Where are they now?

Two Scholars Examine Golden Decade's Imprint on Today's Sociologists

by Stephen Turner, University of South Florida, and Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University

Imagine it is 1975 and you and your longtime friends are musing and speculating about the fates of some of your sociology acquaintances from the 1960s. . . . Why? Because hard data, not just nostalgic longing, show that “The 1960s” (which bled into the early 1970s) was a “golden era” for the discipline of sociology, and you and your friends are sociologically curious about the larger-than-life reputation of the 1960s. The number of bachelor’s degrees granted in those years, the peak of the student political movement, was almost four times the low it dropped to in the 1980s. At the same time, the discipline achieved unprecedented public visibility and influence in connection with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs.

The Golden Decade

Yet, that period is also remembered as a time of violence, massive social change, unusually sharp intergenerational strife, and personal transformation. Sociologists who are now in their fifties matured during this remarkable period and were in important ways defined by macro-events such as the global student revolutions that began in May 1968. “Baby boomer” sociologists were studying sociology for the first time during that historic period. What did these experiences mean for them—and, hence, for their future students—and for their later work? This question inspired us when we assembled The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties, in which 18 leading scholars from six countries consider their own past through the sociological lens.

Where Are they Now?

“Beyond my family and community, whose unshakable support made all the difference, no one ever expected me to make it,” reports Patricia Hill Collins, for whom the 1960s meant going from a Philadelphia neighborhood, where ambitious young black women commonly aspired to become secretaries, all the way to Brandeis University, a world with an almost all-white, well-to-do, mainly Jewish student body. There, as one of very few black students, she became “hypervisible,” and her college experiences formed her basic outlook for years to come. She learned to see the ways in which the invisible, unsung working class sustained the university through its service labor, and to identify with those who earned their money through honest work. Martin Luther King’s assassination was a galvanizing event, which raised the question for her and many others as to whether white people would ever listen. Related events showed her the significance of black solidarity, and led her to the community schools movement in Roxbury, MA, where she taught and developed her social theory “on the ground.” “I have never had the luxury to be just a social theorist,” said Collins, since her theoretical and political struggles went hand in hand. Without these 1960s experiences, it is unlikely that she could have developed the unique brand of black feminist social theory for which she is widely known.

For Karen Schweers Cook, the tumultuous 1960s seemed very remote from her upbringing in suburban Texas. “My cousins (almost all male) taught me to drink beer, line dance, and shoot rabbits, deer, and rattlesnakes. They were cowboys and proud of it.” But more important, she was ethically influenced by the Lutheran social idealism of her community, and, as head of her high school Future Teachers of America club, organized an innovative program to help Hispanic preschoolers learn English. Breaking the mold of her cohort, and with her father’s encouragement, she and her twin brother left Texas to seek an education in California, despite dire warnings about “drugs and sex” from worried Texas friends. Later she joined a consciousness-raising group armed with the knowledge of differential treatment of women that she had acquired by watching the contrasting expectations set for her brother and herself. She became a valued participant in the all-male Stanford University departmental effort to make sociology a “hard” science. At the University of Washington she entered an almost all-male department and became involved with social justice-based community organizations. She believes her scholarly work on equity and social justice received impetus from the transformative currents of the 1960s.

Andrew Abbott’s path through the 1960s was rocky and unpredictable, as he explains: “In the 1960s I grew up. I was not happy about it. I thought I had lost my direction and my principles. Long retrospect says that what I lost were illusions. But they were my illusions, and I loved them.” His arguments with his generation, with its special role in ending the Vietnam War, along with allied questioning of his own heritage (privileged on one side, upward striving on the other), made for the creation of a scholarly mind and attitude that is now recognizably unique. But his self-creation did not come easily: “As for more open political action, I detested the groupthink it seemed to enforce. My decisive experience came on Moratorium Day in October 1969. Guilt-tripped into going by friends, I found myself walking up Commonwealth Avenue to get to the Boston Common and hearing from two blocks away 100,000 people shouting ‘Peace now, Peace Now’. . . . Suddenly I had a vision of the great Nuremberg [Nazi] rallies.” As he got further along in higher education, things became more serious: “The horror was that the [military] draft virtually forced you to barter your values.” Abbott joined the Army Reserve, learned first-hand about the full range of social classes from which he had to that point been protected, and lost a few more youthful illusions. Entering graduate school in 1971, he drew up a list of “burning questions” he wanted to answer, which seem to him now “contentless” because of their gigantic scope. Yet they gave him a launching pad for a distinguished career of empirical research and theoretical creativity, and they have about them the distinctive mark of The 1960s—even when Abbott fought against its ideals.

“There are currents that run through the affairs of men and women. They wash over us, cleanse us, and push us head over heels into some unknown place. They knock us over, wear us out, and sometimes almost kill us. They leave us gasping in their wake and grateful for being left alive.” So begins Jeffrey C. Alexander’s commentary on the socially formative 1960s and what he learned from that period. As a major contemporary theorist, Alexander understands the 1960s as a confrontation of classical modernity—captured most successfully by Max Weber’s various metaphors for rationalization—with a postmodern flux of unknown direction. “During the Sixties, the social unconscious reached up and grabbed us by our collective throat. It shook us violently and turned our world upside down . . . . I was a Sixties communard, a noncommissioned foot soldier in the new generational army of social and personal salvation.” In summoning up the friendly image of the Paris communards in 1870, Alexander brings together the rambunctious, hopeful, and ultimately failed revolutionaries of his own cohort with those about whom Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and other theorists agonized much earlier. In his own way, he seconds what Bob Dylan famously observed circa 1963: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

What Ever Happened to . . . ?