austin porterfield and texas christian university and 1937-1966

From all external indicia, Porterfield got a "late start" in academic life. For example, it wasn't until his 41st year that he began his first teaching job after receiving his Ph. D., and he only had a few articles, and not even a book, to his credit by then. His family (he and his wife had three children) often lived in penurious circumstances while Austin tried to teach and earn his degrees (2 masters and the Ph. D.) Yet, as this essay will show, he lived his professional career with a sense of gratitude and grace, influencing about 20 of his students to get Ph. D.'s in sociology and become contributing members to the discipline. This essay seeks to understand his career from the perspective of those that knew him. The next essay probes the idea of the use of the imagination in sociology.

Getting Oriented in Sociology

The discipline of sociology in the 1930s was still peopled to a large extent by ministers, minister's kids or those who were energized by the social gospel preaching of such giants as Walter Rauschenbusch or Washington Gladden in the early decades of the 20th century. Porterfield himself had been a Disciples of Christ minister for a few years. Sociology in those days was quintessentially a problem-solving discipline, using the insights of theory, Christian ethics, and survey data to devise systems and programs to understand delinquency, crime, suicide, the family or human life in a complex society. It might have been helpful had Leonard Cain tried to "situate" Porterfield in the history of the discipline before reviewing his career for us and providing student reminiscences. But the virtue of providing these memorial statements from former students (many of which were written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Porterfield's birth) is to give us an insight into the person and scholar before reviewing his ideas. As I emphasize to my students, once you get to know the person behind the writing, the ideas tend to fall neatly into place. So, even as I wished for a more "field-specific" orientation, I was grateful for the stories and memories about Porterfield.

The most immediately impressive thing about Porterfield was the amount of teaching he either chose or was required to do. It was not unusual for him to teach five courses per semester as well as to guide graduate student research and to lead a graduate seminar. Cain, who has counted up all the courses, says that he introduced fifteen distinctively new courses in the 1930s, fourteen in the 1940s and five each in the 1950s and 1960s. Sometimes he would teach two sections of the same course, such as Marriage & the Family in the 1950s, but he covered the range of courses such as introduction to sociology, juvenile delinquency, history of social philosophy, criminology, sociology of conflict, sociological ideas, sociology of religion, social change & social problems, population problems, sociology of literature, urban sociology and many others. In addition to this, as Cain points out, he managed to write a major professional article every three or four months as well as a book every three or four years. Yet, significantly, students seem to remember him as one who was energized, rather than depleted, by all these tasks, and a man who was fully identified with the possibilites and promise of the field of sociology.

I speak about Porterfield's teaching load because of the debates over "load" in academia today. Professors constantly complain that they are "overloaded." The typical undergraduate teacher today teaches five or six courses per year, rather than that number per semester. But, in contrast to Porterfield's day, college professors have so many things to do in managing the university or developing their careers (from endless committee assignments to special event attendance to participation in many professional activities), that the professoriate is largely, in my judgment, a bureaucratic calling today. Porterfield was, above all, a teacher, and was remembered as such.

A Few Reminiscences

Two types of memories call for mention. First, are the ones that talk about Porterfield as a person/teacher. Jerry Michel, who later became a professor of sociology at Memphis State, after being a student of Porterfield and teaching with him at TCU for a few years, emphasized the pride Porterfield had in his rural background. Then he says, "He was completely satisfied with the exact span of his life and his exact age at every age. He was happy to have been born in 1896 and as he grew older from time to time he affirmed that he was happy to be the age he was at the time" (p. 75). Porterfield deeply cared about students even while his focus was on the totality of humanity. What many recalled was his infectious optimism. "He believed that social science was cumulative and, thus, was highly optimistic about the long-run value of current research." He could lecture without notes and possessed a powerful memory. One time when students asked him whether he had a photographic memory, he simply said that he did not, though he could never forget anything. Finally, one student said that the impression he received from Porterfield was that sociology was worthy of one's best intellectual efforts, a belief which Porterfield incarnated in his life.

Second is the type of memory of Cain himself as well as others who spoke of their research activities with him. Porterfield was at the forefront of his field in wanting to collect data on social problems. Especially noteworthy were his studies on self-reporting of juvenile delinquency which appeared a few years before Kinsey used the same method (and received national attention) when he used self-reporting of young people in speaking about their sex lives. But Cain makes an interesting point that lies behind the title of the book (A Man's Grasp Should Exceed His Reach)--that Porterfield often lacked good data to make judicious conclusions and so he would often "leap ahead," extrapolate or in someway come up with conclusions that were derived from data but not completely justified by it. Rather than criticizing his mentor for methodological sloppiness, Cain recognizes both the rather rudimentary nature of the field in those days but also that Porterfield already "grasped" a vision of a better society, almost like the Kingdom of God, even if his data wouldn't let him "reach" it. Thus, he grasped more than he reached--a concept worth more than a moment's reflection.

Interesting to me, however, was the realization that the topic of Porterfield's Duke University doctoral dissertation was the role of imagination in sociology. That topic deserves an essay.

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