Professionalization Recollected in Tranquility

Professionalization Recollected in Tranquility Thomas S. Kuhn Isis, Vol. 75, No. 1, Sarton, Science, and History. (Mar., 1984), pp. 29-32. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28198403%2975%3A1%3C29%3APRIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N Isis is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.

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PROFESSIONALIZATION RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY By Thomas S . Kuhn*

I first became interested in the history of science during 1947, at which point I was a graduate student two years from a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. Four years after that introduction, still having taken no courses in the history of science, I offered my first to a small group of Harvard undergraduates. And five years later still I moved to Berkeley, where I had been invited to set up a program in my new field. No trajectory of that sort is imaginable today, for history of science has in the interim become a profession. Other signs of that transformation are not hard to recall. When I was working my way into the field, there were only half a dozen people employed to teach it in colleges and universities in the United States, and no two of them were at the same institution. Other people offered courses, too, but most of them were practicing scientists who occasionally lectured on the development of their own field. George Sarton's short article about the history of science at Berkeley, written after a visit there in 1933, is still worth reading as an account of activities in the field before World War I1 (Isis, 1933, 20:6-14). I remember the enthusiasm with which he gave me a reprint after he heard that I was departing for California. During those same years, attendance at History of Science Society meetings can never have reached fifty (half that number is probably far closer), simultaneous parallel sessions were unknown, and the audience at papers could have been accommodated comfortably in the sitting room of a mid-sized house. As for tone, I still remember a young chemist reading his first history paper, a good one on Boerhaave, only to be taken to task by a distinguished physiologist, not himself Dutch, for mispronouncing his subject's name. I do not miss those meetings, for there was something fundamentally unserious about them. But I do miss some of the participants. It is a pity that the phrase "professional amateur" is so much like the phrase "square circle." When did the professionalization of history of science begin, and what brought it about? No answer to questions of that sort can be based on an individual's memories, but I can suggest some clues. During the first eight years after my interest in the field was aroused in 1947, only two jobs opened up for historians of science, one at the University of Oklahoma, the other at the University of Kansas. Then the situation changed suddenly. In 1955 Harry Woolf went to the University of Washington; the following year I went to Berkeley; and the year after that Marie Boas went to the University of California, Los Angeles. Other major universities soon sought historians of science as well, only to discover that the supply was insufficient and would remain so until the number and size of graduate programs increased. For a few years the nascent profession witnessed a game of musical chairs as universities competed for the available talent. Then came a longer period in which any student with a degree in history of science could count on a variety of opportunities. What permitted this expansion was a development I did not even recognize at the time, the rapid expansion of college and university faculties. Retirements in history of science were even rarer than senior practitioners. The departments * Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

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that appointed fledglings in the field-mostly departments of history-usually did so only in response to external urging from scientists, philosophers, or university administrators. Even then they required assurance that the new appointment was a "net addition to staff' and would not "count against" the traditional parts of their field. If American higher education had not been growing rapidly and steadily, the professionalization of history of science would have been far slower and might not have occurred at all. When expansion stopped, the effect on history of science was determined in part by the fact that there were still almost no retirements. Doubtless there are several reasons why history of science was so significant a beneficiary of educational expansion. But only one of them had a direct effect on me, and I shall restrict myself to it, first preparing the way by qualifying one aspect of what I have already said. Though the beginnings of professionalization in the history of science were clearly visible only in the second half of the 1950s, what happened then could have happened almost a decade earlier and, indeed, had begun to do so. The first search for historians of science began immediately after World War 11, or so I was assured in the 1950s. What slowed it initially was what slowed it later, a lack of qualified candidates. What next shut it down for several years was the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and the resulting suspension of university expansion. The Korean armistice was signed in 1953, and the spurt of appointments I described above began within two years after that. Many of the people who filled those first jobs were, I suspect, directly or indirectly products of the earlier, but aborted, surge of interest. In any case, I was such a product. The United States had emerged from World War I1 with a widespread public awareness of the power of science and of its unprecedented role in the allied victory. Radar and the proximity fuse were the first major sources of that awareness, greatly reinforced at the war's end by the atomic bomb. War-accelerated advances in plastics and in medicine doubtless also played a role. Similar decisive science-based innovations were, people believed, likely to continue in peacetime, and a citizenry that understood science was thought to be essential if the discoveries that permitted such innovations were to be put to appropriate use. During the immediate postwar years, there was much discussion of what every educated voter ought to know about science, and there were numerous experiments with special science courses for the nonscientist. One of them was responsible for my introduction to history of science. In 1947 James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University, published On Understanding Science, a series of four lectures proposing that nonscientists be introduced to science through historical case studies of selected scientific advances. Even before the book appeared, he announced a one-semester course to try out his proposal, and I was invited to be one of his two assistants. Conant kept on the wall of his office a cartoon drawing of a turtle with the caption "The tortoise gets furthest when its neck is out." At our first meeting he asked me, still a physics graduate student scarcely aware that history of science existed, to prepare a case history on mechanics. Much of the summer was spent reading Afistotle, Galileo, and bits of the scholastics, together with Alexandre KoyrC's Etudes galile'ennes, and the results were for me transforming. By the early fall I was seriously considering transferring from science to its history. By spring the decision was made. From the perspective of this narrative, that story is in several respects ironic, and the ironies bear on more than myself. What attracted me to Conant and to history of science was not a special concern with the challenge of teaching science to nonscientists. I thought that goal important, and I remember wartime

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discussions of the subject long before I met Conant. But I was drawn to him initially by curiosity and to history of science by a totally unanticipated fascination with the reconstruction of old scientific ideas and of the processes by which they were transformed to more recent ones. Although my first teaching was in science general education, and though I believed in it, I left it for fulltime work in my new profession as soon as the opportunity offered. In short, the postwar concern with science for nonscientists was responsible for my introduction to history of science and provided the context in which I first pursued it, but it was never what primarily motivated me. I shall shortly suggest that the same was true for a number of others. A second irony is that the Conant approach to science education for nonscientists was quite atypical. One of the activities with which I became involved by working with Conant was a series of conferences intended to bring together people engaged in the new, nonprofessional science teaching. I remember three such meetings-at Princeton, at Harvard, and at Washington University, St. Louis-and there was little sign of historical concern. Richard Shryock and Henry Guerlac were at the Harvard meetings, presumably because Conant had had a hand in the invitations. But a more nearly typical group was the one from Princeton: Eric Rogers, physicist and educator, Hubert Alyea, chemist, and Luther Eisenhardt, mathematician and dean. All were able; all were committed to communicating science to nonscientists; but none was inclined to invoke the aid of history. Indeed, except for the Harvard group, the closest approximation to historical interests was shown by the group from the College at the University of Chicago. Their very interesting and quite successful approach introduced nonscientists to science through the reading of great books, classics of science. Some of the texts they used were used also by the historians. But the Chicago group treated those classic texts in total isolation, and their results seemed to us profoundly unhistorical. A third irony, the last of which I am aware, is that the way we "historians" reacted to the Chicago exponents of great books was the way the established historians of science reacted to us. On this subject my memory is especially vague, doubtless for the obvious reasons. But we were surely viewed as outsiders, people who used history of science for purposes that were at once more and less than historical, people whose problems and standards of selection were determined in part by their special educational goals. Clearly that attitude had some basis, and I often found my own loyalties divided. On the one hand, I deeply believed in the historical approach to teaching science for nonscientists. On the other, I recognized that even the best of the courses through which historians of science represented their professional concerns and goals were not well calculated to provide a nonscientist with what he needed to know about science. Yet, despite these several misfits, I suspect that postwar concern with what C. P. Snow belatedly called the two-culture problem was the primary force in the emergence of the history of science as a professional discipline. Besides myself, only a couple of those who became professionals owed their acquaintance with history of science to work in a course aimed at nonscientists, but they were near-contemporaries of mine, and the total number in the field was then very small. Much larger was the number of people who, drawn to history of science for whatever reasons, were able to support themselves in graduate school by assisting in courses that satisfied one or another science distribution requirement. And, finally, hardest to evaluate but probably most important, history of science was seen by some scientists and many educational administrators

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as a potential supplier of bridges across the cultural divide. Philosophy of science had been around for some time without doing so, and it was in any case likely to be regarded as too technical. Sociology of science, except for studies of industrial research laboratories, was virtually unknown. But history had long been a central humanistic discipline. To be a historian of science was to bridge the cultures in one's own person, or so some people of influence seem to have thought. Of course few historians of science were ever asked whether they wanted that responsibility, and the evidence suggests that we did not. Instead of designing courses that aimed to produce scientific literacy, however broadly defined, most of us followed the lead of previously institutionalized academic specialties and offered courses suited to potential members of our emerging profession. That choice was not, I think, wrong. The two-culture problem is probably intrinsic to the nature of science. Attempting to resolve it would, in any case, have turned us away from the intellectual imperatives of the field we sought to establish. But in refusing the global task that our promoters often expected of us, we were frequently led to refuse a more localized challenge as well. Emphasizing graduate work and preparation for it, we neglected to ask whether our field could, like history itself or the study of literature, develop any natural clientele among those who would not become professionals. When, with the end of university expansion, professional training became a decidedly secondary function, our field was unprepared, and it now pays both an intellectual and an institutional price.