"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.
Case 22: Setting the Modern Mold
The elimination of core requirements in general anthropology, although long in coming, was finally effected in the context of larger social issues reverberating through the American academy in the late 1960s. For aspiring anthropologists - by tradition a culturally alienated group identifying with their subject peoples - the war in Vietnam had a conscience-wrenching symbolic significance. In a period witnessing the withdrawal of European colonial power from the world of subject peoples generally, many students felt themselves implicated in a massively bloody but ultimately futile attempt to reverse the tide of history. At Chicago, as elsewhere, political issues were stirred into a turmoil with those of academic structure and purpose. In the aftermath of a student sit-in over the denial of tenure to sociologist Marlene Dixon, the early spring of 1969 was a period of intense debate among both students and faculty in the Anthropology Department. Although the outcome was scarcely a "reinvention" of Chicago anthropology, it was in the period encompassing this ferment that its modern mold was set.
Despite the underlying issues of global political and moral concern, the "position papers" produced by the "workshops" of that spring tended to focus on matters closely related to graduate training as preparation for a career in anthropology. Although the faculty proved unwilling to accept regular student participation in the Department's governance, both groups were, from somewhat different grounds, opposed to a rigidly structured "core' program. By the end of the spring quarter, a new set of "departmental procedures" had been adopted. Students, in consultation with faculty advisory committees, were encouraged to "marshal" the resources necessary to tailor their own individual programs.. Although there have been subsequent calls for the reintroduction of elements of a more rigid pedagogical structure, the prevailing departmental ethos continues to be at once permissive (in terms of requirements) and demanding (in terms of expectations).
The concomitance of antistructure in the realm of pedagogy and structure in the realm of cultural theory was not the only paradoxical aspect of the emerging modern situation. The demands of a "large and complex" enterprise involving more than two hundred people and "funds of over $800,000 going through our books each year" were beginning to be reflected in the internal structure of the Department. Although the "perquisites" proposed in October 1968 to facilitate the selection of a new chairman were by no means all achieved, the end of that academic year saw the formalization of a "committee structure for the management of Department Affairs"which did not, however, seriously inhibit the rampant individualism of its faculty.
The internal structural evolution of the Department reached its current form just at the point when the long boom which had nourished it came to a close. The 1968-69 year marked the beginning of a precipitate withdrawal of federal funding from the support of graduate education, and a redefinition of priorities in the support of social science research. By 1973, the funds available for student support in the Department had fallen by two-thirds, and the attempt to renew the Public Health Service training grant had run aground against the insistence that such support must contribute directly to medical education in this country. But despite clear signs of a rapidly shrinking job market for anthropologists, Chicago students continued to fare relatively well in the academic marketplace. Sustained by University policy and by the continuing reputation of the Department, enrollment throughout the decade has remained on a plateau approximating what it was in 1968. Notwithstanding the loss of important faculty members between 1970 and 1975, and the successive retirements of the Department's elder generation, important new appointments have been made, including several women. And despite the failure to win federal funding for the "comparative study of meaning systems," these appointments have tended to sustain and develop the intellectual orientations which had been defined by the early 1970s.
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