The Ambivalence of Scientists

Abstract

It is a high privilege to be invited to give the lecture that annually commemorates the first great president of this first authentic university in the United States. This is especially so for someone from a comparatively new academic discipline, a discipline which was installed in this university a short time ago with the appointment of Professor James S. Coleman (who, it is agreeable to note, is himself outstanding among the graduates of our department at Columbia). I like to think that the double recognition thus accorded sociology by the Johns Hopkins is only another bit of testimony to the far-seeing vision of Daniel Coit Gilman. We should remember, for one thing, that he had prophetically described the “study of man in his relations to society” as one of “the modern humanities”; that later, only three years after he became president of this new university be agreed to become president of the American Social Science Association; and finally, that, in his famous address on ‘Research’ almost sixty years ago, he conceived the expanding domain of science to include sociology which (in his words) was beginning to “employ the scientific method, with increasing success, and [to] demand recognition in the surrogate’s court, as the next of kin.” But since I have not been asked here to present the sociologist’s credentials as kin to the older sciences represented at the School of Medicine, I must proceed to my subject.