The job of social sciences collegiate master is “a very complex administrative position,” says Elisabeth Clemens, AM’85, PhD’90, professor of sociology, “because it is located between two quite different pieces of the University”—the College and the Social Sciences Division. It’s not just complex; it’s unique in American higher education. In UChicago’s unusual administrative structure, there are four graduate divisions (social sciences, humanities, physical sciences, and biological sciences) and a separate undergraduate College. The collegiate masters, who are associate deans of both their particular division and the College, are the liaisons between the two. The job responsibilities range from the evaluation of scholarship to the most everyday administrative problems. On a practical level, the SSD collegiate master oversees the social sciences and civilization sequences, which are required core courses for all undergraduates. The master makes sure there are enough sections, that the courses are staffed, and that each course has a faculty member to chair it. In addition, the master oversees the courses taken by upperclassmen who have declared concentrations in the social sciences. He or she also approves any significant changes to the structure of a major, as well as the creation of any new majors. On the divisional side, the master participates in the review of all cases for faculty appointment and promotion. Finally, along with the other collegiate masters, the social sciences collegiate master helps set general policy for the College: “They are my most senior advisers,” says John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. Clemens finished her three-year term as master last summer. On July 1, Adam Green, AB’85, associate professor of history, and a 2011 recipient of the Quantrell Award for Undergraduate Teaching, took over. In a continuation of Dialogo’s Shoptalk series, Clemens and Green spoke with Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93.  

How did the idea of collegiate masters originate?

Clemens: The relation of undergraduate and graduate education has been under continuous debate as long as the University has existed. The structure of the University now is that there are graduate divisions of the social sciences, the humanities, and so on, and then there is the College. From 1930 to 1965, there was a separate collegiate faculty. In 1965, a decision was made to move away from that. The change created a need for the collegiate master position to align the graduate divisions, which oversee the departments and undergraduate majors, with the core curriculum, which remains grounded in the College. Green: The challenge is, how do you make a world-class research university also a world-class teaching college? The masters coordinate the resources, together with faculty throughout the Social Sciences Division, to help realize that outcome.

How does UChicago’s educational philosophy differ from that of other institutions?

Clemens: The standard university organization is an “arts and sciences” structure. Each department is responsible for both its graduate and undergraduate students. General education is understood as diversity—a smorgasbord. It’s good for everyone to read Shakespeare; it’s good for everyone to know a little about science. At other universities, a student might take intro to psychology or intro to sociology, and get an overview of contemporary research. They’re positioned as students at the feet of the professors—sometimes with hundreds of other students. At Chicago, we start by positioning them with the text. Engage with Plato, with John Locke, with Thomas Hobbes.

How does that approach affect undergraduate education?

Clemens: It makes upper-division teaching in the departments much livelier, rather than if students had been given an overview of the discipline, but were left to develop those critical skills somehow during their training. Green: Students go to these upper-division classes and they already have an intellectual stake in their work and the discussions. That’s tremendously exciting and democratizing.

Does this structure have any effect on graduate education at the University?

Clemens: Yes. Another unusual aspect of Chicago is that by the time undergraduates are in their fourth year, quite a few of them will take a graduate course. First-year graduate students come into class and realize these undergraduates have a skill they don’t have. The grad students are in the habit of reading an article for the overall theoretical argument and main finding, while these undergraduates burrow down into the assumptions and structure of the argument. That’s actually beneficial, because then you can see the graduate students starting to read in a different way.

During your tenure as collegiate master, what was the most challenging aspect of the position?

Clemens: I took over on July 1, 2008, and that fall Lehman Brothers crashed. It became clear that there would be very little space to do anything new, at least for a time. I had hoped to inject more resources into the third and fourth years—the College beyond the core. There’s a real opportunity to link faculty research with undergraduate opportunities and graduate education. As a university, we need to move beyond this old notion that any time spent with undergraduates is somehow taking away from one’s development as a scholar, or the training of new scholars. I think we’ve moved well beyond that zero-sum game, but I had hoped to go further.

What was the most rewarding aspect?

Clemens: Because there was so much faculty and student energy here, we were able to do a lot, just with the crumbs in the cupboard. We were able to double the number of undergraduates receiving a sizable research grant to do work on their BA papers the summer before their senior year. We were able to get scholar-practitioners to offer courses in a number of areas: nonprofit management, state and local government. I know Adam has plans to go further with that—enriching what the College is doing after the core.

What are your plans for the coming years?

Green: A great strength of this institution is its general education program. But that poses a tremendous challenge for a four-year undergraduate program, because the first two years are dedicated to fulfilling that general education program. Majors have to figure out how to introduce students to various disciplinary traditions, to excite and encourage their sense of being original and ambitious, and to require or strongly encourage capstone projects. I would like to see the last two years of an undergraduate’s career become as dynamic, enriching, and world-expanding as the first two years. That is by no means something that any master does alone. Dean Boyer has been a tremendous advocate for placing undergraduate research in a greater field of visibility. As I understand it, even in my first few weeks in this position, an attitude of optimism, combined with the energy of faculty, students, and community members, can achieve a great deal, even when resources appear scarce. Clemens: I think what Adam and I are pointing to is not to diminish the core, but to say, we can do even more of that in the final two years of a student’s College education.

What undergraduate courses do you teach?

Clemens: For my core teaching, I teach Power, Ideology, and Resistance. The fall and spring quarters cover material I’m very familiar with: Adam Smith, Marx, Durkheim, political theory in the 20th century. But as master, I taught in the winter quarter as well, teaching texts I hadn’t read since I was a freshman in college. When I opened up Hobbes, I was reading through the marginalia I had written then. I also teach an undergraduate course on political participation and organization, and graduate courses in American politics and social movements. Green: I teach America in World Civilization II, the 19th century. I’m a 20th-century historian, so that’s my immersion into unfamiliar waters. The other class is Introduction to Black Chicago, 1893–2010.

How does teaching undergraduates differ from teaching grad students?

Green: Graduate students have a very practical set of goals in mind. They want to cut to the chase in the classroom. That is by no means a bad thing—it serves as a good control on faculty energies. But while graduate classes necessarily function as means to ends, undergraduate classes can be ends in themselves. Clemens: For graduate students, developing a career in academia involves defining a puzzle that will be theirs, where they can make a contribution. So as a professor, much of one’s work for graduate students is somewhat subversive—you’re trying to disrupt that. By contrast, undergraduates are usually interested in the resonances: how to understand something well enough so that it can form a deep analogy. A great class has both kinds of students.

Does teaching undergraduates encourage you to be more open in your thinking?

Green: Absolutely. There’s a capacity to approach questions afresh. A refreshing—bracing, at times—honesty, a presence of “So what?” that’s always in your class. Clemens: When you work with undergraduates, they bring expertise from all around the University. One year, I supervised two BA papers on the political development of Islamic societies in North Africa and South Asia. I know nothing about those areas, but both students had expert advisers who did. My job was helping with their analytic arguments, shaping the questions, pushing them on evidence. I learned tremendously from those experiences. That’s the joy of BA advising.

Does the collegiate master oversee graduate teaching?

Clemens: This has become a much bigger part of the master’s job in the past year or two. Under the new Graduate Aid Initiative (GAI), graduate students in the social sciences have a teaching obligation. Many of the graduate students will intern, and some will lecture, in the social science core. More advanced students are able to apply for prize lectureships to teach their own courses. Green: The GAI helps graduate students to think about their teaching as a sustained and deliberate progression, from interning, to lecturing in a shared core sequence, to designing their own stand-alone class. It is our hope that this will prove a significant support for graduate students here, and a still greater advantage as they enter the job market.

What are your current academic projects?

Green: I’m in the midst of a book project, “Friendship of an Everlasting Sort: Claude Barnett, Faye Jackson, and the Black Struggle for Happiness.” I’m examining a very rich archive of letters between two black journalists in the 1930s: Claude Barnett, the founder of the Associated Negro Press (ANP), and Faye Jackson, the wire service’s correspondent on the West Coast. The ANP was interested in how to cover the burgeoning Hollywood film industry and the politics of race that were beginning to be codified as the studio system emerged. In the course of these letters, Barnett and Jackson establish a dynamic, ambitious, at times volatile interchange that I see as an exemplary African American friendship. I’m interested in friendship as constitutive of African American community, in the ways that people often think about politics or family or social movement as constitutive. Clemens: I’m finishing a book called “Civic Nation: Volunteerism and the Governing of America.” My question is, why is it that this very powerful modern American state has incorporated so many practices that are civic, voluntary, private, and charitable? In the 19th century, charity was understood as antithetical to democratic standing, because it made another American dependent on you. And that’s a fundamental threat to the liberal citizen. The Civil War is probably the first great charitable effort, when Americans attempt to create a nation and overcome sectionalism through fundraising, making bandages, and so on. Similar patterns occurred during World War I, the early Depression, the New Deal. Then after World War II, the nonprofit sector develops. It avoids this tension between charity and democracy. It’s a piece of American political development that hasn’t been well explored because this development changed the key terms and therefore made it somewhat invisible. This long process of institutional change has sometimes made it difficult to recognize the role of civic life in government as well as easy to misrecognize patterns of political control and responsibility.