Robert E. Lee Faris
February 2, 1907 – January 25, 1998
Robert E. L. Faris served as the 51st President of the American Sociological Assocation. His Presidential Address “Reflections on the Ability Dimension in Human Society” was delivered on September 1, 1961, at the Association’s Annual Meeting St. Louis. His address was published in the December 1961 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 26, No. 6, pp 835-843). Upon his death in 1998, an obituary was published in the May/June 1998 issue of Footnotes.
Obituary
Written by Jack Faris, published in Footnotes, May/June, 1998
Robert E. L. Faris’s introductory essay to The Handbook of Modern Sociology – titled “The Discipline of Sociology” – began with this sentence: “When the wise men of ancient Babylonia gazed at the night sky, they were not merely partaking of recreation, but were searching for meanings relevant to human affairs.” The title of this essay and its opening line provide a good starting point for a career that illuminates the potential of sociology, both in its aspiration to build a corpus of objective, scientific knowledge and at the same time to contribute to a humanistic understanding of the significance of that knowledge.
The professional career of Robert E. L. Faris, from the awarding of the PhD at The University of Chicago in 1931 to his retirement from the University of Washington in 1972, is marked by a series of intellectual achievements and contributions that help us comprehend the realm of the possible. In his synthesis of social psychology and his empirical research on mental disorders, Faris expanded our understanding of human possibility. In his analysis of social organization and society, he drew our attention to the limits of the possible. To anticipate points to be developed later, Paris’s social psychology teaches us that we are not prisoners of our genes, our libidos, our ids, or our instincts. His sociology of institutions, conversely, instructs us that we are constrained by the realities of our norms, values, and traditions. In both spheres, his contributions were informed by his commitment to sociology as a discipline. He was a man of discipline.
Faris was part of the second generation of university-based sociologists. He was born in Waco, Texas on Ground Hog Day in 1907 and soon moved to Chicago with his father and three brothers, where Ellsworth Faris had enrolled in the Graduate School at The University of Chicago (where he took several courses from George Herbert Mead). During one school term the only income the senior Faris -a former minister and missionary – had was $25 per week for preaching on Sundays in Winnetka. Robert E.L. would later recall, without bitterness, a Christmas when each boy was limited to a gift washcloth.
After completing the PhD, Ellsworth took a position at the University of Iowa, where he was Scoutmaster to his sons’ troop. The family returned to Illinois in 1918 when Ellsworth joined The University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology- the first of its kind and still only in its 33rd year. He became Chairman in 1925 and served as President of the American Sociological Society and Editor of the American Journal of Sociology before his retirement in 1938.
Robert Faris attended The University of Chicago’s University High School and went on the do his undergraduate and graduate work at the University. His selection of a dissertation topic–a choice which resulted in a sociological classic when published (with Warren Dunham) as Mental Disorders in Urban Areas-was virtually accidental. Robert Park, one of the Department’s most eminent professors, asked Faris what he wanted to do for a dissertation. There was a rich tradition within the Department of conducting research within the city that hosted the university, and Faris had been impressed in particular by a careful analysis of the spatial distribution of suicide in Chicago. So he replied that he would like to do what Ruth Shonle (later Ruth Shonle Cavan) had done with her research on suicide, but that she had already done it. Park immediately suggested that he do the same thing as Shonle, but with mental illness instead of suicide. And so he did.
This apparently capricious decision illustrates three facets of Faris’s attitude toward discipline. First, it is characteristic of his pragmatic style to get on with the project of a dissertation, instead of fussing about for months (or years, as is sometimes the case) trying to decide what would make a great topic. In later years, this same discipline was evident in his work habits; he would get to the office before his morning class so he could work on a book in progress-every day.
A second aspect of Paris’s conception of discipline, which also relates to how he chose his dissertation topic, is that through his career he came to regret the intellectual contamination that political and ideological passion brought to various projects of sociological enterprise. He would never have claimed credit for his own dispassionate selection of a topic – he freely conceded that it was simply the easy answer to take Park’s suggestion, but he did advocate that his students not take on research topics in areas about which they had strong feelings. For Faris, an essential element of the discipline of sociology was keeping it as clear as possible of emotion and politics.
The third facet of Paris’s sense of discipline that can be connected to the episode of his dissertation lies not in his behavior, but in Park’s. It was what Park did not do that Faris would have applauded, for what Park did not do was to try to enlist Faris to perpetrate Park’s own research agenda or theoretical doctrine. At that time, Chicago’s Department of Sociology was relatively free of an otherwise widespread tendency for prominent scholars to seek to immortalize themselves with a formal school of thought and successor generations that would extend the influence of the founders while venerating their memory. Faris would quote with appreciation the admonition that Albion Small, the first chairman of the Chicago department, would give to new graduates – “Now, your job is to go out and make everything we taught you obsolete. This spirit continued to animate the Department through the years of Park and Burgess and Ogburn, and is a central theme in Paris’s widely appreciated Chicago Sociology: 1920-1932.
Throughout his career, Faris deplored those colleagues who sought to found or perpetuate schools. He was himself clearly in an intellectual tradition -from William Jarnes to Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead and through Ellsworth Faris to himself (and quite a few others). This tradition placed central emphasis on the role of social experience, and particularly language, in the development of individual capacities of consciousness and comprehension of self. Yet I cannot recall Faris ever using the term “symbolic interaction,” and I am sure he never used the words “symbolic interactionist” or “symbolic interactionism.” Not only did he dislike jargon, he had a profound aversion to anything that had a whiff of dogma. For Faris, to seek to found or perpetuate a school of thought, rather than to extend the domain of objective knowledge, was a regrettable, if common, human foible, a surrender to ego, a failure of discipline.
Given the attention and acclaim Mental Disorders in Urban Areas received, it would have been natural enough for Faris to spend the rest of career building on his dissertation. It is another example of his commitment to the discipline of sociology, and of his own personal discipline, that he did not do so. This was in part because of his quite pragmatic recognition that continuing in the area of mental disorders would offer diminishing returns, both personally and professionally. Rather than narrowing, his interests broadened.
One subject that became a life-long interest-it was the topic of his Address as President of the American Sociological Association -was the nature of ability. Particularly in the case of what is regarded as genius, there was, and there remains, a tendency to suppose that extraordinary ability comes from divinity. Even today, many schools reflect this assumption with programs for “gifted children.” Faris was widely knowledgeable about research on all kinds of achievement. He made a particular effort to study and understand the abilities of a few extraordinary individuals who gained renown as “lightning calculators.”
These were people who could almost instantly calculate the product of two four-digit numbers, mentally. Over a longer period of time, one such prodigy was able to abstract the cube root of a one hundred-digit number without pencil and paper (let alone a computer). These feats seemed to be beyond the grasp of ordinary humans-they seemed to depend upon some sort of inexplicable, innate phenomenon. Yet Faris’s inquiries once again de-mystified these amazing abilities. He discovered that these lightning calculators· had devised tricks, shortcuts, and techniques that helped them do these remarkable stunts. One had memorized 14-place log tables from 1 to 150-a tedious thing to do, but useful when multiplying and dividing big numbers in your head. Faris also demonstrated that a capacity for memorizing numbers can be developed with training. He would underscore his demystifying of lightning calculation by contending that to read sophisticated material-say, college level history-at a more or less standard speed for an hour or more is an intellectual feat of a higher order than to multiply two ten-digit numbers mentally. We simply don’t recognize it as such because it is an achievement made by many people instead of only a few.
Across a range of extraordinary achievements, in music, in science, in art-Faris drew attention to factors he found frequently to be present-encouragement ·and support from a parent or other adult, large amounts of silent and/or unnoticed practice, and at least some screening from the homogenizing influence of age-peers. Thus, Faris, by showing how the achievements of the extraordinary are within range of most if not all of us, expanded our understanding of the possible.
Faris drew on this corpus of research to develop a set of practical suggestions for parents interested in fostering achievement of their children. In a paper not intended for publication, “Family Interaction and the Generation of Ability,” Faris advocated that eager, loving, attentive parents who wish to nurture ability spend lots of time in stimulating interaction with their children even as infants, enjoy and participate in the development of speech and expansion of vocabulary, and introduce counting and numerical concepts as early as possible. He also suggested a progression of experiences in reading, from early cuddling with picture books to reading aloud of more complex literature such as Tom Sawyer and Kidnapped. He recommended that parents try to create favorable attitudes toward school, to exert influence over the child’s social relationships with playmates, and to be sure to reserve ample time after school for reading and family conversation. And of course to set limits on the amount of time spent on television.
Early in his advanced course in social psychology, Faris would review the history of attempts to account for human behavior with biological explanations. Starting with instinct theory-which his father Ellsworth had critiqued with considerable effect in his 1919 article “Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses?” -Faris would set up and knock down the various successors to instinct theory-drives, needs and so forth. The idea that we are driven by our genes to be promiscuous, or adventurous, or altruistic, he found silly. He was, to the contrary, fully convinced that a person can deliberately shape his sell, can lay out an agenda for personal transformation and see it through, whether that is a matter of gaining control of a hot temper or overcoming fear of public speaking or becoming more considerate of other people.
Faris was a strong social psychologist, but he was also a genuine sociologist. In this also he was a student of his father, whose book review of George Herbert Mead’s posthumous Mind, Self and Society pointed out that this title was not, chosen by Mead and that, because Mead clearly placed social interaction as antecedent and causally prior to consciousness, a better title would have been “Society, Self and Mind.” Paris’s advanced course on social institutions began with a strongly supported assertion that social organizations have emergent properties which cannot be identified, let alone understood, with a reductionist strategy. The ability to build, say, an aircraft carrier is something which can exist only within a social organization -it does not exist as a property of the individual constituent parts of that organization.
Faris drew upon William Graham Sumner’s distinction between crescive and enacted institutions. He loved to describe the crescive development of organizations, such as Lloyd’s of London, pointing out how they would often emerge almost by accident and grow gradually, and without planning, to take on a significant function. Lloyd, of course, was never in the insurance business himself, but the coffee shop that he owned became a gathering place for men who cooperated in the business of insuring merchant ships whose value exceeded the capacity of any one insurer. Faris also enjoyed tracing the development of universities, pointing out the significance of the fact that the very date of the emergence of the first university (in Bologna) cannot be precisely fixed-its development was so gradual and unplanned.
With these and other examples, Faris painted a picture of social organizations and society as sustained by a complex fabric of norms and values, custom and tradition, the function of which is often subtle and sometimes invisible. He was as a result highly skeptical of the capacity of deliberate planning to engineer radical change successfully. A product of the University of Chicago’s undergraduate college, Faris disapproved of the extreme changes instituted by Robert Maynard Hutchins. He took some satisfaction in pointing out that over a period of time every one of the Hutchins reforms was reversed. He was respectful of the wisdom that inheres within organizations that have a history, and he considered that the constraints such organizations place on attempts at radical transformation to be in fact a positive kind of discipline.
So Faris, while expanding the role of the possible in terms of his social psychology, found limitations on the role of the possible within his sociology. The latter posture was well represented in the administrative aspect of his career. As department chair at Washington as well as in his service in a variety of roles in the American Sociological Association, Faris was appreciative of organizational continuity, including, of course, a steadfast commitment to sociology as an enterprise of objective scientific inquiry-a discipline. When Faris was editor of the American Sociological Review, to give an example that illustrates his philosophy, he deliberately did not do what most editors, before and since, have done-he did not re-fashion the look of the journal and change the cover. His appreciation of tradition did not result in a reflexive resistance to change. As President of the American Sociological Association in 1961 (a position Ellsworth Faris held in 1937), Faris was the prime architect of the most significant transformation in the organization’s history-from an association of associations to an association of individual scholars. This made the ASA much more professional and influential in the discipline of sociology.
His teaching career began at Brown in 1931 and took him to Bryn Maw, McGill and Syracuse. At Syracuse, he was pleased to have two extraordinary students- Leo Goodman and Sandy Dornbusch-who went on to distinguished careers in sociology and were life-long friends. Faris took pride in the professional success of these and many other students who learned from him. George Lundberg brought Faris to the University of Washington in 1948, and he remained there until his retirement in 1972. He served as Department Chair for 13 years, and under his leadership the Department attained national recognition. In 1962 the Seattle Times reported that the University of Washington’s Department of Sociology had been rated by “high ranking outsiders” as among the top five in the country, advancing “steadily under the guidance of Robert E. L. Faris, the present chairman.”
His success as a leader was not purely academic; during his tenure the department had a strong gemeinschaft-like quality that is rare in any university. Otto Larsen, Bill Catton, Ed Gross, Wes Wager, Frank Miyamoto, Stud Dodd, Cal Schmid, Norman Hayner, Clarence Schrag, Dick Emerson, and others were friends as well as colleagues, and regular parties in the Faris home went on into the late hours with laughter, talk, and music.
In addition to his teaching (Faris never took a full year sabbatical, and even as a full professor and department chair enjoyed teaching more than the required load), scholarly writing, and administrative work, Faris found time to serve on a policy advisory group during the Johnson administration. He submitted a number of -recommendations, including to undertake an environmental initiative to protect our natural resources. He also proposed to Johnson that our foreign policy stance toward the Soviet Union move away from rhetoric that demonized the Russians as implacable, atheistic enemies.
His personal life was as rich and satisfying as his professional career. He met his wife-to-be, Clara Guignard, while he was assisting William Ogburn in a statistics course. The young woman had won a graduate scholarship from North Carolina, They married in 1931 and were together until her death in 1992. Following his retirement in 1972, he and Claire spent the next eighteen years in Coronado, enjoying, among other things, the sailing he had come to love on Lake Washington in Seattle. The couple moved back to Seattle in 1990 to be closer to family.
Robert E. L. Faris was an accomplished painter, a pretty good violinist, and an enjoyable pianist. He put away his paintbrushes in the late 30′ s when he became too busy, but resumed in the 1980′ s and did some of his strongest work (which tends to feature architectural landscapes that resemble Edward Hopper in style and mood). He was somewhat fluent in French-he translated some of the works of Marcel Pagnol (of “Jean de Florette”, etc.) for his own pleasure, and he had some command of German and Italian. He took great pleasure in his pursuits of quantum theory, astronomy, and cosmology-some of his favorite people were mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers. At the same time, he seemed to be able to complete just about any major speech in Shakespeare if you started the first line.
He had three sons, three grandsons, and three granddaughters, and he loved them. They loved him back.
Robert E. L. Faris died as a result of a massive stroke on February 26, 1998. Though somewhat frail, he carried himself with pride and retained his remarkable mental acuity up to his last moments. He was a man of discipline.