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I entered Columbia College in the fall of 1960 and have been at this extraordinary university ever since. From our "freshman" orientation lecture by Lionel Trilling on C. P. Snow's essay on the two cultures through today, Columbia has been the principal source of my education. I was "an organized dilettante."
As a student, I chose my courses on the basis of the minds I wanted to engage rather than on the content of a course description. I was not disappointed. I studied with great teachers including Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley, Meyer Schapiro, Richard Hofstadter, and James Shenton. These teachers, along with several others, shaped my intellectual development, and I could not imagine a higher quality undergraduate educational experience. They challenged my biases and presuppositions. They forced me to think critically and with skepticism toward assertions of fact. They created in me a desire to ask questions for which there were not answers at the back of the book. They showed me the excitement that they experienced in making new discoveries.
My most significant teacher is one of the world's great sociologists, Robert K. Merton, who was developing sociological theories that could be tested with empirical social research. My doctoral work emerged out of an on-going seminar, workshop that focused on developing the nascent specialty of the sociology of science. In that early seminar, I developed with my collaborator (and brother) Stephen Cole, the first uses of citations as indicators of scientific and scholarly impact and quality.
Much of my subsequent published work has examined the social organization of science, the normative structure of science, the treatment of women in science, issues of fairness and justice in the reward system of science, the peer review system for allocating scientific resources, and the relationship between uses and abuses of scientific evidence. I have also focused on the growth of scientific knowledge and other knowledge systems, such as law. I have reproduced a number of my published papers below for those who might be interested in reading them.
As Provost of the University since 1989, I have focused a great deal of effort on eleven strategic academic objectives. These goals emerged from a planning effort, which I chaired, that brought together over 100 faculty, students, alumni, deans, and administrators. These elements were consistent with George Rupp's own agenda for the University when he arrived to assume the presidency in 1993 and became policy objectives. The objectives included: moving undergraduate education to the center of the University while simultaneously improving still further our historic strength in graduate and professional education; creating a renaissance on the health sciences campus; enhancing the quality of our departments and schools so that minimally 75 percent could be counted among the most distinguished in the world; increasing the linkages between the University and the great cultural and other institutions in the City of New York (in short, to view New York as our unique advantage and through linkages with these institutions capture more of the "shadow endowment" that the City represents for us); building still further on our international reputation through greater ties with other nations and through the globalization of our curriculum; improving our libraries and information systems so that they continue to be among the world's best; increasing Columbia's research capabilities and results as measured by the products of the research discoveries of our faculties; reforming a poorly articulated budget system; improving the quality of our physical plant and the enhancing the ease with which faculty and students work at the University. Finally, we wanted to become a university that saw the value of the knowledge that it produced. We wanted to transfer scientific and scholarly knowledge into useful medical treatments and into new technologies and to use the returns on the value of our intellectual property to invest in new faculty ideas and initiatives.
We have moved a great distance towards achieving these goals. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested and the current quality of our students and faculties represents the extraordinary returns on these investments. A great deal of the credit for these achievements goes to a remarkably capable group of deans and academic vice presidents, their staffs and the faculty of these schools, who have had enormous success in elevating the distinction of their departments and schools. These groups have worked closely with the president and myself, as well as with others in the central administration, to shape the trajectories of the schools and departments, but much of the success of the past decade must be attributed to their leadership.
Today, Columbia can claim a place among a handful of the greatest private research universities in the world. But we have a long way to go before we meet our objectives. Great challenges remain for us as we compete with universities with larger endowments and far more space into which to grow. We are at the beginning of a revolution in the production and consumption of knowledge that will yield incredible new discoveries and will change relationships between faculty and students that have existed for decades. We must reinforce and preserve the best from our past while continuing to develop new fields of knowledge and new ways of transmitting knowledge to our students and a broader public.
Selected bibliography:
"Marriage, Motherhood, and Research Performance in Science," (with Harriet Zuckerman), Scientific American, 255, 2, February 1987, pp. 119-125. Also in The Sociology of the Sciences, Vol. I, Brookfield: Elgar Publ., pp. 254-267.
"Dietary Cholesterol and Heart Disease: The Construction of a Medical Fact," in Hubert J. O'Gorman, ed., Surveying Social Life: Papers in Honor of Herbert H. Hyman, pp. 437-465. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
"A Theory of Limited Differences," (with Burton Singer) in The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community, (Co-edited with Harriet Zuckerman and John Bruer). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. Paperback edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
"Balancing Acts: Dilemmas of Choice Facing Research Universities", Daedalus 122, No. 4, Fall 1993, pp. 1-36.
'The Two Cultures Revisited," The Bridge, National Academy of Engineering, Vol. 26, No. 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996, pp. 16-21.