A History of the Sociology of Education Program at New York University
Floyd M. Hammack
The study of sociology of education has a long, rich history and tradition at New York University.
The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University was founded in 1890 as the School of Pedagogy. As early as 1906, the School offered courses in sociology, taught by Robert McDougal, a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1922, E. George Payne, who was then the President of Harris State Teachers College in St. Louis, was hired to develop a program in Educational Sociology. Payne was a graduate of the University of Chicago and held a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, in Germany. Within a short period Fredrick M. Thrasher, a 1926 Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago was hired, as was Harvey Zorbaugh, who also held a Ph.D. from the graduate program at the University of Chicago’s sociology department, the first really prominent sociology department in the country.
To mark the prominence of the Educational Sociology program at NYU, Payne and his colleagues founded The Journal of Educational Sociology in September of 1927. Dubbed a “Magazine of Theory and Practice,” the editorial statement launching the journal announced that, in contrast to psychology, which had developed tests of ostensibly innate capacity and achievement, sociology’s emerging contribution to education would be devoted to studying and understanding education’s relation to social life. “The sociologist is concerned with education as an instrument for effecting behavior changes in the individual and in his [sic] social relations; that is in his family, in his groups, in his play and recreation, and in his civic relationships, etc. Furthermore, the sociologist is concerned with creating community changes and community practices and methods of discovering to what extent school instruction may effect such changes” (Payne, 1927, iii-iv).
In 1936, Dan W. Dodson joined Payne, Thrasher, and Zorbaugh at NYU. Others were associated with the program at various points, but these three all devoted their careers to NYU and the Educational Sociology program. Examples of their productivity include the founding of a clinic for “exceptional” children, a particular interest of Zorbaugh’s, who in the 1940’s recognized the educational power of television and helped produce one of the first educational television programs. The beginnings of media studies can be traced to the work of Thrasher and colleagues, who, in the 1930s, began a series of studies of the effects of motion pictures on children. His courses on the subject were pathbreaking, including a course, begun in 1934, named “The Motion Picture: Its Artistic, Educational and Social Aspects.”
Doctoral and master’s degree programs in educational anthropology were begun in the 1950s, championed by Professor Ethel Alpenfels. These programs continued until the late 1970s. An undergraduate program in social work was initiated in the late 1930s and moved into the Ehrenkranz School of Social Work at about the same time that the Anthropology of Education program was discontinued.
Payne went on to become the Dean of NYU’s School of Education from 1939 to 1946. An early and strong proponent of racial justice, he was a board member of the NAACP and other national organizations and bodies, such as the League for National Unity, which combated prejudice in education and employment.
Dan W. Dodson, the son of a Texas sharecropper, was, from the moment of his arrival in New York City, active in racial justice efforts as well as scholarship on racism and desegregation. In 1944 he took leave from NYU to serve for four years as executive director of Mayor Fiorella La Guardia’s Committee on Unity. This work for Mayor La Guardia launched the field of Human Relations and set the example for human rights commissions throughout the country. It was during this time that Dodson’s Texas origins became important for the world of baseball. Sharing bourbon and branch water with fellow Texan and Brooklyn Dodgers’ president, Branch Rickey, Dodson worked to pave the way for Jackie Robinson’s employment as the first Black man to play in the major leagues. Returning to NYU, Dodson headed up the Center for Human Relations, which offered master’s and doctoral degrees in close affiliation with Educational Sociology. Dodson retired in 1972, and the Center closed a few years later.
The Journal of Educational Sociology was published by faculty in the program until May of 1963, when it was transferred to the auspices of the American Sociological Association and was renamed Sociology of Education. This name change reflects the times, recognizing that the field of sociology had come into its own to such a degree that its practitioners were increasingly doing work in reference to other sociologists and to the discipline itself, not so much in reference to the application of sociological research and theory to affairs in other realms, including education. Many writers in the field make reference to this shift. For example, many of the essays in Sociology and Contemporary Education (edited by Charles H. Page, New York: Random House, 1967) describe the tensions between “educationists” and sociologists. Certainly, the 1960’s were a period of transformation in the sociological study of education.
For the Educational Sociology program at NYU, this period was also transformative. Thrasher retired in 1959, Zorbaugh in 1962, and Dodson in 1972. While some of the new faculty in the program stayed for relatively short periods (for example, Patricia Sexton left in the early 1970’s to move to the Department of Sociology at NYU; S. M. Miller left to become chair of the Sociology Department at Boston University; and Marvin Bresslerleft to join the Sociology Department at Princeton University), others came and spent their careers in the program.
Lloyd Barenblatt was the last person to be imprisoned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, He also spent almost 30 years in the Educational Sociology program teaching courses on complex organizations and doing research on intrinsic motivation (see his article, for example, “Intrinsic intellectuality: Its relation to social class, intelligence, and achievement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984). His HUAC story is chronicled in the book by Peter Irons, The Courage of Their Convictions (NY: Free Press, 1988, pp. 83-104). A student of Theodore Newcomb at the University of Michigan, Barenblatt was trained primarily as a social psychologist. He retired in the late 1990’s.
Joseph Giacquinta, a student of Neil Gross, David Armor, and Robert Herriott at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard in the 1960’s, arrived at the program around 1967. His research interests centered on planned organizational change, and he remained active in this area until his retirement in 2001. Giacquinta is the co-author of several books, including Implementing Organizational Innovations: A Sociological Analysis of Planned Educational Change (NY: Basic Books, 1971), and, Beyond Technology’s Promise: An Examination of Children’s Computing at Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). His work on the status-risk theory of receptivity to change is widely recognized as an important contribution to the literature on organizational change and innovation.
Floyd Hammack, the most recent former program director, began his affiliation with the program in the Fall of 1971 and spent his career studying a diverse set of issues centering on inequality and organizations in education. He co-edited (with Kevin Dougherty) Education and Society (Harcourt, 1990). More recently, he edited The Comprehensive High School Today (Teachers College Press, 2004). His papers have concerned private schools, education for nursing, high school dropout, and the development of higher education systems, among other topics.
The program had many departmental homes over the years. Most recently, it joined the Department of Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Professions (now called Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities) . This department was formed in 1999 to provide a home to discipline-based studies in education, several interdisciplinary programs, and the statistics and research methodology offerings for NYU Steinhardt. Several of the faculty who formed the department were near the end of their careers, and a number have since retired, which allowed a new generation of scholars to join the program and the broader ASH department.
These additions illustrate the long-term cooperative nature of our program: We have always had one foot in the discipline of sociology and the other in the professional world of education. The interplay of these orientations has generated important contributions to our home school and profession (education), while connecting us, and our work, with the intellectual root discipline of sociology. Uncommon in American schools of education, our program continues to evolve and to thrive.
As curricular emphases and research priorities follow faculty interests, these too will evolve as new faculty make their mark on the program. It is clear that a new period in the program’s history has begun, and we look forward to many more years of vital contributions in the field of education and the discipline of sociology.