On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:34:42 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Mike, > >You make a number of good historiographic points, but clearly this >website is intended as the kind of celebratory history one often finds >in forums of this sort.
*smacks forehead* I forgot, this is for the tourists and not for the people who really want to know the history of the department. My bad. >It was never intended to be a comprehensive >scholarly history of the department, so I think you are criticizing it >for not being what it was never intended to be is. Perhaps. But maybe they should put "ADVERTISEMENT" in tiny type at the top. >(And the fact that it mentions at least some of the problems the department >has had over the years, makes it better than most of its kind.) I will give you that. Though the "Czar" business makes one wonder what kinds of power-hunger megalomaniacs were running rampant in the department. Moreover, who were the "Cossaks"? >As for the "weasel words," they are well-placed. No one but a historian >wants to read the long version. Skilled use of such words is to make them as unobtrusive as possible so that the casual viewer will not notice it but a critical viewer will reason that something, perhaps a con, is going on. I thought we were supposed to teaching/promoting critical thinking and analysis? Sorry, my bad. >As usual, the search for historical >"firsts" comes down to arbitrary definitions and relatively empty >terminology. Oh, is this like deans condemning the use of things like the U.S. News and World Reports college rankings and then advertising that the school was listed in the top 50 or so? >Indeed, there were earlier mental philosophers who had the >word "psychology" in their titles, but this kind of search often >implicitly aims at finding the first professor of "experimental" or >"scientific" psychology (even though those terms rarely appear in >official titles). It turns out that Joseph Jastrow's Wisconsin position >and G. S. Hall's at JHU have claims on being the "first" as well, so in >order to avoid going through all of that irrelevant (to the history of >the Penn dept.) material, Jonathan simply said "arguably." Perhaps you are being more gracious than I. I see the point as being one of emphasizing the department's achievement of a "first" in stead of saying "our department was among the first to have a professor of psychology in the U.S." >Here's NYU's history blurb: http://www.nyu.edu/about/history.html Does >it strike you as being much better? The NYU psych dept doesn't seem to >have an on-line history of its own, even though the lab there was >founded by a fairly eminent psychologist: Charles H Judd, in 1900. Fortunately, I have nothing at all to do with how the NYU psych department presents itself to the world even though back in the 1990s I assisted a colleague in organizing a database of all of the doctoral dissertations done in psychology to date (interestingly, there was one or two prior to 1900). It was interesting to see who had been part of the faculty, even for a short period of time (e.g., Zimbardo, Gazzaniga), how many faculty supervised dissertations, and which students went on to make significant contributions and/or became a prominent name (you know, the "Dr. Phil" types). There is an interesting history here but few seem interested in either investigating it or presenting it which explains why the psychology department doesn't have a history page though it probably could use one. -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
