First Year Of Graduate School Research Articles

RNA dances to center stage.

RNA dances to center stage.

“¿Qué Estoy Haciendo Aquí? (What Am I Doing Here?)”: Chicanos/Latinos(as) Navigating Challengesand Inequalities During Their First Year of Graduate School

Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, this study analyzed the challenges and structural inequities that Chicanos/Latinos(as) encountered and resisted during their first year of graduate school. Grounded in intersectionality theory, this study analyzed how race, class, and gender inequalities that are embedded in the graduate schooling process impinged on first-year Chicano/Latino(a) doctoral students. Findings reveal that academic transition challenges; isolation and alienation; clashes with traditional academic culture and the graduate school curriculum; and racist, sexist, and classist microaggressions constituted the most salient hurdles for Chicanos/Latinos(as) as they transitioned into graduate study. Respondents, however, challenged these structural inequalities through their deployment of various resistance strategies. Overall, the study underscores the importance of both analyzing the first-year doctoral education experience of Chicanos/Latinos(as) and utilizing intersectionality theory for analyzing Chicanos/Latinos(as)’ educational experiences.

Rinaldo Castello: Berkeley Roots

When asked to write this article about Rinaldo Castello, I found myself reflecting on my own years at UC Berkeley, particularly when I first arrived in the early 1990s. As someone who grew up in Michigan, then attended the University of Michigan for my undergraduate degree, it was certainly a dream of mine to go to graduate school at a place like UC Berkeley. Initially, I was amazed by the faculty, all of them engineering luminaries. I have vivid memories of my first few days on campus, particularly the first time I walked down the corridor of faculty offices on the 5th floor of Cory Hall, awestruck by the names on each door I passed. Every few feet I would say to myself, ?Yep, I used his textbook?.yes, read his book?.oh, I?ve seen several of his papers.? However, after working a few months in Paul Gray?s research group (where, like Rinaldo, I was fortunate to find a place to hang my hat during my first year of graduate school), I soon realized that the uniqueness of Berkeley?s culture and excellence in IC research really lies as much, if not more, with the graduate students as it does with faculty. The leadership, the transfer of technical knowhow, and the breading of a creative environment was really attributed to the students that surrounded us. With every successive generation of graduate students, there always seems to be one student who stands out and leaves a lasting impression. Although Rinaldo was long gone by the time I came to Berkeley, stories of his leadership and technical excellence still abounded; so much so, that before I met him for the first time, I almost had a larger than life image of this person who embodied the ethos of a collaborative research group and had gone on to do so many great things in the IC design community. I met Rinaldo early on during my graduate studies at Berkeley and not only did he live up to the image, but he also became a great friend, from whom I have received so much technical advice and career guidance through the years, as do many former and current EECS graduate students from UC Berkeley.

Hip Hop Spice Boyz

Hip Hop Spice Boyz Richard T. Rodríguez (bio) During my first year of graduate school—1993 to be exact—I started writing about Latino rap and hip hop. At the time I continued to be inspired by Kid Frost’s anthem, “La Raza,” released three years earlier, for the way it galvanized me and many of my peers into radical thinking and political action.1 And although I was hard-pressed to find inspiration from other artists I learned about from perusing the musical offerings at swap meets and independent music shops like Ghetto Records in my hometown of Santa Ana, California, I continued to collect tapes by any and all Latino rap acts since I was intent on locating additional infectious anthems of collective empowerment. Yet I’ll never forget the moment when a friend who, upon learning about my obsession to collect these tapes, flatly declared that Latino hip hop was “booty.” I attempted to ignore him rather than address his “critique,” but his comment has stuck with me ever since. Did he consider Latino hip hop booty because it aesthetically failed in comparison to black hip hop (if invested in such a marked distinction)? Did it have to do with the fact that Latinos seemed too obsessed with identity affirmation (as journalists at the time claimed), thus signaling their inability to capture a widespread audience? Or was it simply because he thought Latino hip hop was bad and therefore embarrassing?2 I would venture to say that the answer to each of these questions is “yes.” However, I also want to focus on the word booty here because other than its then-common definition as “bad” or “lame,” its sexualized connotation as “ass” functions for me about how we might think of Latino hip hop with respect to queerness. Latino hip hop’s failure—a queer art of failure, as Judith Halberstam might put it—also has much to do with the fact that it has largely gone unacknowledged and unexamined, perhaps because its archive often appears both scant and unremarkable. And given my critical investment in categories such as “failure” and “ephemera,” central categories for many queer theorists, [End Page 140] I want to suggest that we might look for the queerness of hip hop—in general and in Latino contexts in particular—in unlikely places like gay pornography. To be sure, in a number of pornographic texts, one can trace what makes Latino hip hop booty. While the performances of Latino rap artists in gay porn can be quite bad—“failed” queer performances if you will—they also signify queer historical and sexual traces similar to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “ephemera as evidence.” For Muñoz, “the notion of ephemera as evidence … is nothing like a smooth linkage.” To be sure, ephemera “is linked to alternative modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance: it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things. It is important to note that ephemera is a mode of proofing and producing arguments often worked by minoritarian culture and criticism makers.” I want to argue here that Latino hip hop performances represented in gay pornography function as ephemera—or as traces, glimmers, residues, and specks—which signal the Latino embrace of hip hop culture in sexually nonnormative contexts. Although Latino hip hop may itself be a queer cultural phenomenon given its historical propensity for failure in its inability to generate money, cultivate a wide fan base, and deliver sophisticated enough products, Latino hip hop in gay pornography signals the lasting historical value of the performative act that may have never been taken seriously in the first place. Indeed, the connection between Latino hip hop and gay porn is hardly “a smooth linkage.” Yet their linkage fittingly lies in the manifold layers of fantasy and power, enabling pornographic narratives and the multiple ambitions behind engaging hip hop as an expressive form in a homosexually explicit realm. And, if we think of...

An Autobiography of Companions

An Autobiography of Companions Byron Davies Of the contributors to this symposium, I am the newest to Stanley Cavell, both to the transformational power of his work and to the transformational power of his friendship. I thus want to start by saying how humbled I am to be a part of this occasion, which is the largest stage I have yet enjoyed as an aspiring philosopher. I first met Stanley Cavell in March 2009, in my first year of graduate school, when a friend and I invited him to join our first-year class at a performance of Beckett’s Endgame in Cambridge. Knowing something of the Cavell voice from his essay on the play (which I had come upon accidentally in college), but as yet knowing nothing of his devotion to young philosophers, I was giddy for weeks when he not only accepted our invitation, but suggested that we meet for drinks both before and after the play. It was a beautiful evening, and the next day Stanley sent all of us an email announcing that he had woken up with a smile on his face, “as if the performance we attended was rather of something called Openings.” Those openings widened sooner than I expected, when several months later (having spent much of the semester obsessively reading The Claim of Reason in a group organized by my teacher Richard Moran, whose role in my understanding of Stanley’s work will become apparent) I learned that the Walter M. Cabot Professor, Emeritus, was looking for a research assistant. To borrow a phrase from Little Did I Know: I might as well have been asked if I would care to visit Paradise (137). It’s a job I unhesitatingly (though very nervously) took up, and it’s one that I have relished ever since. I cannot express how grateful I am now to this wonderful man and his wonderful family, particularly his wife Cathleen, for their support during this period (this period which has included the editing and publication of Little Did I Know). [End Page 972] But I do want to note (and here I think I speak representatively) how important visits to their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, can be for restoring sanity and humanity. My afternoons with Stanley and Cathleen Cavell have been the best kind of philosophical education, the best kind of personal education, the best kind of therapy, and the best kind of companionship. It should thus not be surprising that today I want to say something about themes of companionship, especially as they appear in Stanley Cavell’s earliest work (and the reception of ordinary language philosophy in that work) and as they appear in Little Did I Know. At the very beginning of his memoir, Cavell notes that he has been here before, not only in earlier autobiographical writing such as A Pitch of Philosophy, but also in his early understanding of the methods of J.L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein as autobiographical, specifically in their insistence that “I speak philosophically for others when they recognize what I say as what they would say, recognize that their language is mine,” and he notes that this has produced in him an understanding of philosophical writing as “the autobiography of a species” (6). So Cavell is returning to one of the animating questions of his earliest work, namely what entitles one to say ‘we’, what entitles one to speak on behalf of others. This is the question that opens the essay “Must We Mean What We Say?”, written in response to a paper by his then-Berkeley colleague Benson Mates disputing the entitlement of ordinary language philosophers (in this case, Austin and Ryle) to make claims about what we say (in this case, what we say is done “voluntarily”) because they have not assembled the right kind of evidence. Cavell’s response was to claim that such native speakers do not need evidence about “what we say”: they are the source of that evidence (Must 4). Connected with this is Cavell’s insistence that the methods of Austin and Wittgenstein (including methods of asking “What should we say if . . .”, or “In what circumstances would we call...

Summertime and the research is easy.

Summertime in a research laboratory is a wonderful experience. The ebb and flow of research activity abides by no schedule, least of all an academic calendar, and yet there is a pervasive undertone of contentedness and ease in the summer that replaces the more frenetic forward tilt of the school year. For a student like me, fresh from his or her first year of graduate school, summer is a relief of coursework-free time practically begging to be overwhelmed with experiments and relevant literature. Anything seems possible. In fact, these may be the months during which Nobel prize-winning work is dreamed up and carried out.

An Unexpected Spotlight

On 22 March 1948, Life magazine ran an article titled “Genius school,” about Hunter College Elementary School, then the only special elementary school in New York City for “gifted” children. Accompanying the article was a photograph of a 7-year-old boy with a chemistry book in hand, standing in front of a blackboard covered in chemistry equations. That little boy was me. I had not thought about my brief moment of childhood fame in decades, when recently I received an e-mail from an elementary school friend, Judith Shulman Weis. From Judith, I learned that my 7-year-old self had earned a second moment of glory: Science magazine had run a version of the Life magazine photograph on the cover of the 23 April 2010 issue on Science, Language, and Literacy. Upon seeing this snapshot of the past, I couldn't help thinking about my years at Hunter and how the school may have affected the path my life has taken. The photograph seems to imply that I learned those chemical equations at school. This was not the case. The staff at Hunter did not teach me advanced chemistry, but they did provide something even more important: an environment that encouraged independent learning and rewarded interest in science. With support from my teachers, I taught myself the chemistry displayed in the photograph by reading the high-school review book shown in my hand. My father had given me the book; he was a high school graduate but had always been interested in chemistry and was one of the smartest people I have ever known. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: JOHN SOLEM/UMASS AMHERST Throughout my childhood, I dreamed of being another Beethoven, but when reality set in, I turned back to my interest in chemistry. I majored in chemistry at the University of Michigan and then earned a master's degree in chemistry from Harvard. However, because of the way chemistry was taught at the time, I became frustrated with the subject. Even after my first year of graduate school, I did not understand what a chemist did. I changed course again and returned to the University of Michigan to get a master's in mathematics and a Ph.D. in psychology. In the years since, my primary research has been measuring eye movements to gain insight into the reading process. I have also been involved in funded research on the understanding and misunderstanding of statistics, and more recently I have studied driving and driving safety, also using eye movements as a primary variable of attention. I am still active in all three areas at age 70. I like to think that the inquisitive little boy that graced the cover of Science last year is still a part of me. [1]: pending:yes

Presentation of the 2010 Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America to Robert C. Newton

It is a distinct honor to introduce the 2010 Roebling Medalist, Robert C. Newton. I first met Bob in 1982, in California, on a blueschist and eclogite field trip for which I had been drafted as an anonymous student driver. It was my first year in graduate school, and I was just becoming aware of his work. But as I read and learned in the following years, I realized that this unfailingly polite and considerate personality had contributed to every subject in which I was interested. So imagine my surprise when, some 15 years later, I received an enthusiastic letter from him expressing interest in what we were up to at UCLA, and in moving west upon his retirement to form a collaboration. I replied with alacrity, to the effect that this was about the best idea I’d ever heard. The rest is history: we’ve now worked together as colleagues and friends for about a dozen years. So I am essentially reporting from the front lines when I say that this year’s Medalist is eminently deserving of MSA’s highest award. That Bob now hangs his hat at UCLA represents something of a homecoming, for it is here that he began making his …

A Professional and Personal Odyssey

As I began to write this article reflecting on my professional career in biomedical research, many memories of people, activities, situations, and experiences were swirling in my head. Because of the extraordinary support that I have received from my family, they are never far from my thoughts. I believe that sharing a few of these memories will be helpful for those who find themselves in similar situations or periods of professional development. This is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the fields to which I have had the privilege of contributing but a personal stroll down a path in which I have found extraordinary pleasure and from which I have derived a sense of accomplishment.

Writing Sociologies: A Coda

Writing Sociologies: A Coda

The Transition to Independent Research: Who Makes It, Who Doesn't, and Why

The main purpose of doctoral training is prepare a student for a lifetime of intellectual inquiry that manifests itself in creative scholarship and (Council of Graduate Schools, 1977, cited in Bargar & Duncan, 1982, p. 1). Successful completion of the dissertation marks the from student to independent scholar (Council of Graduate Schools, 1995, p. 9). However, graduate faculty acknowledge that the from course-taker to independent scholar/researcher is hard for many students and that they cannot predict who will successfully make the and complete the doctorate based only on students' undergraduate records or even their performance in their first year of graduate school (Lovitts, 2001, 2003). Many graduate students also feel unprepared to make this transition. Golde and Dore (2001) found that 35% of third-year graduate students did not believe that their graduate coursework laid a good foundation for doing independent research. (1) The percentages were significantly higher in the sciences (biological sciences, 40%; physical sciences 42%) than in other fields (social sciences 31%; humanities, 29%; other disciplines, 25%) (Golde, February 2002, personal communication). Further, numerous studies estimate that 15-25% of graduate students who advance to candidacy never complete the PhD (Benkin, 1984; Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Moore, 1985; Nerad & Cerny, 1991). This article addresses two important questions about the to independent research: (1) What facilitates or impedes graduate students' ability to make the transition, where impede is defined as leaving the program without completing the dissertation, making slow progress toward the degree, or completing undistinguished dissertation (i.e., acceptable but not high quality)?; and (2) Given doctoral education's emphasis on creative research and scholarship and the production of a dissertation that makes original and significant contribution to knowledge (Lovitts, 2003, 2007; Tinkler & Jackson, 2000; Winter, Griffiths, & Green, 2000), what leads some students to produce distinguished research and scholarship, where distinguished is defined as high quality and original/creative/innovative? I explored these questions from two perspectives: theoretical and practical. The theoretical perspective derives primarily from theory and research on creativity. It is discussed in detail in Lovitts (2005) and is outlined briefly below. The practical perspective derives from focus group discussions with high-PhD-productive faculty on the critical transition and is guided by the theoretical perspective. It constitutes the body of this article. Theoretical Perspective Creativity is acknowledged to be a factor in the successful completion of the PhD (Enright & Gitomer, 1989). It is also inherent in and integral to graduate education because graduate education is about producing the knowledge workers who ensure the ultimate success and survival of all the major institutions of society by preserving, creating, and developing the ideas, information, and technology necessary for them to persist and advance. Indeed, the concept of creativity is frequently invoked in discussions of the goals and end products of graduate education--the production of creative scholars and the completion of a dissertation that makes an original contribution to knowledge. Similarly, off-hand remarks often appear in the literature on creativity about how graduate education and dissertation research and writing exemplify the processes being discussed (e.g., Amabile, 1996; Sternberg, 1997a). Contemporary work on creativity has focused on creativity as a social phenomenon that takes place within a social context and involves a sociocultural judgment of the novelty, appropriateness, quality, and importance of a product (Amabile, 1996; Csikszentmihaly, 1996; Sternberg, 1997a; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). …

The History of EmergencesIan Hacking.The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference.2nd edition. 209 pp. + unpaginated introduction, bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $24.99 (paper).

Caveat lector. There are books that can change your life, and this is one of them. Sometime in the spring of 1975, during my first year of graduate school, I came across the first edition of Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability on the new books table at the library. It had an intriguing title (not “revolution,” all the vogue in the mid-1970s, but “emergence”), a still more intriguing subtitle (a “philosophical study” but about “early ideas” rather than dernier cri problems in induction and inference such as Nelson Goodman’s “grue,” the hot topic in my philosophy of science seminar), and it was short, a slim 185 pages of text. I had never managed to read Descartes’s Meditations in a single sitting, as recommended by the author and my philosophy teachers, but I did devour Emergence in one long evening. By the time I had finished, I knew I would be writing my dissertation on the history of probability and statistics. It has taken me much longer, some decades, to digest what kind of history was being pursued under the quiet, precise declaration in the subtitle. I relate this story about the impact of Hacking’s book on myself only because I suspect my name is legion. Certainly the now flourishing studies of the history of probability and statistics and their ramifying applications owed their emergence largely to Emergence. Even the work of those historians who had preceded him in the field—such as O. B. Sheynin, Ivo Schneider, and L. E. Maistrov—won a larger audience thanks to the impetus Hacking gave to this previously tiny subspecialty of the history of mathematics. It is most unlikely that the international group of scholars, including Hacking himself, who in 1982– 1983 convened at the Zentrum fur Interdisziplinare Forschung in Bielefeld, Germany, under the remarkable leadership of Lorenz Kruger in order to investigate “The Probabilistic Revolution” could have been assembled before the publication of Emergence.1 The most sincere compliment to Hacking’s deep and enduring influence on the field is that even his detractors have continued to pose the same question he did, although they take exception to his answers. The circumstances Hacking took to have triggered the emergence of prob-

Profile of George M. Church, Ph.D.

Profile of George M. Church, Ph.D.

Raising the Question #4 Why Bother Attending Conferences?

Thirty-nine years ago during my first year in graduate school, I attended my first speech convention. I was quite the neophyte regarding the benefits and responsibilities of conventions. Thankfully...

Recollections of an accidental contrarian.

First, I sincerely thank BBCS for this honour. It seems especially appropriate to receive this award in Montreal, where I started my studies many years ago at McGiIl University. As so often in life, I got to McGiIl somewhat by chance. I was finishing off my high school senior year with the Saskatchewan government correspondence school while teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in northern Manitoba. I noticed an ad in the Manitoba Teacher's magazine urging teachers to encourage qualified students to apply for an entrance scholarship to McGiIl. I applied, and to my delight was successful. So I ended up in 1953 living in Royal Victoria College at the corner of University and Sherbrooke, at that time the McGiIl women's residence. For a girl from a farming village in Saskatchewan this was quite a change. My teacherage in Manitoba had no telephone, no electricity, no running water, no central heating (in fact not much heating at all), and no indoor toilets (Figure 1). In two months I went from that to a stately and comfortable mansion in the heart of a big city. after-dinner coffee was served to us in gracious lounges by freshmen residents. It was quite another world (Figure 2). In my first year at McGiIl, I took Introductory Psychology taught by Dr. Hebb. Although he insisted that we not take notes, and in fact encouraged us to bring our knitting, his lectures were such a fascinating series of informed speculations about how the brain might work in mediating behaviour that it influenced all my subsequent research. There was an oral examination at the end of the Honours Psychology program. question to me was, what contribution had Tinkelpaugh made to psychology? I had never heard of Tinkelpaugh. For any of you in the same boat, Tinkelpaugh did a study on monkeys in the 1920s that Hebb was particularly fond of and you can read about it in both the Organization of Behavior (1949) and in introductory textbook (1958). I felt my ignorance had not made a great impression on Hebb, and when in my last year I went to talk to him about going into graduate school, somewhat at the last minute, he said Why would a nice girl like you want to go into graduate school? This seemed a strange question to me - and probably elicited a gasp from some in today's audience. But I believe, aside from an element of real concern, that it had another purpose, which was to determine how serious I was. He pointed out that I had been a teacher and that this was a satisfying occupation, whereas research could be very frustrating. But I persisted, and managed to convince him that within the limits of my experience, I had enjoyed research more than anything else I had done. He ultimately became extremely helpful, and was instrumental in getting me accepted at Berkeley. I was offered a research assistantship at Berkeley, which at that time meant that the first two years would be spent doing prescribed research entirely for someone else (admittedly a world-renowned researcher) while I studied for comprehensive exams. This really did not appeal to me, and I went back to Hebb with the letter. He had always argued that graduate students should get started on research of their own very early; he agreed that the Berkeley offer was unpalatable, and I was then and there admitted to graduate studies at McGUl. In the first year of graduate school, all students at that time took part in what was called only Hebb's seminar. In our first assignment, we did a group presentation and in my group I was designated the organizer. topic was The circumnavigation of cognition, the paper by that name spoofing the overarching learning theory of the time, which explained much of what is called cognition as a series of unidirectional S-R connections. Apparently I had redeemed myself from the Tinkelpaugh episode. Graduate School approach to graduate student education emphasized doing research right from the start. …

Being a good course‐taker is not enough: a theoretical perspective on the transition to independent research

Students are typically admitted into doctoral programmes because they have been good course‐takers. Yet, the PhD is awarded for doing independent research and making an ‘original contribution’ to knowledge. Graduate faculty acknowledge that the transition to independent research is hard for many students, and that they cannot predict who will successfully make the transition and complete the doctorate based only on students’ undergraduate records or even their performance in their first year of graduate school. Similarly, many graduate students feel unprepared to make the transition. Drawing on recent work on creativity, this paper provides a theoretical perspective on the factors that facilitate and impede doctoral students’ transition to independent research.

Scientist: four golden lessons.

When I received my undergraduate degree — about a hundred years ago — the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't have to.

Why Are You Learning a Second Language? Motivational Orientations and Self‐Determination Theory

The data for this study were collected in my first year of graduate school for a term paper for a course I was taking from Luc Pelletier. When I began graduate school, Luc also started at the University of Ottawa as a new faculty member, and he taught a course in motivation. I had worked with Richard Clément for a couple of years already as an honors student and as a research assistant and had conducted research on orientations and motivation under his supervision as part of my honors thesis project. Luc was very interested in self‐determination theory (SDT) and had worked with Bob Vallerand on an instrument to assess academic motivation from this perspective. Luc and I decided to carry out a study on language learning orientations using SDT and enlisted Richard's and Bob's involvement in the project. As a bilingual institution where all students were required to demonstrate competence in their second language (L2), whether French or English, the University of Ottawa was an ideal setting for this type of research.The project was a first examination of SDT in the language learning context, and to the best of my knowledge it was the only, or at least one of the very few, empirical investigations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the area. It involved the development of a valid and reliable instrument to assess the different subtypes of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It also explored the link between these motivational subtypes and various orientations to language learning that had been identified by Clément and Kruidenier (1983), including the travel, friendship, knowledge, and instrumental orientations. The results showed that the instrumental orientation and the SDT external regulation orientation were strongly correlated, and that the travel, friendship, and knowledge orientations were quite highly intercorrelated with identified regulation and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, the instrumental and external regulation orientation scales correlated in similar ways with the hypothesized antecedents of perceived autonomy and competence and the hypothesized consequences of intention to pursue L2 study and anxiety. In addition, the travel, friendship, and knowledge orientations were correlated with the hypothesized antecedents and consequences in a manner similar to intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. These results suggested that Clément and Kruidenier's 4 orientations may be tapping a similar construct as the SDT orientations. My only regret with this study is that I did not include a scale to measure the integrative orientation (Gardner, 1985) to determine its relation with the SDT subtypes. This issue would have to wait until a later study to be addressed.The results of this initial investigation encouraged me to pursue research integrating SDT with other theoretical frameworks of language learning motivation. I believe that the SDT framework has several advantages over some other formulations of learner orientations. SDT offers a parsimonious, internally consistent framework for systematically describing many different orientations in a comprehensive manner. It also offers considerable explanatory power for understanding why certain orientations are better predictors of relevant language learning variables (e.g., effort, persistence, attitudes) than others. Also, by invoking the psychological mechanisms of perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness, it can account for why certain orientations are evident in some learners and not in others. Moreover, the framework is empirically testable and indeed has stood up well under empirical scrutiny in our studies. Its clear predictions may also be particularly valuable in applying the theory in language teaching and program development. [The present article first appeared in Language Learning, 50 (1), 2000, 57–85]

Creating, Testing, and Applying Social Psychological Theories

I am highly honored to receive the 2002 Cooley-Mead Award, and I want to thank my collaborators, both colleagues and students, who made this possible. I don't have enough time to acknowledge all the people from whom I learned so much and who stimulated the social psychological work that I have done. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the people most significant to my work and my development. I owe my colleagues at Stanford-Joe Berger, Sandy Dornbusch, Henry Walker, Buzz Zelditch, and especially Liz Cohen-an immeasurable debt not only for the research in which we were involved but for the hundreds of hours spent discussing issues of theory construction, methodology, and social psychology in general. Creating, testing, and applying social psychology theory takes team efforts, and I was part of a very exciting team. There is a small irony involved in receiving the Cooley-Mead Award since the one question on my PhD written exams that I answered inadequately was the question about Cooley and Mead. That, too, was predictive in a sense because it started me on the path of questioning the prevailing conceptions of theory in sociology. When I came into the field, there was not much of what I would call theory. Today there are many examples. I disagree with my friend Henry Walker (Walker 2000) about the state of theory development, but I understand the basis of our difference. I am looking at theory development relative to where we were when I started in social psychology; he is critiquing theory development relative to where we want to be. I agree with him that we have a long way to go, but the four branches of the expectation states program (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1966; Berger and Conner 1974; Berger et al. 1972; Webster and Sobieszick 1974)-power-dependency theory (Emerson 1972a, 1972b), network exchange theory (Markovsky, Willer, and Patton 1988; Willer and Anderson 1981; Yamagishi, Gilmore, and Cook 1988), identity theory (Stryker and Burke 2000), and affect-control theory (Heise 1999) to cite a few examplestestify to the growth over the last 45 years. I would like to believe immodestly that I, along with my Stanford colleagues, contributed to this growth. I was interested in the theory enterprise even before my first year in graduate school. In fact, I took an MA in psychology from the University of Minnesota because I was attracted by Leon Festinger's (1950) theory of informal social communication. At Minnesota I discovered that I did not look at things the way most psychologists do, so I returned to Harvard for my PhD in sociology, but I was very much a product of the Social Relations Department. Jerome Bruner told me after I had switched to sociology that the boundary areas between fields like psychology and sociology generated the most creative work. I took this seriously, and much of my research was close to this boundary. What no one told me was that working in these boundary areas creates problems of legitimacy. Because I constructed a probability model for the Asch (1951) conformity experiment (B. Cohen 1958,1963; Cohen and Lee 1975), sociologists tended to treat me as a psychologist even though my model was based on the very unpsychological assumption that there were no individual differences among the experimental subjects. I had a hard time convincing people that it is not the phenomenon one studies but the theoretical approach one takes that determines whether one is a sociological social psychologist. The theory enterprise has grown and matured over the last 50 years. Almost everyone now speaks favorably about theory. I am reminded of George Homans' complaint 5 * Direct correspondence to author at cohenb@stanford.edu

The State of the State among Historians

During my first year of graduate school (1982–83), Louis Galambos congratulated me for having the courage to go into a dying field. Naïveté, not courage, had propelled me to leave my position as deputy director of income maintenance programs for the New York City Department of Social Services and study political history at The Johns Hopkins University. Although contact with the job market four years later would confirm my adviser’s warnings, at the time he issued this “heads up” I did wonder what Dr. Galambos had been smoking. After all, it seemed to me that politics, and particularly its bureaucratic incarnation, touched the lives of Americans more of ten and more forcefully than ever before. How could interest in this topic be declining? What’s more, by my third year in graduate school, I had mastered a rich body of literature that confirmed the centrality of politics.The Progressive synthesis, dating back to James Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, was under fire but still compelled elegant work that had begun to focus less on Progressive presidents and more on the fate of liberalism as it engaged racism, sought to reconcile local preferences with national agendas, and grappled with Americans’ increasing distrust of the centrally directed programs that the New Deal and the Great Society spawned (Brinkley 1982, 1995; Chafe 1980; Gerstle 1989, 2001; McGirr 2001; Sugrue 1996).