SPEAKING OF EDUCATION

Discipline's past is context for future

By Paul Nelson, PhD
APA Acting Director of Education

The dawning of the 21st century seems an appropriate time to raise questions about our discipline's future. Most of us will agree that the next century should bring quantum advancements in our understanding of the human mind and human behavior. Perhaps less consensus exists among us, however, about how our discipline will be conceptualized, taught and learned in the next century, and consequently how it will contribute to that further understanding.

Looking back...

A century ago psychology was a fledgling experimental science. Throughout the past century struggles within this emergent discipline have been characterized by tensions within and outside the academy from many dialectic orientations of theory, method, field of interest and disciplinary role. At the same time that these intra-disciplinary tensions played out in academic departments, psychology faculty increasingly found academic homes in a variety of university departments and colleges, in addition to the traditional department of psychology.

By the end of World War II, the question of how and where psychology should be organized on university campuses became more than a passing conversation piece. In 1945, Harvard University President James Conant appointed a blue-ribbon commission (half of whom were psychologists and half not) to determine the place of psychology in an ideal university. At the end of two years, the commission issued a report (brief summaries of which were published in 1948 by Dael Wolfle in the American Psychologist (Vol. 3, No. 2, 61-64) and by Walter Bingham in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 32, No. 3, 321-324).

The commission concluded that psychology, already having a presence in more university colleges than any other discipline, had four major obligations in a university: to contribute to the general (liberal) education of undergraduate students; to provide a valuable adjunct in the education of students for other professions; to train students for academic research and teaching in the discipline of psychology; and to train students for applied fields in psychology. Moreover, to avoid fragmentation of resources and disciplinary perspective, the commission recommended that in an ideal university all psychologists should be housed in a single department of psychology, with adjunct appointments to other departments or academic units, as appropriate. As Bingham pointed out, while Ohio State University organized in such a manner, interestingly Harvard did not...nor did others among the larger university psychology departments of that day or subsequently.

Today, psychology faculty and their students continue to be dispersed among schools of education, engineering, medicine, nursing, public health, business, law and other professional academic units, in addition to their own professional schools of psychology and departments of psychology in colleges of arts and sciences. The ubiquitous nature of our discipline, moreover, is not limited to its academic presence in a breadth of professional schools. Fostered in part by multidisciplinary research centers in universities following World War II, interdisciplinary science flourished and in some instances led to the emergence of new disciplines and academic departments. Examples include cognitive neuroscience, human development and human factors engineering. Indeed, during the past decade, there has been increased emphasis from government agencies, private foundations and higher education associations on the need for inter-professional training for practice and interdisciplinary research training for science. The implications of these forces for how the disciplines will be organized and taught are many, complex and significant.

...and looking ahead

In looking ahead to the future and what it portends for psychology as a unitary or dispersed discipline, it is instructive to examine the historical context for where we are presently, as Irwin Altman, Janet Spence and Charles Odegaard did in "Preparing Psychologists for the 21st Century" (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990), a publication summarizing the 1987 national conference on graduate education in psychology, edited by Leonard Bickman and Henry Ellis. In that context, on this eve of a new century and millennium, the question I pose for us is this: If we maintain as still valid the four principal responsibilities of psychology as an academic discipline that were outlined some 50 years ago by the Harvard commission, and know now what the commissioners did not know then about how our discipline would develop in the last half of this century, what will the 21st century university look like and, within that university, how will psychology be organized?

More important than the organization per se, but certainly not unrelated to that structural outcome, is the question of how our discipline should be taught and learned in the next century.



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