Research Cutbacks and Corporate Squeeze

American academia has become the scene of a kind of ideological warfare. Although the confrontation affects the humanities and other disciplines, the principal battlefield is the domain of the empirical social sciences.

The self-confidence of the social sciences in the 1960s has given way to despair in the ’80s. For several years, the social sciences have been subject to draconian cutbacks in federal funding. And now, within the various social sciences, pure theorists of both the left and right are calling for the abandonment of the empirical methods of research that were developed since World War II. Scholars in psychology, sociology, political science, and economics are affected by a crisis of self-confidence within and ex...