Bennett Maurice Berger
Entering Cohort: 1950
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UC, San Diego
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I got my Ph.D. in 1958 with a dissertation on suburbia under Reinhard Bendix and Bill Kornhauser. UCPress published it unchanged in 1960 and 1968. After year lecturing at Berkely, my first ladder job was at the University of Illinois which gave me tenure in 1962. In 1963 I moved to UC Davis as Chair of its then rapidly expanding dep't. While there I began studying and writing on youth and was eventually given a large grant by NIMH for field research on child rearing in Hippie communes. That research produced several Ph.D.s by my students and ten years later my book The Survival of a Counterculture which will soon re-appear in a new edition. In 1971 a collection of my essays was published. In 1973 I moved to UC San Diego. In the late 70s I was Editor of Contemporary Sociology. At San Diego I chaired the committees of several first class Ph.Ds (some mediocre ones too) and continued writing lots of reviews and review-essays. In 1990 UCPress published Authors of Their Own Lives, my collection of 20 autobiographical essays by American sociologists and in 1995 my last book An Essay on Culture. I retired in 1991 and don't do much sociology anymore though I continue to write a lot, mostly not for publication.
Berkeley shaped my way of thinking by its theoretical diversity which prevented me from ever becoming a partisan of a particular "school of thought." Pierre Bourdieu was the first theorist I ever read who thought like I did. I doubt that "my" sociology has shaped the world in any way. The poet Auden is often quoted as saying "poetry makes nothing happen" (an exaggeration of course, which makes it quotable). Sociology also seldom makes anything happen, maybe because its structural way of thinking is deeply offensive to American individualism which is why economics (which knows perhaps even less than we do) has become the dominant social science.
Dissertation: Working-class suburb; a study of auto workers in suburbia