No comments about INTL WHO'S WHO IN EDUC 1987.

2 comments about From the Principal.

1. A book to keep on your night stand. If you teach, attend, or send children to high school, you'll appreciate Baker's insights. A must read.



2. Having him for a principal wasn't all that bad. I can't think of anything that he could've improved on. He's wise, and his wisdom shines through this book. Ask him to tell you about how he picked his College.

No comments about Nathaniel T. Allen: Teacher, Reformer, Philanthropist.

No comments about Teachers (Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 10).

No comments about Brian Jackson.

1 comments about Work and Academic Politics: A Journeyman's Story.

1. This is a vanity book.
   
   Some autobiographers devise fantasies that unwittingly divulge facts. In this autobiographical Work and Academic Politics, William H. Form devises the fantasy that academic sociology is a mediaeval guild. A guild is a kind of trade association in old Europe that enforced a trade monopoly and opposed nontraditional technologies. The unintentionally divulged fact is that sociology is merely an academic trade association operating like a guild instead of a science.
   
   Form is not the only sociologist to use the metaphor of the guild, although he is the only one to my knowledge to employ it approvingly. In the "Introduction" to their book, Sociology on Trial, Maurice Stein and Arthur Vidich say that sociologists form professional associations organized to perform the classical functions of a guild - regulation of admission, monopolization of employment opportunity, control and expansion of marketing, and the development of occult terminologies - with the result that the task of sociology gets lost. Form's book amounts to a confession of guilt in sociology's trial.
   
   As a nonsociologist let me submit the following brief as an amicus curiae in this trial: I speak as a witness from personal experience. In 1981 I had submitted a paper to the American Sociological Review, the official journal of the American Sociological Association, while Form was editor. The paper set forth a dynamic model estimated statistically over fifty years of sociologically relevant historical data collected by U.S. government, and developed mechanically with an artificial-intelligence discovery system. In simulations the model exhibited damped oscillations converging in a stable equilibrium growth path, which is due to intergenerational negative-feedback cultural lags among the interacting social institutions. It shows empirically that the five basic institutions of our macrosociety interact to promote macrosocial consensus stability, if per capita real gross domestic product grows at four percent or more annually, and if internal migration is unrestricted so the labor force can exploit economic opportunities.
   
   Form rejected the paper with two referee criticisms. The first showed abysmal ignorance of academic philosophy of science. The second stated that the paper did not reflect sociology's traditions and called it an "empiricist venture". I submitted replies, to which Form responded citing his "folkways". In his Work and Academic Politics Form summarizes his own alternative "organizational approach" to institutional analysis, which exhibits no empirical modeling.
   
   I believe that Form's indulging in his Mediaeval guild fantasy while editor of the American Sociological Review has had a debilitating effect on American academic sociology's information pool comparable to that of incest on the gene pool of a small isolated aboriginal tribe. It has produced a sterile monoculture. Sociological thought is inbred and conformist. Academic sociologists need remedial education in mathematics, statistics, computer systems, and most importantly philosophy of science. I believe that this book is too self-serving to be interesting even to historians of sociology. In fact I believe that it is worthless. The sociologist reader would benefit more from an undergraduate course in philosophy of science.
   
   Readers interested in my further comments are invited to read my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci, and to read my other reviews on the Amazon web site.
   
   Thomas J. Hickey

No comments about John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America: The Years of Growth, 1859-1905 (John Franklin Jameson & the Development of Humanistic Schola).

No comments about Keep the kids away from the power tools.

No comments about Bernard Ashmole, 1894-1988: An Autobiography.

No comments about Betrayal: An American Paradox.