"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.
Case 20: The Boom Years
During the depression decade, graduate enrollment in the Chicago Department averaged fifty-one students each year. After falling off during the war, annual enrollment during a short postwar upsurge averaged seventy-five, from which the number of students dropped to forty-four in 1953. The following year, enrollment entered a long boom period, peaking in 1968 at one hundred and twenty-three "currently registered students' - a category which excludes some students in the field or writing up their research. Until 1955-56, the customary listing of departmental fellows in the University Announcements never included more than a handful. From then on, however, the number of NSF, NDEA, NIMH, and other acronymic fellowships increased each year, especially after the Department received a training grant from the Public Health Service in 1963. Over the next ten years, this source provided a million and a quarter dollars to support students whose course of study the Department considered to be "health-related." By 1966-67, the last year for which a list was printed, the number of fellowship holders reached ninety-one.
In this context, the size of the regular departmental faculty, which in 1953 totalled no more than the seven it had numbered in 1935, began a period of rapid and sustained growth, doubling in size by 1960-61 and peaking in the early 1970s at twenty-seven. Until 1969, this group was exclusively male, although a number of women anthropologists served as Research Associates, temporary instructors, or members of the College faculty. Until the late 1950s, recruitment was predominantly from the ranks of the Department's own graduates and in relation to the activities of its central figures - as the appointments of Adams, Howell, and Marriott testify. From the time Cole began redressing the balance after Radcliffe-Brown's departure, the "separate but equal" subdisciplines remained proportionately about the same.
Although the appointments resulting from the 1960 "raid" on Berkeley were seen by some as filling particular needs of the Department, they clearly had a somewhat opportunistic character, offering several disaffected young social anthropologists a more supportive intellectual environment. Coming in the aftermath of several other additions in social anthropology, the Berkeley appointments upset the traditional subdisciplinary balance in the Department and provided a model for personnel policy in the following years. Recruitment was conceived universalistically as an attempt to capture potential "stars" in a rapidly expanding anthropological firmament, without regard for particular "slots" defined in ethnographic, theoretical, or subdisciplinary terms. Nevertheless, hiring was given some direction by the vicissitudes of funding and by the developing anthropological orientations and the relative influence of individuals previously hired. Although important appointments were made in archaeological and biological anthropology, the inadequacy of the laboratory facilities established in Walker Museum around 1960 hampered recruitment. In contrast, appointments in sociocultural anthropology were sustained by joint arrangements with the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations and other units in the Social Sciences Division.
Despite the inevitable frustrations accompanying these shifts in the makeup of the Department, the traditional Gemeinschaft spirit of Chicago anthropology was by no means lost. Reflected in the continuation of an unarticulated policy of alternation between "insiders' (Chicago Ph.D.'s) and "outsiders" in the chairmanship, it was expressed also in the "pool principle' established in the early 1960s. Instead of being regarded as matters of specific individual responsibility, teaching loads were treated informally as a collective (and an internal) departmental matter - thereby allowing flexibility for individual research activities. Although there were departures as well as arrivals throughout the decade, the continuing success of the Department's recruitment efforts was attested by outside observers. Evaluations by the American Council on Education, based on rankings by anthropologists throughout the country, rated Chicago highest in "quality of graduate faculty" in 1964 and again in 1969.
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