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A SPONSOR OF RESEARCH AND TEACHING
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The course Singer described had taken shape in the 1946–47 academic year under the leadership of a group of young Chicago College social scientists chaired by David Riesman. Riesman has written about his effort, supported by Singer, to incorporate extensive empirical material into the course: “I looked for unprocessed data which students and their mentors could interpret (for example, unprocessed field notes from community studies, or life histories, or the actual questionnaires used in a public opinion survey).” 5 The result was a course that mixed iconic works in social theory with the materials of empirical social science, including treatments of race in America, child rearing among the Hopi, and the organization of industrial society, but the context was decidedly theoretical. The point of the course was to use materials from the students’ own and from other cultures to raise fundamental issues about social scientific reasoning and social scientific methodology. Among the senior faculty members serving as lecturers during the first year of the new Soc 2 was Robert Redfield, a professor in the Department of Anthropology, from 1934 to 1946 the Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, and in 1952 the first holder of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship. Robert Redfield had undertaken his graduate work in Anthropology at Chicago in the 1920s under FayCooper Cole but was also influenced by the sociologist Robert Park (who was his father-in-law). Redfield’s scholarly career took decisive shape during field work at Tepoztlán near Mexico City. This was one of the first anthropological studies of a modern “peasant” community as opposed to an isolated “primitive” group. At Tepoztlán Redfield came to develop his model of the self-contained peasant community or folk society.
5. John J. MacAloon, ed., General Education in the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1992), p. 188.