Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists--Their Passions and Professions, The

Academe, May/Jun 2000 by Primack, Joel R

The Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists-Their Passions And Professions

Joseph C. Hermanowicz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 268 pp., $15

JOEL R. PRIMACK

JOSEPH HERMANOWICZ CLAIMS that the standards against which scientists are now judged are "unmatched in historical comparison," and that the role of ambition has therefore grown more intense. In order to see how this plays out in scientists' careers, he conducted extensive interviews, under assurance of anonymity, with sixty professors selected at random from the physics departments of six unidentified universities in the United States. There were two "elite" universities (one private and one public, which Hermanowicz says resemble Princeton and the University of Michigan), one "pluralist" university of intermediate scholarly reputation (such as Michigan State), and three "communitarian" institutions of only regional prominence (like the University of Tulsa or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

Hermanowicz says he chose to concentrate on physicists because physics is a field in which practitioners perceive one another as being either right or wrong. Yet physicists, like other scientists, often do not know until years later whether any particular piece of research is of fundamental importance. For this reason, and because of the increased competitiveness in physics over the past several decades, Hermanowicz chose as subjects physicists who received their Ph.D.'s before 1970, between 1970 and 1980, or after 1980, whom he characterizes as early, middle, or late in their careers.

Hermanowicz borrows several key ideas from sociologist Erving Goffman, such as the concept of a "moral career." This is a series of steps through which a person's identity and status develop, along with the subjective beliefs and practices that people adopt in order to satisfy status expectations. Hermanowicz contends that the moral careers of physicists are largely determined by the nature of the institutions at which they begin their academic careers. He shows that after a first faculty job, among the sixty physicists whom he studied, there was almost no mobility between the elite, pluralist, and communitarian academic worlds.

Physicists at elite institutions, he contends, are relatively homogeneous in their commitment to and identification with science. They are active in research throughout their careers, and they judge their colleagues' current status on the basis of their latest work. The expectation of continuous success shapes careers, and promotions and awards inspire, regulate, and reward success. Physicists at pluralist and communitarian universities, on the other hand, accept a wide latitude of scientific commitment. In these types of institutions, the person comes before the work, an attitude that permits scientists with dif ferent ambitions and degrees of success to work in relative harmony.

How physicists at pluralist and communitarian universities describe those at elite universities is strikingly different from how elites describe themselves. While the latter say that they prize brilliant colleagues and students, a physicist at a communitarian institution opined that people in the "cut-throat" environment of elite and certain pluralist institutions are "always unhappy."

For physicists at elite institutions, Hermanowicz accepts sociologist Robert Merton's dictum that recognition from people who are competent to judge is the prime indicator of success, and recognition translates into subsequent scientific opportunity. However, Merton's "Matthew effect" also means that recognized scientists receive disproportionately greater credit than lesserknown scientists. This tends to amplify small differences in the early stages of careers.

Another concept that Hermanowicz borrows from Goffman is "cooling out the mark." In a con game, the "cooler" substitutes alternative prizes for the goal originally sought by the "mark." "The cooler has the job of handling persons who have been caught out on a limb-- persons whose expectations and self conceptions have been built up and then shattered." Hermanowicz contends that all of the physicists he studied were cooled out after embarking on their careers, but that each individual cooled out himself or herself (four of the sixty physicists interviewed were women), and in different ways.

The starkest changes in outlooks on self and career were seen among physicists at communitarian universities, whose academic worlds differ most from the ones they had known as students. Family and other extracurricular references are evident in the accounts by pluralists and communitarians of their careers, but rarely in those by elites, although Hermanowicz says that pluralists bear, on average, greater resemblance to elites than to communitarians. Physicists at elite institutions also had to give up some of their youthful hopes of scientific grandeur, but the question was not whether they would achieve greatness but at what level.

There are also important differences in systems of governance among types of institutions; for example, it is difficult for administrators at elite universities to tell scientists what to do, while pluralist and communitarian schools have more centralized governing structures with considerable authority vested in department chairs and deans. Because of the structural and cultural diF ferences in their environments, "the careers of research-productive communitarians are best viewed as miniature versions of elite careers," Hermanowicz says. As pluralists and communitarians age, their interest in science typically wanes. As one remarked, "most of the older people end up going into administration or slowing down." Some become "master teachers." But few elites ever expect to retire from scientific research, because for them it remains fun. There are also larger motivations; as one says, "I really care about the . . . role that twentiethcentury science has played in shaping civilization, and I see myself as a tiny fragment of that tapestry."