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This paper offers an historical survey of problems arising in German mathematics during the rise and rule of National Socialism. Underlying this effort is the goal of developing a theoretical understanding of the social history of scientific disciplines in modern societies. The first part of the paper gives a brief description of the social system of mathematics and the characteristics of National Socialism. Second, an analysis of the background and structure of the attempt to construct a ‘German’ mathematics related to Nazi-ideology is given. This appears as an anti-modernist movement prompted by the rise of mathematical formalism. The basic relations between mathematical and political thought are analyzed and the reasons for the failure of the ‘German’ movement discussed. The third section examines the integration of mathematics into Nazi-German society, focusing on the twin processes of adaptation and resistance by professional societies. It is argued that social differentiation within the system of mathematics, as well as its modern cognitive and social universality, were preconditions of adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the 1965 issue of the journal "Sociological Inquiry." The 1954 and 1955 Supreme Court decisions on desegregation are the force that set in motion vast changes that are restructuring the very nature of race relations in the United States. This volume contain recent developments relating to race relations in the United States. Its nine essays touch on several of the major areas in which change occurs or in which old blemishes remain. The paper by Robin Williams, with which this issue begins attempts an overview of what has happened in the last two decades. Most of the papers in this set are themselves reports of research appropriate to Williams' contention that intergroup relations are part of the basic dynamics of modem social systems. Richard Lamanna's doctoral dissertation is concerned in part with the response of the Negro public school teacher to desegregation. Lewis Killian turns his attention to the negotiations between representatives of the white and Negro communities.

As the public policy uses of U. S. census data have expanded in recent decades, census undercount has become a contentious public issue. Concern centers on the fact that persons that are economically and socially disadvantaged are omitted at higher rates than others. In this paper we outline some of the contributions which sociologists can make to the undercount debate. First, the uses of census data are reviewed, with emphasis on how coverage errors affect social science research. Next, a conceptual model of the census enumeration process is offered, and its social system and census process components are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes the crisis in standards in the academic world where symptoms of academic fraud and diminished quality are linked to increasing competitive pressure, demographic forces, and defects in the social system of professional control, examples of a criterial system with mechanical assessment technology that generates paradoxical outcomes. The paper addresses such issues as redundancy of publications and defects in the peer review system, drawing examples from the fields of medicine, science and sociology. It is argued that a decline in academic standards is facilitated by the confusion involved in differentiating criteria from standards. Further analysis of criterial systems is suggested, along with the need for an explicit examination of academic values and quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary regarding the depiction of Professor J. H. Turner of the symbolic interactionist position of Talcot Parsons. In his paper, Turner advances two simple and straight forward contentions, Parsons is a symbolic interactionist in the way in which he sees human society but for reasons of methodological strategy Parsons proposes to study human society differently than is done by symbolic interactionists. Turner endeavors to support the first contention by arguing that there are basic similarities between Parsons' view and the symbolic interactionist analysis suffers from several forms of theoretical weakness. This article, discusses these two contentions in the light of the symbolic intearactionist position of George Herbert Mead.

This article focuses on the student and teacher relationship. When instructors find their classes failing to respond to lectures with the vitality and interest with which they were presented, failing to participate in discussions with measured scholarly interest, and treating assignments as unwanted tasks, they accuse their students of being unappreciative, lazy, and apathetic. The central success of any course is the coming together of interests among students and between students and faculty. This paper analyzes the problems in the normal teacher-centered class, the changes introduced in transforming it into a student-centered-structure; student reactions to the changes; and its difficulties. One case of an immanent problem grew out of an attempt to come to grips with grading procedures. Students tried to reform the course away from competitive relationships and a mystification of authority in the instructor.

The objective of this paper is to clarify some of the perspectives of the discipline of sociology, to identify radical viewpoints and how they have evolved and converged, and to indicate some of the consequences of a radical sociology and its prospects. A radical sociology calls for a radical perspective, namely, a structural perspective. Such a perspective requires uncovering economic and political realities in the attempt to understand social structure. Intellectual relevance should not merely be cloaked in terms of efficacy demands which derive from state welfarism and militarism, but should be the extension of a radical and structuralist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the nature of value-commitments, conceived as a generalized symbolic medium of interchange in the processes of social interaction, in this respect paralleling money, power, and influence. Commitments constitute moral obligations of units of a system of social interaction to maintain the integrity of a value-pattern and to strive toward its implementation in action through combination with non-value factors. Stability of commitments is a basic condition of the compatibility of wide moral freedom with the exigencies of social functioning. Like the other three media, commitments are not bound by a zero-sum condition, but can be expanded, especially through charismatic movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]