Reassessing research: Liberal arts colleges and the social sciences

Daedalus

Volumn 128, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 265-272

  Bourque, Susan C ^a  

^a SMITH COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 4143104006     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Pathbreaking work on the role of liberal arts colleges has been done by M. Elizabeth Tidball and Vera Kiskiakowsky, "Baccalaureate Origins of American Scientists and Scholars," Science 193 (20) (August 1976): 646-652
2. and "Women's Colleges and Women Achievers Revisited," SIGNS 5 (Spring 1980): 504-517,
3. and Robert A. McCaughey, Teachers and Scholars: The Faculties of Select Liberal Arts Colleges and Their Place in American Higher Learning (New York: Conceptual Litho Reproductions, 1994).
4. Social sciences in this classification scheme include economics, political science, international relations, anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences - not history.
5. The 1998 HEDS data reports on "the total number of Ph.D.'s received by the baccalaureate graduates of institutions from 1986-1995 and the ratio of Ph.D.'s earned from 1986-1995 by these graduates to bachelor's degrees conferred by the listed institutions from 1980 to 1989." McCaughey found a similar pattern using the HEDS data from Ph.D.'s earned from 1980 to 1989. McCaughey, Teachers and Scholars, 94.
6. McCaughey identified and studied the faculties of two to three dozen liberal arts colleges that included Amherst, Barnard, Beloit, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Colgate, Haverford, Hobart, Grinnell, Knox, Lawrence, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Pomona, Reed, Smith, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams. He labeled these the Select Liberal Arts Colleges and noted that they had undergone transformations since the 1970s that made them the intellectual homes of a new category of scholar-teacher: faculty members committed to both research and undergraduate teaching.
7. My thanks to Catherine Rudder, executive director of the American Political Science Association, for this observation and for other insightful comments on the contributions of liberal arts colleges to political science.
8. McCaughey, Teachers and Scholars, 65-88, 105-116.
9. McCaughey, Teachers and Scholars, Ibid., 51.