Department of Sociology, Columbia University
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Department of Sociology, Columbia University Employees
Department of Sociology, Columbia University Details
Historically, the Department of Sociology at Columbia University was seminal in establishing Sociology within the academic system after World War II. Columbia University remains the only Ivy League institution at which a distinguished Sociology Department is central to its institutional identity. At present, the Department is building on these foundations in a new phase of expansion and development.Columbia was the first university in the United States to create a professorship in sociology, which was filled by Franklin Giddings in 1894, and Columbia was the second university (after Chicago) to create a department (in 1904, named the department of social science) that was devoted to the subject of sociology. An early theorist, Giddings also strongly emphasized quantitative methods and was one of the inaugural fellows of the American Statistical Association. This early attention to both theory and methods became a defining feature of the Department's tradition.The early years of Columbia sociology were tarnished by the ideas of Social Darwinism and the Eugenics movement, though perhaps not more than was true in other sociology and other social science departments of this period. At the same time, Columbia sociology was the department where George Edmund Haynes earned his Ph.D. in 1911. Haynes went on to found the social sciences department at Fisk University, later taught at City College, and was the first scholar to study the great migration of blacks following WWI from the rural south to northern and western cities. Haynes became the first executive director of the National Urban League, and he was the first African-American to serve as director of a sub-cabinet post in the U.S. federal government, namely as director of the newly established Division of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor during the administration of Woodrow Wilson.The scope and depth of Columbia sociology advanced considerably with the appointment, during the inter-war period, of Robe
