I have a
growing interest in studying the history of psychology, particularly the
history of my own Department (Dawson, 2013). One of the surprising
consequences of this work is that I sometimes find myself viewing current Departmental
problems in a historical context.
For
example, one Departmental debate that arises every few months, and which has
reached very high levels of administration, concerns what Faculty the
Department of Psychology should be formally part of. We are in the almost
unique position of having official status in both the Faculty of Arts and the
Faculty of Science; this unique position has been the cause of considerable
angst over the past year and a half.
Interestingly,
a little bit of history and reading indicates how this unique situation came to
be. The Department of Psychology became an independent unit at the University
of Alberta in 1960, splitting away from Philosophy. Its first Head was Joseph
R. Royce; Royce was attracted to this position because the University of
Alberta promised resources for his expensive research on behavior genetics (Royce, 1978). Royce was still Head
when the Faculty of Arts and Science split into two separate faculties in 1963.
In other words, it was Royce who was largely responsible for Psychology keeping
a toehold in each faculty.
Why did a
behavior geneticist make this surprising administrative decision? Why did Royce
not break away from Arts? Royce had a diverse and far-reaching vision of the
discipline of psychology. For instance, he argued that it was a mistake to
accept the general definition of psychology being ‘the science of behavior’.
Instead, Royce believed that it was better to define psychology as ‘the study
of behavior’. Replacing ‘science’ with ‘study’ opened the possibility for
psychology to use a broader range of methodologies.
Royce’s broad
vision of the discipline was presented in a 1962 talk that became the opening
chapter in his book Psychology and the symbol (Royce, 1965). Its title was
“Psychology at the Crossroads between the Sciences and the Humanities”. For
Royce, this crossroads was not a
moment – unlike today -- of deciding to choose one direction or the other.
Instead, the crossroads was an intersection,
where psychology necessarily had to
integrate the methods of both the sciences and the humanities. Royce recognized
that psychology is “both scientific and humanistic, both experimental
and clinical”.
Given
this position, it is hardly surprising that Royce’s also saw that it was
necessary to attach the Department of Psychology to both the Faculty of Science
and the Faculty of Arts. This remarkable decision arose naturally from Royce’s
unique and broad vision. To me, it is clear that his goal was to offer the
Department of Psychology the potential to explore broader, interdisciplinary
initiatives than would be possible in a department with a more traditional
organization.
Recently,
administrators seem to have lost sight of this possibility, focusing only on
the complications that our unique structure produces. My own hope is that my
Department is given an opportunity to stop viewing its current structure as problematic,
and instead uses its advantages to become the kind of department that Royce
imagined as its first Head. A Department that did so would be an exciting one
to be a part of, and could bring some unique opportunities to the University at
large.
References
Dawson, M.R.W. (2013).
A case study in Gantt charts as historiophoty: A Century of Psychology at the
University of Alberta. History of
Psychology, 16(2), 145-157.
Royce, J.R. (1965). Psychology and the Symbol. New York:
Random House.
Royce, J.R. (1978). The
life style of a theory-oriented generalist in a time of empirical specialists.
In T. S. Krawiec (Ed.), The Psychologists
(pp. 222-259). New York: Oxford University Press.
