Becker`s method reduces whatever phenomena he is studying to a mathematical formula, giving each component of the formula a mathematical value. That means he is assigning numerical values to human behavior and human beings themselves, as he has done in his studies of family life, making children analogous to durable goods, such as automobiles or refrigerators. He has been widely criticized for that, even by colleagues at Chicago. That is one of the reasons, he says, he likes working at Chicago so much.
”There is more willingness to listen to other points of view here than at any other institution I know of,” Becker says. ”You want people shaking up your ideas. If people are going to disagree with you where you work, you want them to be people whom you respect, whose scholarship you respect.”
There is a strong feeling within the Chicago faculty generally that its ever-widening cross-disciplinary approach allows individual scholars to invent new kinds of questions about society that would not be possible elsewhere.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, whether it was true or not, the University of Chicago and its faculty was thought to be a hotbed of radical leftists. The university then–as it continues to this day–refused to abide by anti-communist loyalty oaths or to undertake secret, unpublished research to obtain federal research funds.
Since the 1970s, the university is perceived more as a hotbed of ultra-conservatism. Neither is an accurate picture of the school or its faculty because the institution has always had scholars representing every stripe of political opinion. What is true today, however, is that many of its social scientists are among the most prominent advocates of the neo-conservative movement in this country.
The general thrust of this movement holds that America`s social policy since World War II, largely the product of liberal and leftist thinking, has been a failure. The feeling among neo-conservatives is that strong, post-war government intervention, intended to eliminate poverty and racial
discrimination, has backfired. Rather than helping to eliminate those social evils, neo-conservative reasoning goes, liberal government policies have actually served to harden the nation`s cycle of poverty and racism.
Earlier this year the chairman of Chicago`s sociology department, William Wilson, delivered a paper scoring the failure of the nation`s welfare system as a means of coming to grips with inner-city poverty. Wilson, who is black, charged that liberal sociologists have been so fearful of being labeled racist that they have failed to do realistic research on urban poverty for 20 years. Instead of helping, welfare and public housing programs for the urban poor in the last two decades have contributed to the development of a permanent urban underclass, Wilson charged in his paper. Out of fear of stigmatizing inner-city blacks by studying patterns of their lifestyles–the breakdown of family life, teenage pregnancies, chronic joblessness, welfare dependency and soaring crime rates–social scientists in recent years have looked the other way, Wilson says.
Without looking realistically at the problems of the inner-city poor, social scientists have been unable to come up with any realistic approaches to deal with the problems, Wilson charges. In fact, the drift in Washington has been to turn away from welfare support systems thought to contribute to the breakdown of family life.
”The government in Washington is aware of the problems,” Wilson says,
”but the danger is that too many people there are willing to simply cut back on welfare programs we already have rather than replace them.”
That view has wide currency at Chicago. Much of the thinking going on in Chicago`s social sciences seems to be strongly influenced by the call of its unorthodox economics department, which demands less government intervention in all areas of American life. The approach of the so-called ”Chicago School”
of economics, perhaps through the university`s tradition of interdisciplinary discourse, seems to have made inroads into all the school`s social sciences. Given the wide influence that Chicago`s social scientists have, what they are thinking today could well influence the laws that will govern all Americans 10 years from now.
Take, for instance, a single public issue–the question of court-ordered school busing to force racial integration of public school systems.
Sociologist James Coleman was commissioned in 1964 by the U.S. Office of Education to head a study on the probable consequences of truly integrated school systems. At the time a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Coleman concluded that children from disadvantaged families performed better scholastically when attending schools with students from more affluent backgrounds.
The report was an answer to the prayers of judges around the country trying to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education to desegregate the nation`s public schools. Though the report did not propose busing as a means of desegregation, judges soon began using the report as the rationale to impose compulsory busing programs in school systems around the country. It was the first time in this country that social policy research was used to reach directly into the lives of millions of Americans. Coleman for a time was lionized as an enlightened educationalist by liberal politicians and the civil rights movement.
The busing programs instituted around the country set off blistering legal battles between parents and school boards, suits and countersuits in courtrooms across the nation. They also set off ugly racial confrontations and rioting among both blacks and whites around the country.
From the outset, it became clear that most white parents were not willing to let their children travel to and attend a predominantly black school with a history of substandard academic achievement. It also became clear that black parents, while not opposed to busing their children to a school with higher academic standards, were reluctant to send their children out of their own neighborhoods into racially hostile ones.
In 1975, three years after accepting a professorship at Chicago, Coleman released another study. The 1966 report, he said, was wrong. Compulsory busing had no visible success in lessening the gap between affluent white children and poor black children, he said. Rather, it added an additional impediment to desegregation because whites were fleeing in greater numbers to the suburbs from cities widely enforcing court-ordered busing. Instead of helping, the busing programs were, he charged, eroding the quality of American cities.
After releasing his 1975 study, Coleman was vilified by the same people who lionized him for his 1966 report. He was accused of turning his back on the civil rights movement, some going so far as to label him ”racist.”
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Moreover, Coleman`s reversal on busing fired a debate on why the government relies so much on the experimental ideas of ”bubble-headed” social scientists in making controversial policy decisions.
For his part Coleman views his 1966 report as an important object lesson for all social scientists in how social science research should be undertaken. ”If one special interest group funds research on a specific policy problem,” Coleman says, ”the researchers contracted to do it will do it, obviously, from the perspective of that special interest group. In 1964 we were contracted by the federal government under the power of the Civil Rights Act to study the effects of school integration. From that perspective, I can see now, we did not include in our study the questions of how compulsory integration would affect the stability of public school systems. That was the flaw in the study.”
The 1966 report, he says, ignored the deep concerns of several other special interest groups which had an important stake in how the government would enforce desegregation. Those included the concerns of the city school administrations, the parents of school children and the civil rights groups interested in protecting the rights of black children.
”What`s important is that each of those interests should have been informed about the consequences of a wide-ranging new policy such as busing, and they were not,” Coleman says. ”I think what`s necessary for social scientists is not to blind ourselves to the facts. It`s important to recognize that a particular researcher is not value-free. The proper role of research is to examine all the possible ramifications of a given policy proposal.
”There ought to come to be a different orientation for funding by the federal government for social policy research. What`s increasingly important is that the government go beyond parochial interests of any given
administration or interest group and do research on behalf of all interest groups.
”Once that`s done, it will not be possible to use social research as ammunition for one group`s side in an argument but to raise the level of discourse in the general discussion on social policy.”
The lesson Coleman has taken for himself out of the experience with his 1966 desegregation report is one that has wide currency within the Chicago faculty.
”My own feeling,” says economist Gary Becker, ”is that public policy usually gets made as the result of pressure by certain special interest groups. There have been a lot of mistakes made in public policy intended to help the poor that end up hurting them even more. You find here at Chicago a stronger sense of skepticism of government intervention on the part of interest groups. Maybe that`s because people here talk to each other so much, and all that talk is so reinforcing.”
Indeed, Becker and Coleman several years ago began to hold their own faculty seminars to discuss social science and public policy. They are taken very seriously, widely attended by professors and graduate students from political science, economics, psychology, sociology and the law school, meeting every other night of the week when in session.
It might not be possible to trace it definitively to the constant interdisciplinary talking, but there is a certain continuity to the problems and solutions that a large number of Chicago social scientists keep discussing.
Some years ago, before he retired from the faculty, controversial economist Milton Friedman came up with his own idea for solving the vast inequalities in American elementary and secondary education. An
ultraconservative true believer in the free market economy, he suggested a school voucher system. According to Friedman`s suggestion, every year each elementary and secondary school student would be issued a voucher to pay for one year`s schooling.
Under a voucher system, if a student`s neighborhood school is substandard, he would be free to attend classes at any other school simply by presenting his voucher. Friedman theorized that it would force school systems to raise the quality of their education to remain competitive and attract enough students to stay open.
The voucher system is an idea that sociologist James Coleman and several other Chicago social scientists have been turning to over the last several years as well. Coleman thinks any desegregation policy the government might implement will probably fail unless it includes allowing inner-city children to attend suburban schools and private and parochial institutions. By making desegregation a metropolitan-wide voucher program, the destabilizing, resegregating effects of ”white flight” from the cities to the suburbs should be eliminated, he says.
Coleman thinks a voucher system can be devised that would be attractive and effective for all economic and racial interests involved. No one school, he says, would be forced to accept so many voucher students that it would upset the school`s racial balance. But any predominantly white school would receive bonus money for each minority student accepted, allowing the school to spend more to enrich its program. Furthermore, city school systems, he says, could attract suburban students into the city by erecting specialized academies that would cater to students gifted in certain fields such as the sciences and performing arts.
Such a system, Coleman believes, would have the effect of continuing the American ideal of the ”common school” in which a single school draws together a diverse body of students from differing economic and ethnic backgrounds. It would also bring back in some measure, he says, the idea of a neighborhood school in which parents are given power to determine the direction of their child`s education.