Bolender.com

Park's Academic Career

In 1914, at the age of fifty, there came another turning point in Park's life: he embarked on an academic career. At the suggestion of W. I. Thomas, he accepted a summer appointment in the Department of Sociology at the Uni- versity of Chicago to give a course on "The Negro in America" for a fee of $500. Soon afterward he joined the department as a permanent member and continued teaching there until 1936.

Park's success at Chicago was not immediate. When he joined the depart- ment, its founder and spiritus rector, Albion Small, still dominated it, and Thomas, who had joined the department in 1896, was its most creative and forceful member. By 1920, however, when the students came back after the war, Small was nearing retirement and Thomas had been forced to resign. Park became the outstanding member of the department.

Stimulating though his lectures were, Park's reputation did not depend on them. He insisted on getting to know each of his students personally and having protracted interviews and sessions with them. Learning about their back- ground and interests in this personal way, Park then helped them map out their field of research and specific research problems. It was a time-consuming procedure, but he loved it.

Park brought his interest in the city into the university. He wrote that he had "actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man." Out of this he had gained "a con- ception of the city, the community, the region, not as geographical phenomena merely but as a kind of social organism." It was the study of this organism in all its details that he now urged upon his students. The city of Chicago was to become a great natural laboratory for research on urban man and his natural habitat.

For nine years Park taught at Chicago as a professorial lecturer with the same nominal salary. But being dedicated to his students and having some independent means by inheritance, he offered more courses than he was paid for. One day he received an official document "authorizing Dr. Park to give courses in the winter quarter without salary." The administration had finally discovered what was going on and wished to regularize the irregular. Park's appointment as a full professor came only in 1923, when he was fifty-nine years old.

Park was a colorful man, even in appearance. Leading a sedentary life while at the university, he developed a thickset and pudgy physique. His white hair was long, perhaps because he forgot to pay regular visits to the bar- ber. Living up to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, he would sometimes appear before his class with shaving soap in his ears and with his clothes in disarray. He would frequently forget where he had placed a book, and it even happened that he came to a convention forgetting to bring a copy of the paper he was scheduled to read. He once continued serenely with his lecture while a student walked to the front of the room and tied his neckwear, which had been dangling loose from his collar.

In the classroom Park had a gruff voice and manner, so he sometimes felt the need to explain that when he spoke rudely he did not mean to offend but that this was just his manner when thinking hard. Nevertheless, tears would sometimes flow when he told a student that his (the student's) ideas were not worth a damn. At times the chairman of the department, Ellsworth Faris, found it advisable to inform incoming graduate students that Park was one of the great scholars in sociology and that they should not be put off by his crustiness, thus depriving themselves of an exceptional opportunity. Once students got to know Park, and discovered the warmhearted and affectionate man behind the gruff mask he liked to present, they became exceptionally de- voted to him. Few men have had as many deeply attached and grateful stu- dents.

Park was not a very prolific writer. Ellsworth Faris said of him that he would rather "induce men to write ten books than to take time off to write one himself." Apart from his dissertation, he wrote only one book, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922). His main contributions came in a series of in- fluential articles and introductions to the books of his students, which have now been gathered in the three volumes of his Collected Papers. Perhaps his most influential publication was the pathbreaking Introduction to the Science of Sociology, which he published, with Ernest Burgess as a junior author, in 1921 and which is by far the most important textbook-reader in the early his- tory of American sociology. One other book that appeared under his name, Old World Traits Transplanted, was the result of Park's collaboration with W. I. Thomas, though it was signed by Park and a junior author. This was done because the publishers and sponsors refused to print a book authored by Thomas, who had recently been forced to resign his university position be- cause of what was then judged to be a case of sexual indiscretion.

Park received ample professional recognition during his lifetime. He served as President of the American Sociological Society (1925), a delegate to the Institute of Pacific Relations, a director of the Race Relations Survey on the Pacific Coast, an editor of a series of books on immigration for the Carnegie Corporation, an associate editor of several academic journals, and was a mem- ber of the Social Science Research Council and more than a dozen other learned societies. He was also the first President of the Chicago Urban League.

An inveterate traveller, Park, before during and after his Chicago appoint- ment, roamed all over the world, exploring its racial frontiers and studying its cities. He visited Germany and conferred with its leading sociologists; he spent a whole academic year at the University of Hawaii; he lectured in Peiping and visited India, South Africa and Brazil.

After his retirement from the Chicago faculty, Park, ever ready to share his knowledge with students, moved to Fisk University, where, right through his eightieth year, he taught students and directed their research activities. He died at Nashville, Tennessee on February 7, 1944, exactly one week before his eightieth birthday.

Perpetually curious and ever open to novel experience whether on the racial frontier or in the wilderness of cities, Park was above all devoted to training men who would be able to map the social world with precision and objectivity. He was deeply committed to reform and improvement of the human condition, but felt what was needed at that juncture were trained and disciplined observers of the passing scene. Students attracted to the area of race relations were generally strongly disposed to social action against racial dis- crimination and for Negro civil rights. Park shared their sentiments. But, in Ernest Burgess' words, he "told them flatly that the world was full of cru- saders. Their role instead was to be that of the calm, detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug."

According to Park, "a sociologist was to be a kind of super-reporter, like the men who write for Fortune. He was to report a little more accurately, and in a manner a little more detached than the average . . . the 'Big News.' But in Park's view the sociologist was no mere gatherer of facts. He gave his students, in Everett Hughes' words, "a perspective in which to see themselves and thus satisfy their curiosity. The perspective was a system of concepts ab- stract enough to comprehend all forms of interaction of men with one an- other."

Devoted to the enterprise of studying urban life and culture with the same painstaking meticulousness and attention to detail that anthropologists use when they describe primitive tribes, Park was convinced that no such study was, to use his expression, worth a damn, if it was not guided by an array of concepts that would allow the student to sift the significant from the un- essential. To the extent that he managed to convey this sense of the importance of theory to his students, and he was by no means always successful, he made them transcend mere empiricism to become true sociologists.

There is no better testimony to the impact of Park's teaching than the imposing roster of his students. Everett C. Hughes, Herbert Blumer, Stuart Queen, Leonard Cottrell, Edward Reuter, Robert Faris, Louis Wirth, and E. Franklin Frazier all became presidents of the American Sociological Society. Helen McGill Hughes, John Dollard, Robert Redfield, Ernest Hiller, Clifford Shaw, Willard Waller, Walter C. Reckless, Joseph Lohman and many other students of Park became leading social scientists. It is hard to imagine the field of sociology without the contribution of the cohort of gifted men whom Park trained at Chicago. What higher tribute can be paid to a teacher?

From Coser, 1977:369-372.