anyway. Of course, all this is highly speculative.

INTERVIEWER: I see a dilemma sometimes with graduate students who start teaching quite early in their graduate careers. If they really like it they tend to spend a great deal of their time and energy on their teaching and they get off track for the academic career.

MERTON: You are touching on something that concerns me deeply and has done so for a long time. I turn to the Columbia



case where I am quite familiar with this pattern of early commitment to teaching. Columbia has had its famous "Contemporary Civilization" course for undergraduates for generations, long before "general education" became popular. It calls for intensive yet wide-ranging study of classical traditions of Western (and some Eastern) thought; it is a prime introduction to basic works in the humanities and social thought. Over the years, Contemporary Civilization has had a remarkable array of young instructors (one of the very few courses at Columbia which graduate students are allowed to teach). It is a much sought-after opportunity for intensive teaching. But it exacts a price as well as providing deep satisfaction for the self-selected and institutionally selected young teachers. To the present day, I have noticed that they include some of my ablest graduate students-Ill limit my comments to them so I can speak with feeling and something approaching assurance. They are knowledgable beyond the boundries of sociology, hard-working, effective in their scholarly research, and deeply aware of the joys of teaching. And, almost without exception, they have been superb teachers. But, to my dismay, over and over again, a good graction of them have taken 8 to 10 years to complete their graduate studies. The experience with CC is variously rewarding to them, interesting to them in many ways, and they are very good at it. There's a paradox built into this. All sorts of good things coalesce in "Contemporary Civilization." You have undergraduate students interacting with young instructors who are enthusiastic exemplars of their kind, exemplary teachers. The instructors get a lot out of it; they will uniformly tell you they have learned much from the experience. But this is often at the expense of completing their doctoral work. I think of several students in that situation here and now. original scholarship gets post- poned or premanently rejected. It is not all gain; there are costs to be paid.

I think that these contradictions arise in part because our organization of teaching and research is more helter-skelter than we realize. There's no reason for those graduate students not connecting their teaching with an ongoing dissertation;



these students are plainly superior in every respect, both with respect to scholarly potential and with respect to what they were actually realizing in their teaching in CC. This is, I suspect, an important and quite general pattern.

INTERVIEWER: And some never finish. They may go on to teach in some form or another, but we lose them to our discipline. maybe the institutional rewards for nonteaching need to compensate for the personal rewards of teaching, because there is an intrinsic attraction to teaching. I know what you are speaking of. You get something from the classroom that you can't get any other way.

MERTON: Of course, Caroline, you might argue quite the other way. The institutional structures and reward systems are faulty. Some people prefer to be teachers and extraordinarily good at it. They prefer not to do new scholarship but they do keep up with developing scholarship. Why isn't that regarded as a sensible preference? And yet we know-I say we know, I'll be more cautious, it is often the case-that such role preferences are seldom allowed for in the major universities. some liberal arts colleges are of course sterling exceptions to this rule. One might argue that there is a division of labor among universities and colleges in this respect, but I think that it is a lopsided division of labor at the expense of teaching. The assumption that everyone wants to do both teaching and research in an intensive way may be faulty. Perhaps there ought to be many more variants. After all, universities do recognize the com- plementary type of variant: faculty members who are miserable teachers but considerable scholars-people who just can't convey either the excitement of learning or its substance and method.

So there we are. I don't for a moment believe that we have gotten anywhere near the optimum in the institutional organization of teaching and research.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, we seem a little more creative when it comes to somebody who is a really good researcher. We will find a berth for them if they are really outstanding, no matter how horrible their teaching is, whether it is a nonteaching position or a minimal teaching position.



MERTON: Or you put up with his dreadful teaching. INTERVIEWER: That's right, knowing the institution is getting

something of value. Yet you are suggesting that there are not comparable arrangements for someone who may be an exemplary teacher but who will never write something in their lives.

MERTON: In earthy, instrumental terms, and not alone as a matter of equity, the system of higher education is weak at this point. Good teachers who have a sustained record of teaching accomplishment-a record of enlisting interest in an intellectual field, of maintaining that interest and enlarging it, of trans- mitting knowledge and a sense of the craft-teachers doing the job of education in the strict sense are seldom rewarded institutionally in a great variety of academic institutions.

INTERVIEWER: So you think that we need some more creative ways to nurture and support good teaching?

MERTON: I do but I have no ready-made recipes. The division of academic labor can be varied. We need not adopt the myth that unless you are producing new scholarship you cannot be sufficiently on top of your field to educate students in the advancing knowledge in that field. This surely doesn't hold for the education of undergraduates. It may hold in some cases but not in others. Of course, we are factoring out the uninteresting case of faculty members who are simply incompetent or lazy. Of course, institutions of higher learning have their share of such people as, I suppose, every other trade or occupation does. We may have fewer or more than others. Who knows? I've not come upon any comparative research on the distribution of ineptitude. I am referring to faculty members who have specialized capabilities and specialized interests in teaching. They're the ones who are losing out under our current academic arrangements.

INTERVIEWER: Regarding the training of graduate sociology students in teaching skills, I have heard that Harvard now has a half credit course in teacher training as part of their graduate program for teaching fellows. I wonder what you think about that, whether you would like to see that in other graduate departments?



MERTON: I haven't thought about it in just that way. But you make me aware of a common practice of mine. In personal sessions with graduate students, I will tell them from time to time, in an unscheduled sort of way, about what I have learned- or believe I have learned-about the art and craft of teaching. It is not terribly didactic; it is more nearly a tutorial session in which one is reflecting aloud about a long run of teaching experiences to a resonant other, a graduate student interested in this matter. I think that something gets conveyed in this way. Still, on the face of it, it seems strange that while we train graduate students in research techniques (statistical methods, field work, and so forth) with regard to the one role which most of them will be asked to perform, teaching-since most of our graduates still go on to careers in academic life- we assume that this can be learned wholly by osmosis, by example. On the face of it, there may be a contradiction here. But here you are tapping part of my ignorance. I have never been in a classroom devoted to the art and craft of teaching; it isn't that I am skeptical about it being done effectively, I simply don't know enough about it at first hand to have an opinion. However, I assume that there are some simple techniques that, put to use, could greatly help many of us in our teaching. The truly superior teachers, I suspect, are self-selected and usually self-taught. Where the system of higher education fails is with those instructors who don't really like teaching but take it simply as an onerous obligtion of their job. They don't have autonomous interest, capability, or trained capacity. They're the ones that need education in the skills of educating. That's where we might be losing out. We may have a larger fraction of inept teachers than we need have. But to speak to your question would require me to know a lot more about teaching curricula than I know.

INTERVIEWER: I have some questions about the contexts in which you have taught. You have taught undergraduates at Harvard and graduate students at Columbia.

MERTON: I've taught a wide array. At Harvard, I taught both undergraduates and graduates. What we haven't discussed is



teaching at different phases of one's lifelong career. Is it much the same or different at various phases? In which respects? There is an unexamined subject about the relative ages of students and teachers that one might go into. When I was a young instructor, I had some students who were older than I. Some of those students are now university presidents emeriti: Logan Wilson, for example. They came to graduate work after a stint of work had interrupted their formal education. Another such student at Harvard was Paul Nitze, now our chief representative in the SALT negotiations with Soviet Russia. He, like Logan Wilson, was several yers older than I. he had been a great success in investment bankng as a young man and decided that he wanted or needed some further education. So he did it on his own. He declared a personal sabbatical. He attended my course on social organization faithfully and we have been friends ever since. So, too, with Logan Wilson- whose dissertation in the 1930s, you remember, was The Academic Man. He had been a newspaperman for a time. Working with such experienced and older students introduced a special challenge as I was beginning my teaching, both as instructor and as tutor. But now you have me reminiscing about my early teaching experience; do you want to hear more about that and the kinds of decisions leading me to one or another teaching post? Even abbreviated it's apt to be a long story.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, please go on. MERTON: I had been teaching for 3 or 4 years as an instructor

and tutor at Harvard; back then, an assistant professorship was a decidedly more elevated rank than it is now. (Talcott Parsons, as I recall, was an instructor for nine years before being advanced to the rank of assistant professor.) Remember, this was the dismal 1930s, with an academic market that makes today's depressed market seem cheerful, and my contract still had some time to run. But for various reasons, I wanted to leave Cambridge. Not least was a structurally induced reason: the Depression had led to a new university-wide rule allowing only for replacements in tenure positions, not for additions. A firm zero-growth policy. All one needed to do was to look at



the age distribution of faculty in one's department to identify the actuarial opportunity structure. Sorokin was then the oldest member of the Department-this is about 1939-and he was 50. The newly emerging Talcott Parsons-he had just published The Structure of Social Action-was all of 37.

There were other reasons for my wanting to move out of Cambridge. And though it seemed rather utopian to assume that there would be interesting academic jobs available anywhere, I decided that only two places in the entire country really interested me. Note that I say "places," not "universities." I wanted to lvie in a cultural region new to me. I had lived my childhood and youth in Philadelphia and was completing a decade in Cambridge. It was time to move beyond the Eastern seaboard. The two places were San Francisco and New Orleans. But the San Francisco area held no promise; back then, Berkeley had no Department of Sociology at all. Literally none; just Frederick Teggart's highly personal Department of Social Institutions. That left New Orleans.

Evidently, my musings must have been heard On High (for I had not whispered a word of this fantasy to mentors or colleagues). Literally within weeks of this fantasy-decision, I received a telephone call from the president of Tulane, asking whether I would be interested in the prospect of a post there. I allowed as how I was. We arranged to meet at what he described as a "half-way spot": for breakfast on the rooftop restaurant of the Astor Hotel near Times Square in New York. (The Astor has long since gone.) He would wear a white carnation in his lapel for ready identification. Meanwhile, I was reading up on New Orleans culture and liking what I read. Among other things, I learned that it was a rather hard- drinking culture. Those famous Sunday brunches with eggs sardou and ample liquor at Brennan's, for example. And by then, I truly wanted to go to Tulane. All this is context for the moment when I met its president for breakfast on the Astor roof. As the waiter waited, the president turned to me and asked: "What will you have to drink?" Primed by context, it was immediately evident to me that he was testing to see if I was truly a Tulanian at heart. I decided to meet the test. And so I



turned to the waiter and said, most casually: "Oh, I don't know. I suppose Ill have a Scotch-straight." There was a long pause, and then the president said: "And I'll have tomato juice." I understand that that story is still being told, some 40 years later. But what is not realized is that my interpretation of the president's question was the by-product of my thorough ethnographical research on the New Orleans subculture. A bit too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. However, as I discovered after arriving there, the ethnographic data had it pretty straight.

I never regretted my decision. Not because I was at once leapfrogged to an associate professorship and the next year, professor and chairman of that tiny, full-scale department of three. But because of the collegial atmosphere, especially among the cohort of young and largely untenured faculty in the social sciences and biology. Those were two happy years: enjoyable and productive, in both research and teaching. In those days, the standard teaching schedule was 15 hours a week, a stint we took for granted since it was even larger elsewhere. Classes were reasonably small, about 20 or 25 students. Most students there were not deeply motivated to learn; many went to college because it was the thing to do. It became a challenge to engage their attention.

I recall my first session in an introductory course at Sophie Newcomb, then the women's adjunct of Tulane. As I entered the room, fully equipped with notes for a more-or-less standard overview of the course, I was startled to find that at least half the class were busily knitting away. In the time I took to reach the podium I made an instant decision: I would see to it that they stopped knitting and not because I would tell them to cease and desist. And so, I scrapped my planned lecture and having introduced myself, announced the subject for this first session: a repot on some research I was doing at the time designed to give them an idea of how some sociologists went about their research. The research subject: patterns of Negro- white intermarriage in the United States. This, mind you, was 1939 and the place was New Orleans. The knitting stopped. A collective sense of numbed disbelief took over. In all fairness, I



must add that this turned out to be a particularly interesting class since, unlike the students at Radcliffe and Harvard, they had had no idea at all of how the work of scientific research and scholarship was done. That was a challenge that did at least as much for the youngish teacher as for the very young students.

But enouth of this. After two years at Tulane-I had planned to stay five-I accepted a position as an assistant professor of sociology in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia. From that time on, at least at Columbia, as distinct from summer school sessions at Berkeley and Penn State, I never again taught an undergraduate class. However, I would periodically admit a few undergraduates to my graduate classes; carefully selected, every one of them came up to snuff.

INTERVIEWER: You came here (Columbia) in 1941? MERTON: And I've never left. INTERVIEWER: As you reflect on these three different univer-

sities and undergraduates and graduates, what difference do you see-whether between schools or between levels?

MERTON: At Harvard, there were few differences in those intermediate courses which included both undergraduates and graduates. That provided a quasi-clinical experiment. In lecture courses, as distinct from research seminars, I have never leavened what I had to say in order to reach the occasional undergraduates. They were highly selected and measured up to rather demanding standards.

Comparing students, I would have to say that there was a perceptible difference in the average quality.

INTERVIEWER: Between Harvard and Tulane? MERTON: Yes. And between Tulane and Columbia. That

difference was much greater than the difference between undergraduates and graduates.

INTERVIEWER: What experiences or training helped you most in becoming a good teacher?

MERTON: You are asking me to muse about my experience as a graduate student rather than as a teacher of graduate students. To me, the most significant aspect of my graduate studies is that I was allowed to audit a great number of courses outside the brand-new Harvard Department of Sociology. Naturally, I



took all the core sociology courses but, looking back, I'd say that most of my education was outside the field of sociology, narrowly conceived. Along with registering for a course in economic history (with Gay) and for a research and reading course in the history of science (with Sarton), I audited courses in philosophy (A. N. Whitehead), economics (Joseph Schum- peter), constitutionalism (Charles Mcllwain), biology (William M. Wheeler), comparative religion (Arthur Nock), and anthro- pology (Earnest Hooton and Alfred Tozzer), and English Literature. With no exceptions, the basis of my selection was the quality of the professor. In English Literature, for example, it was the world-famous Shakespearean scholar.

INTERVIEWER: Was that Kittredge? MERTON: Yes, George Lyman kittredge. (Incidental to our

conversation, it was said of him that he "slighted research for tasks which others could have done or which could have been left undone [this refers to his passion for classroom teaching and the meticulous care he lavished on the substance and style of dissertations he directed], but he would not have agreed, since for him a teacher's monument was in his students rather than in his own writings.")

In the history of science, as I've said, it was George Sarton [pointing to his inscribed picture on the wall of the study]. You would know his name as the virtual founder of the history of science but over there [pointing to another photograph on the study wall], is one you wouldn't know because he never published much scholarly work, an economic historian named E. F. Gay. His large graduate course had an immense influence on me; indirectly, it led me to begin my work in the history of science and from there, I moved toward a sociology of science. Gay was an extraordinary man. He had studied at Berlin under the influential Gustav Schmoller who had founded the new German Historical School. Lacking all business experience, he became the first Dean of the Harvard Business School (in 1980) and introduced the case method of instruction which, with obvious changes, continues there to this day. After World War I, when he did yeoman service for President Wilson, he became



editor of the New York Evening Post (the great newspaper, not the garbagy rag which you know as the New York Post). The point is that he was one of the great teachers, who, though he himself published only a few articles, was the source of much scholarship by his students.

I could ramble through a long list of such teachers who meant much to me. L. J. Henderson and his Pareto seminar, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger (not young Arthur S. Jr. who wsjust coming of age at the time), the consequential philosopher, A. N. Whitehead, who was then nearing retire- ment in his 75th year; Edwin B. Wilson, the mathematician- physicist-statistician (the student of Willard Gibbs, who, at age 22, codified the great physicist's lectures on vector analysis), and the others I've mentioned.3

INTERVIEWER: There certainly was a quality of people and some exposure to other disciplines that seems to have been helpful to your teaching.

MERTON: The exposure to major people in these various fields was surely helpful. The Harvard system was then flexible enough so that you could audit as many courses as you liked. Some of us did so intensively. Very intensively. It's a long story; I can't begin to tell you how it was that the years 1931 to 1935, at Harvard, achieved a density of variously talented instruction for some of us budding sociologists that could not occur again. Those were truly "golden years." To put it in a nutshell, it all grew out of the fact that the president of Harvard back then, a complicated fellow named Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who had behaved so badly in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, had made two university decisions that were almost unimaginable. The first decision was to eliminate a highly successful Department of Social Ethics, as having outlived its usefulness, though it was presided over by a Cabot (who to complicate things further had married into the Lowell family). The second decision was to replace that Brahmin department, which had a world-wide reputation, with a newfangled department in what Harvard disdainfully regarded as the plebian discipline called sociology. What's more, to replace the Bostonian Cabot with a white



Russian, a self-styled peasant, Pitirim Sorokin, to head up the new department. That, you will agree, is a most improbable configuration. But having made these improbable decisions, Lowell had second thoughts. He decided to safeguard the university against the consequences of a possibly rash decision by reaching out to some of the outstanding scholars and scientists in the university to monitor developments in this brand-new department. During the first few years I was in the first cohort of graduate students in 1931; Kingsley Davis came a year later-Lowell saw to it that people like the biochemist Henderson, the historian Schlesinger, the economist Gay, the entomologist Wheeler, were members of the department, actual members attending the meetings of the department.

Their courses were listed and cross-listed in the Sociology bulletin so that it was truly a golden age. (In some cases, I hadn't previously known who some of these people were; I had never heard of Henderson, how could I have? He was a world- class authority on the blood, an "inevitable" Nobel laureate who became fascinated by Pareto, the sociologist not the economist.) It was a magical period, a short golden age of four or five years that was not, and could not, be reproduced. Another active participant was Wheeler, who in 1932 gave a course, described as Animal Sociology, which brought in leading experts on a great variety of social species. Each week dealt with a new species, ranging from cellular and metameric nutritive societies, corals, bryozoa, through insect societies (subsocial insects, wasps , bees, ants, and termites; then fish aggregations; bird and mammal societies to, finally, the social behavior of anthropoid apes). That was a composite course never given again-surely not at Harvard and probably nowhere else. It was just a stroke of historical good luck to have been around at the time. Sad to say, not all of the 8 or 10 graduate students in sociology took advantage of this rare array of courses. INTERVIEWER: But you did take advantage of those oppor- tunities. You went after those courses and those great teachers, and you wanted to soak up as much as possible.



MERTON: Well, yes. Most of them in fact had reputations as being great teachers as well as exceptional scholars.

INTERVIEWER: But what drew you first was who were the leading figures in their fields, of world stature that you could learn from while you were there?

MERTON: That's true. INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much.

APPENDIX

Robert K. Merton

Breve Curriculum Vitae

Education A. B.-Temple University, 1931 M. A.-Harvard University, 1932 Ph.D.-Harvard University, 1936

Teaching 1935-39-Harvard University (tutor and instructor) 1939-41-Tulane University (Associate Professor; then Professor and Chairman) 1941-62-,-Columbia University (Assistant Professor to Professor) 1963-74-Columbia (Giddings Professor of Sociology) 1974-79-Columbia (University Professor) 1979- -Columbia(Special Service Professor and Univer- sity Professor Emeritus) 1979- -Rockefeller University (Adjunct Professor) 1979- -Russell Sage Foundation (Resident Scholar)

Honors Some 20 honorary degrees: Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Temple, University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, Leyden, Wales, Hebrew, University of Jerusalem, Emory, Mary- land, etc. Honorary societies: National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Education, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Prizes: American Council of Learned Societies (for distinguished scholarship in the humanities), NIH Lec- tureship (for outstanding scientific achievement), Amer- ican Academy of Arts and Sciences (Talcott Parsons Prize for Social Science), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (award for outstanding support of bio-



medical science), Society for Social Studies of Science (John Desmond Bernal Award), American Sociological Association (Common Wealth Award for distinguished service to sociology; Career of Distinguished Scholarship award), MacArthur Prize Fellow

Learned Societies and Associations

Books

Coedited and Coauthored Books

President: American Sociological Association, 1957 Eastern Sociological Society, 1969. Sociological Research Association, 1968 Society for Social Studies of Science, 1975-1976 History of Science Society, History of Technology Soci- ety, the Tocqueville Society, Authors Guild (Council 1974-78) Science, Technology, and Society in 17th-Century Eng- land (Howard Fertig, Inc., & Humanities Press, 1938, 1970) Mass Persuasion (Harper, 1946; Greenwood Press, 1971) Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1949, 1957, 1968) The Focused Interview with M. Friske & P. L. Kendall) (Free Pres, 1956) The Freedom to Read (with R. McKeon & W. Gellhorn) Bowker, 1957) On the Shoulders of Giants (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965) On Theoretical Sociology (Free Press, 1967) The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (University of Chicago Press, 1973) Sociological Ambivalence (Free Press, 1976) The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir (Univer- sity of Southern Illinois Press, 1979) Social Research and the Practicing Professions (Abt Books, 1982)

Continuities in Social Research (with P. Fl Lazarsfeld) (Free Press, 1950; Arno, 1974) Reader in Bureaucracy (with A. Gray, B. Hockery, & H. C. Selvin) (Free Press, 1952, 1967) The Student-Physician: Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education (with G. G. Reader & P. L. Kendall) (Harvard University Press, 1957) Sociology Today (with L. Broom & L. S. Cottrell) (Basic Books, 1959) Contemporary Social Problems (with R. A. Nisbet) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1976) The Sociology of Science in Europe (with J. Gaston) (University of Southern Illinois Press, 1977) Toward Metric of Science (with Y. Elkana, J. Lederberg, A. Thackray, & H. Zuckerman (Wiley, 1978)



Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of P. F. Lazarsfeld (with J. S. Coleman & P. H. Rossi) Free Press, 1979) Sociological Traditions from Generation to Generation (with M. W. Riley) (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1980) Continuities in Structural Inquiry (with P. M. Blau)

Articles Some 125 Compilations Perspectives in Social Inquiry: Classics, Staples and

Precursors (Arno Press) 40 vols. History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science: Classics, Staples and Precursors (with Y. Elkana, A. Thackray, & H. Zuckerman) (Arno Press) 60 vols. History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science: Classics, Staples and Precursors (with Y. Elkana, A. Thackray, & H. Zuckerman) (Arno Press) 60 vols. Dissertations on Sociology (with H. Zuckerman) (Arno Press) 61 vols.

Festschriften Lewis A. Coser (ed.) The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) Festschrift for Robert K. Merton (New York Academy of Sciences, 1980)

NOTES

1. The impact of Merton's scholarship is well documented in Eugene Garfield's (1980) study. His computerized search located 2338 articles citing Robert K. Merton in the social sciences between 1970-1977 and 365 articles in the natural sciences that cited him. The rate for citation to Merton is 80 times greater than average annual number of citations in the social sciences and 4 times greater than the average annual number in the natural sciences.

2. An unpublished manuscript written after the fashion of Robert K. Merton's On the Shoulders of giants: A Shandean Postscript (1967).

3. In his piece, "Remembering the Young Talcott Parsons," Merton (1980a) reflects on how Parsons helped him and other graduate students to take both sociological theory and themselves seriously:

Because our teacher, as a reference figure, accorded us intellectual respect, because he took us seriously, we, in strict accord with Meadian theory, came to take ourselves seriously. We had work to do. Soon, we were less students than younger colleagues-fledgling colleagues, to be sure, but colleagues for all that.

REFERENCES

CAPLOVITZ, D. (1977) "Review of 'The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton' edited by L. A. Coser." Contemporary Sociology 6: 142-150.



GARFIELD, E. (1983a) "Robert K. Merton-author and editor extraordinaire, Part 1." Current Contents 39 (September): 5-11.

--- (1983b) "Robert K. Merton-author and editor extraordinaire, Part II." Current Contents 40 (October): 5-15.

--- (1980) "Citation measures of the influence of Robert K. Merton," pp. 61-74 in T. F. Gieryn (ed.) Science and Social Structure: A Festchrift for Robert K. Merton. New York: Academy of Sciences.

GIERYN, T. F. [ed.] (1980) Science and Social Structure: A Festchrift for Robert K. Merton. New York: Academy of Sciences.

MERTON, R. K. (1984) "Texts, contexts and subtexts: an epistolary forward," pp. ix-xlv in L. Schneider, The Grammar of Social Relations. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

---(1982) "Alvin W. Gouldner: genesis and growth of a friendship." Theory and Society 11: 915-938.

---(1980a) "Remembering the young Talcott Parsons." Amer. Sociologist 15 (May): 68-71.

---(1980b) "On the oral transmission of knowledge," pp. 1-35 in R. K. Merton and M. W. Riley (eds.) Sociological Traditions from Generation to Generation: Glimpses of the American Experience. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

--- (1967) On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. New York: Free Press. MILES, W. (1975) "The writings of Robert K. Merton:.a bibliography," pp. 497-522 in L.

A. Coser (ed.) The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Caroline Hodges Persell is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University, where she served as Director of Undergraduate Studiesfor a number of years. She is the author of Understanding Society (Harper & Row, 1984), Education and Inequality (Free Press, 1977), and numerous articles and monographs. Her major research interests are in teaching sociology, education and stratifications, and sex and gender.


Article Contentsp. 355p. 356p. 357p. 358p. 359p. 360p. 361p. 362p. 363p. 364p. 365p. 366p. 367p. 368p. 369p. 370p. 371p. 372p. 373p. 374p. 375p. 376p. 377p. 378p. 379p. 380p. 381p. 382p. 383p. 384p. 385p. 386

Issue Table of ContentsTeaching Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1984), pp. 355-487Volume Information [pp. 484 - 487]Front Matter [pp. 469 - 469]An Interview with Robert K. Merton [pp. 355 - 386]Some Evidence about OutcomesDeterminants of Decisions to Take Sociology Courses: Introductory Sociology Makes a Difference [pp. 387 - 397]There Is Life (And Work) after Sociology: Implications for Curriculum Design [pp. 399 - 417]

Instructional StrategiesUsing Student Journals in Sociology Courses [pp. 419 - 437]Optical-Disc Technology: Future Implications for Teaching Sociology [pp. 439 - 454]

Area OverviewsTeaching Social Gerontology [pp. 455 - 468]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 471 - 474]untitled [pp. 474 - 478]

Erratum: Symposium Review [p. 478]Book ReviewsSymposium Review [pp. 479 - 483]

Back Matter

1984 - an interview with

Documents

editors of teaching

teaching ideas

examples of teaching

teaching strategies

medical sociology

sociology of science

jstor terms

heavy teaching loads