Tonight will mark the 11th anniversary of the start of David Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS, which continues to run. Before that, he did a virtually identical show called "Late Night" on NBC for 11 years (1982-1993). Although Letterman's CBS show has received many honors (including six Emmys for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Program in 1994, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002), it is my feeling (and probably that of numerous other Letterman watchers) that he was at his most creative during those mid-80s NBC years when we were in graduate school.

Letterman did the kind of things during those years that had us graduate students asking each other on many a morning, "Did you see what Dave did last night?" And when Dave did an anniversary show, at least the first few ones, watching was de rigueur. There's an online list of "The 80 Greatest Late-Night Episodes of All Time" and, by my count, 44 of them involved Dave (you need to scroll down a bit when the web document comes up, to see the list).

Granted, some of Dave's stunts appear to have been "borrowed" from Steve Allen's work in an earlier era. But, how can you not love Dave's physical comedy, such as dressing in a jumpsuit covered with probably hundreds or thousands of bits of Rice Crispies and being lowered into a vat of milk, or wearing a suit of Alka-Seltzer tablets and being lowered into a vat of water? (I heard a rumor that during pre-testing of the Alka-Seltzer stunt, a stagehand filling Dave's role passed out from the resulting gases, so Dave had to wear a gas mask when doing the actual stunt.)

From the elevator races, to the "democracy show" where the audience got to vote on which features to implement during an actual taping, to the velcro suit, to "supermarket finds," to riding on a luge sled, the Letterman gems are endless. Though Dave gets less physically involved today on his CBS show (perhaps a result of his health problems), he still gives us such cerebral exercises as "Will it float?," a physics lesson viewers don't even realize they're getting.

Among my fellow Michigan grad students, the one who probably got the most enjoyment out of Dave's antics is Steve Fein, a professor at Williams College since graduating from UM. Back then, Dave's NBC show "Late Night with David Letterman" came on at roughly 1:00 AM on the local Detroit affiliate. Michigan is in the Eastern time zone, meaning "The Tonight Show" (then hosted by Johnny Carson) would be on from 11:30-12:30. Then, instead of putting Letterman on at 12:30 AM, which was plenty late, the NBC affiliate put him on at 1:00, with a half-hour of Barney Miller (and other similar shows') repeats filling the gap.

Rather than stand passively by like the rest of us, Steve called up the NBC affiliate to ask why Letterman didn't come on at 12:30. The answer he got had something to do with local affiliates' being able to pocket advertising revenues for shows aired only in the local market (such as the "filler" rerun), whereas the revenues for a national show such as Dave's went to the national office. Steve got a kick out of many of Letterman's stunts and even was known to imitate one or two of them.

Another feature of the show I find interesting is that, in the early years, there was a fair amount of turnover in the band (known variously as "The World's Most Dangerous Band," "The NBC Orchestra," and "The CBS Orchestra"). Sid McGinnis replaced Hiram Bullock on guitar in '84, and Anton Fig (whom Dave used to jokingly refer to as "Antop Zip") replaced Steve Jordan on drums in '86. Bandleader/keyboardist Paul Shaffer and bassist Will Lee have been there all along. But since '86 (which is 18 years ago, for heaven's sake), there have been no personnel changes on these four instruments (there have been additions to the band, however).

I was a little disappointed that Dave didn't change up the show more when he moved from NBC to CBS, and I recall Steve feeling the same way from our correspondences. The question of what facets of Dave's NBC show he could take to CBS reached the point of absurdity when, as stated in one online biography of Letterman:

"NBC claimed that many of Letterman's gimmicks and jokes, including throwing the pencil at the camera, the top ten list, and Larry Bud Melman, among many others, were 'intellectual properties.' NBC lost, but Larry 'Bud' Melman would now be called Calvert DeForest on the CBS show."

And you think I'm kidding when I say that Dave gave many Michigan social psych graduate students intellectual enrichment during our years in Ann Arbor?

* * *

On a somewhat related note, any longstanding show such as David Letterman's on NBC and CBS, will have its detractors, people who feel the show "jumped the shark" and started heading downhill. The term "Jump the Shark" derives from an episode of Happy Days on which Fonzie, clad in his trademark leather jacket, jumped over a shark on water skis. That, to many, was a signal that Happy Days was seriously on the decline. In keeping with the theme of the Michigan retrospective website, it turns out that the creator of the term "Jump the Shark" (and host of the website and author of the book by the same name) is Jon Hein, a 1989 UM alumnus (to my knowledge, I never met Jon at UM, but with tens of thousands of people there, that's not surprising). People can submit their opinions to the Jump the Shark website on when a given show has started to decline. Here are the entries for Letterman's NBC and CBS shows.

Yesterday's New York Times had a thorough article on the debate over psychotherapy effectiveness research (whether insurance companies should rigorously base their reimbursements on demonstrated effectiveness, should practitioners be required to closely follow procedures from manuals?, can the complexity of what goes on in a therapy room be captured in research studies?, etc.).

One of the scholars quoted in the article is Drew Westen, a professor at Emory University. Drew was a clinical psychology graduate student in the 1980s at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. He has been a very prolific author over the years. Drew and I will occasionally run into each other at conferences and chat briefly.

If you're already a registered NY Times user, you can just click here to see the article that quotes Drew, for the time being at least. If you're not already registered, you can complete the free process by going to the Times' main page.

Just a brief entry today, on some miscellaneous items...

First, a short time ago while looking through some piles in my office for unrelated purposes, I found a complete list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers for the period 1973-1992 (it was probably an enclosure with the invitation to the 1993 talk that presumably all program alumni received). As some of you may recall, my April 29 entry was devoted to the Katz-Newcomb Lecture. With the help of many people, I was able to compile a near-complete list of speakers from 1973-1997 (when, except for some ad hoc lectures, the series came to an end). But, there were still some gaps for the more distant years. The list I found has now allowed me to fill in all the speakers for the complete series. As an added "bonus," the list I found also included the 1973-1992 speakers' titles, so I have added these. Take a look at the updated list by going to the April archive.

August is a pretty quiet time in academia, as professors, students, and staff members prepare to start another school year. One major event that will be happening in August (the 13th-29th) is, of course, the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. UM has produced a list of current and former Wolverines who are participating. As a sign of how much 80s-era students such as myself have aged, our only Michigan contemporaries are going to Athens in coaching roles. Enjoy the Games!

I recently returned from a trip that I'm calling "Midwestern Tour '04."  For about 10 days during the middle of July, I traveled through Cincinnati (to attend the Society for American Baseball Research or "SABR" convention), Chicago (to visit my sister and her family and also drop by the offices of some professors and researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston), and finally, Madison, Wisconsin (to attend the International Association for Relationship Research convention).  Where academics and sports are involved, a large University of Michigan presence is virtually assured, and there indeed were Michigan connections throughout the trip.

Cincinnati Portion of the Trip 

According to this ESPN.com document, there are six former UM baseball players currently in the major leagues.  However, only two, Cincinnati's Barry Larkin and St. Louis's Mike Matheny, were 1980s Wolverines.  Naturally, SABR schedules its meetings when the home team is in town, so I was able to attend a Reds game; they were playing the Cardinals, so I further got to see the two ex-Wolverines square off.  Although baseball certainly lags Michigan's "marquee" sports (football, men's basketball, and ice hockey) in popularity, I enjoyed going out to UM's Ray Fisher Stadium to watch baseball during my grad school days.  Michigan has a proud baseball history, having won the College World Series in 1953 (under Fisher) and 1962 (under Don Lund).  Up through the 80s, the Wolverines were a perennial post-season team, until being put on probation.  The program has not been the same since, but may be staging a resurgence under relatively new coach Rich Maloney. 

While in Cincy, I also added another Pizzeria Uno to my list of ones I've dined at (see the February and March archives on the right-hand side of the page, midway down, for my previous Uno's-related writings).

The SABR conference was great fun.  My activities ranged from watching a trivia contest (where I knew the answers to about five questions for every 100 asked, in contrast to the actual contestants who reeled off answers to one obscure question after another) to touring the grounds where Crosley Field, the beloved former home of the Reds, was located (there are no remnants of the park at the site today, just a variety of industrial businesses) and also a park in Blue Ash, Ohio that replicates some of the features of Crosley.  

At the SABR book exhibit, I picked up the book A Mathematician at the Ballpark, by Ken Ross.  On page 178, it cites my hot hand website on the statistical study of sports streakiness.

Chicago/Evanston Portion

Next it was on to Chicago.  Like any major research university, Northwestern has both research centers and traditional academic departments (often, scholars at one type of unit will have a joint appointment at a unit of the other type).  I knew (or knew of) a number of scholars at Northwestern, so I e-mailed ahead to see if people wouldn't mind having me stop by to chat about research and/or just visit.  Within the psychology department, I met with Alice Eagly, a 1965 social psych Ph.D. from Michigan.  I was also hoping to visit with David Uttal, a developmental psychologist who was a comtemporary of mine during grad school at UM in the 80s, but our timing didn't work out.   

I also met with two people at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.  My first meeting was with Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, whom only after our meeting started did I learn was also a 1980s Michigan Ph.D  (developmental psych, 1981).  Her research is in the area of public policy as related to families and children, such as studying welfare reform.  As seen in my lecture notes on adolescent sexuality, I've drawn upon Lindsay's research for many years in teaching my "Problems of Adolescence" course at Texas Tech (click here for the main syllabus).  In our conversation, Lindsay cited her experience at Michigan with the Bush Program in Child Development and Social Policy as being particularly valuable.  The other IPR researcher with whom I met was Greg Duncan.  Before moving to Northwestern in 1995, Greg spent over 20 years at Michigan as a research scientist and professor, including a stint as director of UM's Panel Study of Income Dynamics.  Although I had never met Greg during my time at Michigan, I knew of him.  We had a nice wide-ranging discussion of research on adolescent and young adult drinking, public policy, and research methodology.

The Northwestern scholars with whom I wanted to meet, of course, were not limited to people with Michigan backgrounds.  I also had a nice visit with Dan McAdams, who has a joint faculty appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy and the psychology department.

I want to thank my relative Bonnie (whose husband is a cousin of my mother), who works at IPR, for her hospitality during my visit.  Also, of course, I want to thank my sister Lynn and her husband Jeff for hosting me.  It was in the spring of 1986 that Lynn, then an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, came up to visit me in Ann Arbor; on that trip, she met Jeff, then an undergrad at Michigan, and the rest -- as they say -- is history.

Although Chicago is the home of the original Pizzeria Uno's -- both the first one at the corner of Wabash and Ohio and Pizzeria Due's, built about a block away to handle the Uno's overflow crowd -- I had already been to both before, so I didn't have any Uno's pizza in Chicago.  Instead, I tried out another Windy City deep dish place, Lou Malnati's.  It was good, in my opinion, but not quite up to Uno's.    

Madison, Wisconsin Portion

Lastly, I arrived in Madison to present a poster at the IARR close-relationships conference on a study an undergraduate student, Teresa Lair, conducted under my supervision (click here to see both the paper and some pictures I took in Madison).

Naturally, I saw some former Michigan people:

• Terri Orbuch, who was featured in a June write-up (see archives) about UM's Early Years of Marriage Project.  A paper from the project (Orbuch, Veroff, Hassan, & Horrocks, 2002, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships)  won the IARR Article Award at the conference.
• Linda Acitelli, a University of Houston faculty member, with whom I overlapped during grad school at Michigan (she was in the personality psychology program, but there was extensive contact between the social and personality programs).
• Kathy Carnelley, a lecturer at the University of Southampton in England, and Amber Story, a program director at the National Science Foundation, a pair of mid-1990s Michigan post docs.  Kathy was also featured in my June write-up on the Michigan-UCLA connection.
• Dan Perlman, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who told me he did some of his graduate work at Michigan in the 1960s.

In addition to the people, however, the town of Madison itself evoked a strong connection in my mind to Ann Arbor.  The similarities are numerous:

• In both towns, the major street in the campus area is called State St. (which is the case in some additional Big Ten cities as well).
• Both towns have extremely liberal political climates.  In Dane County, Wisconsin (which includes Madison), Gore and Nader combined in the 2000 presidential election to take two-thirds of the vote.  In Washtenaw County, Michigan (which includes Ann Arbor), Gore and Nader combined for slightly less than two-thirds.  I don't claim to know the demographics of these counties that well, but it's potentially the case that the campus areas per se were even more highly Democratic, with rural outlying areas diluting the county-level percentages.
• A couple of businesses that I thought to be unique to Ann Arbor were also in Madison, namely Steve & Barry's t-shirts (which, I've discovered on their website, has quite a few locations) and the Dahlmann Campus Inn hotel (Ann Arbor link, Madison link).
• Both, of course, feature traditional, college-town barber shops.  In Ann Arbor, I always went to the State St. Barber Shop during my graduate student days and I make it a point to go there every time I get back to town.  Bill, the State St. barber, was featured in the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood, and to my knowledge, Bill is still there.  Upon arrival in my hotel room in Madison, I looked over the Madison magazine that was displayed in the room.  I noticed an article about a man named Don Fine, who owns the College Barber Shop on State St. near the University of Wisconsin campus and has been cutting hair there for 51 years.  I went in the next morning, grabbed a seat in the waiting area, and hoped to get Don for my haircut.  There were about five barbers cutting at the time, but by the luck of the draw, I got Don.  He was extremely friendly.  As the article notes, his chair is "the first in the shop's line of eight and the one in the prime spot in front of the picture window."  I noticed how Don would personally say good-bye to each departing customer, so my guess is that he picked the location of his chair to enable him to do so most efficiently.  (While on the subject of barber shops, I want to acknowledge the Collegiate Barber Shop in Lubbock, where I usually go.)

There are also obvious differences between Madison and Ann Arbor:

• Madison has the two lakes (Monona and Mendota) on either side of the isthmus containing the state capitol building and campus (in fact, there's a town newspaper called The Isthmus).  The Wisconsin Memorial Union on campus has a beautiful terrace behind the building overlooking Lake Mendota; there are tables set up so people can dine out by the lake, as well as a stage for evening musical performances (see the set of pictures I took, which I referenced above).  Ann Arbor has nearby water as well, including places to go canoeing (as I recall, Chris Crandall was a very skilled rower during our Michigan grad school days), but not as prominently as in Madison.
• Madison is a state capitol, Ann Arbor is not.
• Ann Arbor has a Borders book store in the campus area (in fact, Ann Arbor was where Borders originated), whereas the Madison Borders appeared to be away from the campus.

I went to the Pizzeria Uno's in Madison twice on this recent trip.  I had been to this Uno's before, but it was over 15 years ago (when visiting my relative -- again through a cousin of my mother's -- Jill Soloway, a UW student at the time and now a writer for HBO's "Six Feet Under").  Also, not surprisingly given Wisconsin's motto of "America's Dairy Land," I ate more ice cream on this recent trip than I usually do.  The Daily Scoop in the student union, where ice cream made in the Babcock Hall Dairy Plant is sold, is a can't miss.

As you can see, I was quite taken with Madison.  Even a maize-and-blue guy such as myself has to admit that Madison is just as nice a town as Ann Arbor (OK, there I admitted it).

In closing this segment about the Madison component of my trip, I would like to congratulate Linda Roberts, a UW-Madison faculty member and former colleague of mine from our days at the Research Institute on Addictions in Buffalo, New York, on an excellent job of co-hosting the IARR conference.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently completed its term for the year. As most of you are probably aware, the major cases involved the rights of prisoners detained as part of the War on Terror.

One of the cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, involved an American citizen named Yaser Hamdi, whom the U.S. government was holding as an "enemy combatant." Two issues were at stake: whether Hamdi could be detained (perhaps indefinitely) without being charged with any crime, and whether he had the right to challenge his detention in court (and with assistance of counsel).

The Court's decision was what might be considered a "compromise verdict." The detentions themselves were permissible (having received the proper Congressional authorization), but the detainee had the right to a day in court to challenge the detention.

As noted in an excellent summary of the case by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism:

"Amicus briefs [were] filed by former prisoners of war, experts on the law of war, and Fred Korematsu on behalf of Hamdi."

As with all entries on this website, there must be a University of Michigan '80s connection, and that connection is Fred Korematsu. Korematsu, as many of you know, brought an unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge 60 years ago to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I had the pleasure of seeing Korematsu speak at the UM law school about the history and legal issues of his case. It was probably in 1988 or '89. I've found two documents on the web that allude to Korematsu speaking at UM. Based on contextual clues, the first document could very well be describing the same lecture I saw, whereas the second one appears to describe a later visit by Koretmatsu. There's obviously no reason why Korematsu couldn't have spoken at Michigan on multiple occasions.

As I will attempt to detail in future entries, the University of Michigan gets a lot of prominent scholars, politicians, and historical figures to speak on campus. The "intellectual nourishment" level is high.

If asked, most researchers would probably say they had one (or a few) favorite project(s) among the research studies they had conducted over their careers. Some projects may stand out in one's mind as being more fun to work on than were others, or it may be the reaction of the field to a published product that stands out.

My personal list of favorite projects would have to include the heat-aggression in baseball study I conducted with Rick Larrick and Steve Fein. The official scientific reference for this study is:

Reifman, A. S., Larrick, R. P., & Fein, S. (1991). Temper and temperature on the diamond: The heat-aggression relationship in major league baseball. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 580-585.

I do not teach social psychology (even though my Ph.D. is in social psych, my faculty appointment is in human development and family studies at Texas Tech University). Still, I am fortunate enough to be able to give an annual lecture on the heat-aggression in baseball study to the undergraduate social psych class of my TTU colleague Darcy Reich. Last week I gave this guest lecture for the third straight year, each time during Darcy's summer session class (what better time of year to speak about heat and aggression?).

Rick, Steve, and I came up with the idea for such a study during the summer of 1987 (the end of my third year at Michigan and Rick and Steve's first). Based on a landmark Michigan-based article by Dick Nisbett and Tim Wilson (Psychological Review, 1977), I try to be very cautious about claiming an impetus for my thought processes. Having said that, I would say there were three events that led Rick, Steve, and me to conduct the heat-aggression in baseball study:

*It was a very hot summer for us in Ann Arbor.

*An article by Craig Anderson, a prolific heat-aggression researcher, came out in the June 1987 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on temperature and crime rates.

*Major League Baseball was dealing with a "beanball war" that season, as exemplified by the July 20, 1987 cover of Sports Illustrated. (After you click on the preceding word "cover," be sure to scroll down far enough when the page comes up.)

I remember that Rick, Steve, and I went for pizza one evening at a place on Maynard whose name I can't remember, to discuss our plans for the study. In conducting the study, each of us spent long hours in the UM libraries, going over microfilm rolls of major newspapers to look at randomly selected baseball box scores (for the hit-by-pitch data, our measure of aggression) and corresponding weather pages (to record the high temperature in the home city the day of the game). Nowadays, box scores are readily available on the web, with weather conditions at the game included in the box score.

To make a long story short, we conducted the initial parts of the study in 1987, presented our results as a poster at the 1988 convention of the American Psychological Association, then published our final results in PSPB in 1991, as noted above (we had to do some additional analyses for the journal version). Beyond some initial media coverage of the study in 1988 and my annual guest lecture at Texas Tech, the study has continued to live on in a number of ways:

*Citation by Dean Keith Simonton in a 2003 Annual Review of Psychology chapter on "Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of Historical Data."

*Citation by Anderson in several articles and chapters (click here for his list of recent publications).

*Citation by Eric Sundstrom, Paul Bell, and colleagues in a 1996 Annual Review of Psychology chapter on "Environmental Psychology 1989-1994."

*Continued citation in several social psychology textbooks.

*Inclusion of the study in several social psych professors' online syllabi and lecture notes (a search at Google, with the keyword set "reifman" "larrick" "fein" -- keeping the quotation marks -- currently yields 35 hits).

*A reprinting of our journal article in the book Psychology is Social.

*Application by Tom Timmerman of our idea that hit-by-pitch instances measure aggression, to a different context, namely the question of whether black batters were more likely to get hit by a pitch than their white counterparts, as part of the climate of prejudice just after the integration of Major League Baseball.

*And last but not least, publication of a letter of mine in the July 27, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine, in response to an article in the June 15, 1998 issue on hit batters that omitted our research.

My bottom line is that, if a topic such as baseball that has interest to many people can get students excited about doing research, then that may be the heat-aggression study's main contribution.

Just a brief entry today. As most of you are probably aware, the controversial movie Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore is bringing in huge box-office sales around the country.

As with anything on this website, there's a link between Michael Moore and the mid-80s Michigan scene. I would estimate that within just the first few weeks of my September 1984 arrival in Ann Arbor to begin graduate school, I started picking up an alternative political newsmagazine called the Michigan Voice. The editor of this publication was none other than Mr. Moore.

As any viewer of Moore's first film, Roger and Me, knows, Moore is from Flint, Michigan, not Ann Arbor. As noted in the biography linked to Moore's name above, he worked for what was then the Flint Voice, which expanded into a statewide version.

I even remember the cover story of the first issue of Michigan Voice that I ever read, again from 1984. It took to task U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who remains in office today and has long been one of the most liberal members of the body, for some alleged retrenchments in Levin's liberalism. The headline, a play on a song title by the artist formerly (and currently) known as Prince, was "When Doves Die."

A few weeks ago, I received the Spring 2004 issue of Relationship Research News, the newsletter of the International Association for Relationship Research. Within the newsletter was a review of the book Thrice Told Tales: Married Couples Tell Their Stories. The book was written by Diane Holmberg (a Michigan social psych Ph.D.), Terri Orbuch (a research scientist at UM's Institute for Social Research and a professor at Oakland University in suburban Detroit), and Joe Veroff (Professor Emeritus at UM in social psychology).

The book presents qualitative data (i.e., "narratives" or "stories") from the Early Years of Marriage (EYM) project, begun in 1986 by Veroff, ISR Research Scientist Shirley Hatchett, and the late UM Professor Elizabeth "Libby" Douvan. A number of social psych grad students from the mid-1980s such as Susan Crohan, Ann Ruvolo, and Lynne Sutherland also worked on the project. Orbuch came on a little later in a leadership role. (Note that the above link to the EYM project is from Radcliffe's Murray Center, where some of the EYM data are now archived.)

In preparing this entry, I thought I should do a little homework, so I contacted some people on (or close to) the project to see how things were going. I also read the following article, which provides an excellent overview of the EYM project:

Orbuch, T.L., & Veroff, J. (2002). A programmatic review: Building a two-way bridge between social psychology and the study of the early years of marriage. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19, 549-568.

Participating couples have been interviewed every few years (the title of the book derives from its use of interviews at three occasions). The EYM study has gathered quantitative (closed-ended) data as well as qualitative, but as noted above, the book focused on the latter. Based on the References section of the aforementioned article and some computer searching I did, I would estimate that at least 20 scholarly publications have emerged from the project.

Joe and Libby, always sweet, gentle, and friendly, collaborated extensively in their teaching as well as research. During the Winter 1985 term, I took Joe and Libby's graduate course on socialization (yes, I still have the syllabus and my notes).

In addition to the EYM project, Joe and Libby also collaborated on earlier national surveys on Americans' social participation, as described in the following book:

Veroff, J., Douvan, E., & Kulka, R.. (1981) The inner American: A self-portrait from 1957 To 1976. New York, NY: Basic Books.

This research has been cited in such prominent books as Bowling Alone (by Robert Putnam) and The Tending Instinct (by Shelley Taylor).

Joe also has a long history in studying various social motives (e.g., achievement, power). Monica Biernat, who later switched to research on stereotyping, published an article in 1989 in the Journal of Personality on achievement motives and values, which resulted from her working with Joe.

Joe seems to be doing well at this time. The last time I saw him was in 2002 at a reception during Pat Gurin's retirement celebration (the subject of my June 14, 2004 entry). One of Joe's EYM collaborators, who also notes that "we just finished collecting data in Year 16 of the couples' marriages," informs us that:

"Joe is fine and wonderful. He continues to be active in research activities on the Early Years of Marriage Project. He continues to be a co-PI on the project."

One of Joe's relatives adds:

"He is doing well and I think he enjoys the ongoing connectivity and work on this project. My sense is that he also enjoys the collaborative writing. That said, he is also doing a lot of other kinds of writing for pleasure (fiction, poetry) and savors the slow pace of life in a Michigan small town."

And through the continuing vitality of the EYM project, the legacy of Joe, Libby, and their collaborators lives on...

As people may have noticed from reading some of my postings at this website, I frequently reminisce about events in the 1980s through linkages to developments of today involving the same individuals.

In yet another example of this trend, I took note a while back of the fact that singer/songwriter David Byrne was appearing in concert at UM's Power Center for the Performing Arts this week on June 15 (see review of the concert).

Back in the early years of my grad school experience at Michigan (around 1984 and '85), Byrne's band at the time, the Talking Heads, was among the more popular groups among my fellow social psych graduate students (based on frequency of stereo play at student parties). According to Byrne's online bio,the Talking Heads were active from 1976-1988 (see this excellent Talking Heads fan page).

According to the VH1 Rock Stars Encyclopedia, in October of 1983 (about a year before I arrived at UM), the "Talking Heads' Burning Down The House hits US #9, their biggest hit single to date" (p. 984). Other songs by the group that I remember include Take Me To the River (which I learned from the Encyclopedia was a cover of an Al Green tune), Life During Wartime (This Ain't No Party... This Ain't No Disco... This Ain't No Foolin' Around) and Once In A Lifetime.

Byrne and his bandmates in the Talking Heads were all-around artists, having first met at the Rhode Island School of Design. Byrne has worked in film scoring, winning an Oscar (Best Score) for The Last Emperor, and also in ballet and opera.

A solo artist for the last many years, Byrne appeared to show as much eclecticism as ever in his recent Ann Arbor performance with a string ensemble and a Brazilian sound.

Exactly two years ago to this day, a retirement celebration was held for Professor Patricia Gurin on the UM campus. I (along with a large number of other former students) had the pleasure of working with Pat, and I was equally pleased to attend the retirement festivities. I will discuss three areas in this write-up: the retirement celebration itself, Pat's work in recent years in the area of campus diversity, and the research I and a fellow student, Gretchen Lopez, worked on with Pat.

The Retirement Celebration

A couple of springs ago, I received a letter from Pat dated March 7, 2002, inviting former students of hers to come back to Ann Arbor the weekend of June 14-16, 2002 for both a formal UM Psychology Department event to mark her retirement and other informal gatherings (e.g., a dinner and a brunch).

The letter was very moving, referring to the retirement/reunion weekend as an opportunity "for me to appreciate what is the most important legacy of my years at Michigan. That legacy is you!"

Now, it doesn't take much to get me to go back to Ann Arbor, and I jumped at the chance to attend Pat's events.

The first day, Friday, June 14, consisted of a full day's set of addresses and panel presentations on the many facets of Pat's career at UM (teacher, researcher, mentor, administrator).

Hazel Markus, a Michigan Ph.D. and for many years a professor at UM before moving to Stanford, began the festivities. Hazel's splashy PowerPoint presentation basically covered Pat's life history.

Nancy Cantor, a former Michigan provost and chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at the time of Pat's retirement, also gave an eloquent address (see my February 20, 2004 entry for an update on Nancy). Nancy recalled her days as provost, working with Pat when Pat was serving as interim dean of UM's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). Mainly, though, Nancy focused on Pat's research on campus diversity and the exacting standards to which Pat was subjecting her own research, because the research could come into play in the legal challenges to UM's affirmative action policies (which culminated at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, about which more later).

Among the panel presentations, one focused on Pat as a mentor, with former graduate students (carefully selected to represent different eras) conveying their experiences. The representative of my era was Kerth O'Brien, who has been on the faculty at Portland (Oregon, as opposed to Maine) State University since receiving her Ph.D. in 1987.

Kerth talked about coming away from meetings with Pat where they had worked on Kerth's dissertation feeling "intellectually rolfed." For those of you not familiar with rolfing, according to a website on the subject, the technique involves deep-tissue massage that "aims to realign the body by using intense pressure and stroking to stretch shortened and tightened fascia back into shape." (As an aside, this past year I advised a student at Texas Tech, Andrea McCourt, on her dissertation; I told her about the "intellectual rolfing" reference, and she seemed to think it fit my advising style, too!)

After all the talks on Friday, a reception was held at UM's Museum of Art. The reception provided further opportunity to catch up with current UM faculty members and fellow alumni. Earlier in the day, I had learned that by amazing coincidence, another conference was going on simultaneously at UM on the developmental psychology of the transition to adulthood, which happens to be one of my main research areas. Thanks to John Schulenberg, who let me sit in, I was able to take in some of the "transition" conference in between some of Pat's sessions.

At the transition conference, I saw University of Minnesota sociologist Jeylan Mortimer, a Michigan Ph.D. whom I knew to have a connection to Pat (and, as it turned out, Pat's husband Gerry). I invited Jeylan to stop by the reception to see Pat and Gerry, which she did. Meanwhile, before the reception, I had told Pat to expect a "mystery guest" at the reception, which was Jeylan.

Saturday night, Pat and Gerry gathered with her former students at a local restaurant for dinner. One of the attendees was Dottie Walker, the administrative secretary for the social psych program when many of us were in graduate school. I have some electronic pictures from the dinner (taken by Lisa Brown) and other events of Pat's weekend. If anyone wants a copy, you can e-mail me (see my faculty website in the "Links" section in the upper right-hand part of the page).

Pat's Research on Campus Diversity

As most readers of this website would likely be aware, the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policies were challenged in two companion cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and were decided in June, 2003: Gratz v. Bollinger, involving LSA undergraduate admissions, and Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the Law School. (Bollinger is Lee Bollinger, the UM President at time the policies were implemented and now the president of Columbia University.) The Law School's admissions policy was upheld and the undergraduate one overturned; however, UM was able to craft a new undergraduate policy based on the Law School's.

An expert report by Pat, deriving from her research, was part of the materials of the cases. The following are excerpts from the report ("Empirical Results" section):

An important question to examine first is whether structural diversity -- the degree to which students of color are represented in the student body of a college -- shapes classroom diversity and opportunities to interact with diverse peers. It is through these diversity experiences that growth and development occur among college students. To test this hypothesis, I use data from the national CIRP data base...

Structural diversity had significant positive effects on classroom diversity and interactional diversity among all students. Attending a diverse college also resulted in more diverse friends, neighbors, and work associates nine years after college entry. This is strong evidence that structural diversity creates conditions that lead students to experience diversity in ways that would not occur in a more homogeneous student body.

Pat and colleagues have published some of this research in the Harvard Educational Review and the Journal of Social Issues. Further, as I recently learned via an ad for the University of Michigan Press in the Spring 2004 LSA Magazine, Pat has a new book out entitled Defending Diversity, co-authored with Jeffrey Lehman (former UM Law School dean and now president of Cornell University) and Earl Lewis (former dean of UM's Rackham Graduate School and recently named provost of Emory University).

Gretchen's and My Research with Pat

Like the aformentioned research on diversity, the studies that fellow student Gretchen Lopez and I worked on with Pat involved social issues and individuals' experiences in social contexts. In the end, we got a couple of conference papers out of our work. One of them, entitled "Attributional Complexity and Political Thinking," by Lopez, Reifman, and Gurin, was presented at the 1988 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is Gretchen's hometown, and I later lived in Buffalo when I had a position at the Research Institute on Addictions (1991-1997).

I still have the EPA program containing the abstract:

The hypothesis that cognitive complexity is reflected in political thinking was examined using questionnaires administered to 63 undergraduates. The questionnaires measured (a) individual differences in cognitive complexity of causal attributions, and (b) political beliefs about gender, race, and class disparities. As predicted, subjects with complex external attributional styles were more likely to identify societal discrimination, as opposed to personal motivation, as the cause of group disparities. The role of cognitive styles in political socialization is discussed.

Just a brief entry on the current National Basketball Association (NBA) finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Detroit Pistons.

Not only do the two cities parallel my personal road from undergraduate college at UCLA to graduate school at Michigan. It's also the case that during my last two years of graduate school, 1987-88 and 1988-89, the Lakers and Pistons met both years for the NBA championship. The Lakers won the first of these match-ups, and the Pistons the second. In fact, the NBA website has created retrospectives on both the 1987-88 and 1988-89 finals.

Then, as now, the Lakers were led by high-profile "celebrity" players (Magic and Kareem, then, and Shaq and Kobe, now). Likewise, then as now, the Pistons were known for their "blue collar," physical play under the basket (Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, then, Ben Wallace, now). The Pistons of yesteryear also featured Isiah Thomas.

In the years before making the finals, the Pistons had to battle through the Larry Bird-led Boston Celtics. In similar fashion, once the Pistons established themselves as the top team in the NBA's Eastern Conference, they had to fend off the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls, which they did, but only for a while.

I went to a game in March of 1987 at the Pontiac Silverdome (probably best known as the former home of football's Detroit Lions, but also the former home of the Pistons) in which Jordan scored 61 points against Detroit. Frankly, from seats up high in a football stadium, the players on the basketball court looked like 10 tiny insects.

Overall, during my years at Michigan, the baseball Tigers probably had the biggest following of the Detroit sports teams among the people I hung out with. They were consistent contenders and even won a World Series during this time, a topic I plan to address in the fall as the 20-year anniversary of the Tigers' 1984 world championship rolls around. The Pistons and Red Wings (hockey) would get some attention when they were doing well in the play-offs, whereas the Lions were consistently bad and got little attention.

Social Psychologists Who Spent Time at Both Michigan and UCLA

Each individual who goes into academia usually has the opportunity to establish affiliations with multiple universities. First, one must receive the Bachelor's degree, then a Ph.D. (sometimes with a Master's along the way, with the Master's and Ph.D. usually from the same university, but not always). Many new Ph.D.'s then take on a post-doctoral fellowship to gain additional training and research publications. Next, after the Ph.D. or post doc, often comes a faculty position at a university (although many Ph.D.'s also end up at research institutes, outside of a university system). Finally, over the course of a career, one may teach at multiple universities.

I received my Bachelor's degree in psychology at UCLA in 1984, then went on to Michigan for my Master's (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in social psychology.

Either toward the end of my time at UCLA or early in my Michigan days, it became clear that a large number of social psychologists had affiliations with both Michigan and UCLA in some combination. The late Hal Gerard, for one, was one of my advisors at UCLA and had received his Ph.D. at Michigan. The Michigan-UCLA connection is the theme of today's entry. [In a June 11 e-mail, Wayne Osgood has now coined the term "Bru-verines," a combination of UCLA Bruins and Michigan Wolverines.]

In preparing this entry, I gleaned some very useful information from Bert Raven, via an exchange of e-mails. Bert was one of the first social psychologists to establish ties to Michigan and UCLA. Bert received his Ph.D. in 1953 from Michigan. According to Bert's faculty webpage, "He has been a member of the faculty of the Psychology Department at UCLA since 1956, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, recalled and still active in research and instruction."

After I publicized my "Michigan 80s" website on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology e-mail discussion list, I heard from a number of UM alums, including Bert. After I mentioned my idea of one day doing an entry on the Michigan-UCLA connection, Bert e-mailed the following comments:

"It would be interesting to see your article on the Michigan/UCLA connection, which began first with migration of UM people to UCLA, and later with more movement in the opposite direction. To my knowledge, the first UM PhD to come to UCLA was Zan Sperber. I came shortly thereafter."

Below, I have compiled a list of everyone I can think of in social psychology (or related fields) who has passed through both Michigan and UCLA (please notify me with any additions). I do not know if Michigan-UCLA is the most common two-school combination among people in social psychology, but it would certainly have to be up there.

In thinking about why such a pervasive Michigan-UCLA connection would exist, the first reason that comes to my mind is that both social psychology programs are very large. UCLA currently has roughly 15 faculty in social psychology. Michigan's social psych faculty is probably about the same size, although on the current directory, fewer than 15 faculty are pictured, yet many more than 15 are listed in the roster (which includes people in related fields).

Having a large faculty would also be correlated with large enrollments at both the graduate and undergraduate level. This creates opportunities for an undergraduate at one of the schools to go to graduate school at the other, or a Ph.D. recipient at one to get a post doc or faculty position at the other.

In fact, Michigan and UCLA probably are among the nation's most active universities in providing post-doctoral training. UCLA's health psychology post-doctoral program alone has hosted at least two people with earlier degrees from Michigan. Various post-doctoral programs at UM's Institute for Social Research and in other units have hosted a number of young scholars over the years.

Other possible reasons for the connection? Other than the weather in winter, I think Michigan and UCLA have a lot of the same feel, both being cosmopolitan, large, state universities, with prominent athletic programs, and lots of other cultural activities going on. And, oh yes, both schools' colors are similar, maize and blue for Michigan, and blue and gold for UCLA!

The list of Michigan-UCLA scholars [including June 10 and 11 updates] follows (with web links where available):

UCLA undergraduate-UM graduate student

Bonnie Barber (developmental psych)
Paula Pietromonaco
Alan Reifman
Elissa Wurf

UCLA undergraduate-UM post doc/research scientist

Kathy Carnelley
Pete Ditto
Wayne Osgood

UCLA undergraduate-UM faculty member

Rich Gonzalez

UM undergraduate-UCLA graduate student

Pam Feldman

UM undergraduate-UCLA post doc/research scientist

Jennifer Lerner

UCLA graduate student-UM post doc/research scientist

Grant Marshall (clinical/personality/health)

UCLA graduate student-UM faculty member

Jacquelynne Eccles (developmental psych)
Vincent Hutchings (political science)
Donald Kinder (social psych Ph.D., political science faculty)
Nicholas Valentino (political science and communication studies)
Monique Ward (developmental psych)

UM graduate student-UCLA post doc/research scientist

Darrin Lehman
Roberta Mancuso
Lynne Sutherland

UM graduate student-UCLA faculty member

Elizabeth Bjork (cognitive psych)
Lawrence Bobo (sociology, now at Harvard)
Karin Elliott Brown (social work, now at Cal State L.A.)
Patricia Cheng (cognitive psych)
Andrew Fuligni (developmental psych)
Hal Gerard (deceased)
Oscar Grusky (sociology)
Julia Henly (social work/public policy, now at University of Chicago)
Tim Ketelaar (now at New Mexico State)
John Liebeskind (physiological psych, deceased)
Jerome Rabow (sociology)
Bert Raven
Bernie Weiner

Faculty at both UCLA and UM

Robert Bjork (cognitive psych)
Keith Holyoak (cognitive psych)
Neil Malamuth (communication studies)

Some readers might be thinking that subfields of psychology outside of social psych may be worth mentioning, as individuals in the other subfields would at least be colleagues in the same departments with social psychologists. The listing of sociologists and political scientists may strike some as a little far afield. However, as Bert Raven noted in a follow-up e-mail to my initial posting of the Michigan-UCLA list:

"As you may know, the [Michigan] social psychology PhD program accepted both psychology and sociology undergraduates as graduate students, then tried to make us into hybrids who could fit equally in departments of sociology and psychology."

Also, David Sears e-mailed me, noting the "very active political psychology group at UCLA, [that] has contributed to some connections with Michigan."

Thanks to the following individuals for providing additional names beyond the ones I initially listed: Kathy Carnelley, Matthew Hogben, Keith Holyoak, Bert Raven, and David Sears.

It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I must report the passing of Ziva Kunda, a 1985 Michigan Ph.D. recipient and for the last many years a professor at the University of Waterloo. I just learned of this sad development by reading the Society for Personality and Social Psychology newsletter Dialogue.

Ziva and I overlapped only one year in the social psychology program, so I did not know her as well as did others. I remember attending her wedding, probably some time in the summer of '85. I think it is a sign of her generosity and inclusiveness that she would have wanted to share the experience of her wedding with a wide variety of people in the Michigan program, even those with whom she might not have had as much contact. In the years following graduation, we would chat briefly every few years at conferences. Even during that one year of overlap during grad school, it was clear to me that Ziva was headed for greatness in the field, which her subsequent achievements strongly confirmed.

Her husband, Paul Thagard, has created a web memorial to Ziva. Beneath the picture of Ziva are several links, including remarks from her family and colleagues.

As a thriving college town, Ann Arbor would probably have enough variety and frequency of live musical performances to satisfy virtually anyone's tastes. From the mainly folk music at The Ark, to the classically oriented University Musical Society, to the rock/R&B available in various clubs around town, to even watching UM marching band practice at Elbel Field (named after Louis Elbel who, as an undergraduate, wrote "The Victors" fight song), the breadth of local music seems impressive.

I would like to focus the present entry on a style of music that, outside of large metropolitan areas, is relatively difficult to access: jazz. It is hard for me to imagine many other towns of 100,000 population that would have as rich a portfolio of jazz offerings as Ann Arbor (although I'm sure it helps Ann Arbor to be near the large metropolitan Detroit area).

In my five years at UM (1984-1989), I was able to see a number of prominent jazz artists live. My own tastes in jazz are somewhere in between the pop-oriented style of "smooth jazz" and traditional "straight ahead" jazz. I like improvisation, but also melody. I don't like what I consider the overly watered-down music of, for example, a Kenny G (who some critic accused of engaging in "safe sax").

With the above characterization in mind, the artists I saw in Ann Arbor (listed below) should come as no surprise. As can be seen from the web links associated with these artists, most are still going strong today.

One group I saw twice in Ann Arbor is Spyro Gyra, once in Hill Auditorium and once in the Power Center. The group, named after the algae, spirogira, sometimes sounds a little too pop-oriented to me, but they've never crossed the line, in my judgment.

Two other concerts I saw in Hill featured popular jazz guitarists. One was with the Pat Metheny Group, and another was with Earl Klugh (I actually saw Klugh during a 1982 visit to Ann Arbor before I actually was going to school at UM; Klugh was also scheduled to play on campus in 1986, but cancelled).

Metheny, through his use of guitar synthesizers and accompaniment by band mates from around the world (who are each usually talented on multiple instruments), manages to create a sound that is both unique (as in "that's the Pat Metheny sound") and different (even different passages within the same song can sound very disparate). I hope that makes sense.

A couple of years after seeing the Pat Metheny Group, I saw a group headlined by Lyle Mays, the keyboardist of the Metheny group and a frequent co-composer with Pat, play at (as I recall) the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater. As best as I can recall, Mays was accompanied on drums by Peter Erskine, and on bass by Marc Johnson.

Klugh, on the other hand, plays only the acoutic guitar, with his trademark rich melodies. Though probably most identified with jazz, Klugh would also fit in well, for example, on a stage with country music guitarist Chet Atkins.

I can recall going to three other jazz concerts at the Power Center. One was with saxophonist Michael Brecker, then starting out on a solo career after years with groups such as Steps Ahead. One of the members of Brecker's band that night was fiery guitarist Mike Stern.

I also was able to see two legendary jazz trumpeters, now deceased, at the Power Center, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie (in separate concerts). Gillespie, famous for his bent trumpet and puffed cheeks, was accompanied by a big band. Davis, well into his pop-funk phase, lived up to his reputation for aloofness. As one example, he never introduced the members of his band.

A few years after that concert, Miles Davis walked into a Santa Monica, California restaurant with a group of men, as my family and I were dining there during one of my school breaks. When I got back to Ann Arbor, I told Claude Steele, a jazz buff and former UM professor (now at Stanford), about seeing Davis. I think Claude was impressed.

As implied above, guitar is probably my favorite jazz instrument. At The Ark, I saw a young, up-and-coming electric guitarist named Kevin Eubanks (later to become the Tonight Show bandleader). In his early career, Eubanks went back and forth between pop-oriented tunes (including some cover versions) and some serious, fairly complex jazz standards. The night I saw him, I recall, he stuck to the latter.

I also saw guitarist John Scofield, with his jazz/bluesy sound, at a club called the Blind Pig (if you get a pop-up about installing special language characteristics to be able to read the Blind Pig's website, you can just hit "Cancel" and still see the page). Earlier in his career, Scofield had been a member of the Miles Davis band. (On the subject of Miles Davis, I cannot resist repeating a line from comedian Steven Wright, who wondered if in Europe, the famous jazz trumpeter was known as "Kilometers Davis.")

Ann Arbor has a jazz club called the Bird of Paradise. The only performance I recall seeing there was that of Emily Remler, a young guitarist who died only a few years later. Many jazz guitarists' styles have some similarity to the great Wes Montgomery, including perhaps to some degree Metheny and Eubanks. Remler probably came the closest, however, with one of her albums entitled "East to Wes."

I also enjoyed seeing the Brazilian trio Azymuth at the Michigan Theater. As with the aforementioned Lyle Mays performance, a piano-bass-drums trio (a traditional rhythm section) is a different sound from a group led by a guitar or saxophone. I find, however, that the interplay between the musicians is heightened in such an arrangement.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that in no way was the jazz talent limited to touring, out-of-town performers. Jon Krosnick, who overlapped with me for one year in the graduate program (1984-85) and who has gone on to become one of the most prominent scholars of political attitudes (within the hybrid field of political psychology) at Ohio State University, is an accomplished jazz drummer. Jon was part of a group called the Lunar Glee Club during his Ann Arbor days and in more recent years, has been a member of the group Charged Particles (Jon is the one on the left in the picture that will come up).

I don't know if that many people were as "jazzed" about this aspect of the Ann Arbor music scene as I certainly was, but I consider this to be one of the more important cultural components of my UM days.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, a case emanating out of Topeka, Kansas. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the case, the social psychology program at the University of Kansas will be hosting a conference May 13-14 entitled Fifty Years after Brown v. Board of Education: Social Psychological Research Applied to the Problems of Racism and Discrimination. The Brown v. Board conference will then spill over into the annual Social Psychologists Around the Midwest (SPAM) meeting May 14-16, also at KU.

As one might infer from the inclusion of this item on this board, the KU events will have a strong Michigan flavor. Among the KU social psychology faculty members hosting the events are Monica Biernat and Chris Crandall, two 1980s Michigan Ph.D. recipients. Further, among the speakers at the Brown event are current Michigan psychology professors Patricia Gurin (Emerita) and Rob Sellers, both of whom also received their Ph.D.'s at UM (clickable web links for Monica, Chris, Rob, and a large number of other 80s-era Ph.D. alumni are available in my January and February 2004 postings; see right-hand side of page midway down for links to the archives).

Rob returned to UM several years ago in the personality psych program after an initial stint on the faculty at the University of Virginia (the reason I mention this is that my younger brother Steve, a sociology major, took a course from Rob at UVa).

I plan to do a more extensive entry in the coming weeks marking the two-year anniversary of Pat's retirement celebration in Ann Arbor.

Every April during the 25 years from 1973-1997, something everyone in the UM social psychology community could look forward to was the annual Katz-Newcomb Lecture. Named in honor of the eminent social psychologists Daniel Katz (1903-1998) and Theodore Newcomb (1903-1984), the lecture always brought a distinguished figure to Ann Arbor. Social psychology is of course a subdiscipline in both psychology and sociology, and the organizing of the event and discipline of the speakers appear to have been divided relatively equally over the years between psychology and sociology.

(Just as a side note, this website has concentrated on social psychology in UM's psychology department, as that's where I received my training. To get a feel for sociological social psychology, interested readers may wish to look at the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, which is published by the American Sociological Association, or at a 1977 article by UM sociologist James House entitled "The three faces of social psychology," Sociometry, volume 40, pp. 161-177.)

UM's Bentley Historical Library has received the papers of both Katz and Newcomb, and in conjunction, has prepared elaborate biographical sketches of each (Katz, Newcomb). In the interest of space, I'll leave it to people to read these biographies and see all that Katz and Newcomb accomplished. As you read along, you'll be reminded of social psychological classics, such as Katz and Braley's landmark research on stereotypes and Newcomb's study of political attitudes at Bennington College. (In the biographies, you'll notice some fairly large gaps of white space between paragraphs; the documents do not necessarily end at such gaps, so be sure to read to the very bottom!) Another reading I would recommend is the following book, with a posthumous authorship by Newcomb:

Alwin, D.F., Cohen, R.L., and Newcomb, T.M. (1991). Political attitudes over the life span: The Bennington women after fifty years. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

During my years in the graduate program (1984-85 to 1988-89) at least, the Katz-Newcomb was always more than just a lecture. The main talk would take place on a Friday late afternoon. Afterwards, there would usually be a party or a large group of people would go out to dinner. No questions would be taken after the speaker's lecture. Rather, one would have to attend a Saturday morning brunch/seminar to be able to participate in discussion with the speaker. Thus, the Katz-Newcomb filled up a major part of a weekend.

To varying degrees, alumni of the two (psychology and sociology) programs would come back to attend the Katz-Newcomb. The only one I came back for was the 1997 edition, the 25th in the series. By that time (as best I could tell), I was the only out-of-town alumnus in attendance. (I try to get back to Ann Arbor once every year or two, but usually in the summer.)

As already alluded to, after existing as an annual lecture for 25 years (1973-1997), the Katz-Newcomb Lecture now is more of an ad hoc event. Here is one web link to a more recent instantiation of the Katz-Newcomb.

To cap off this retrospective on the Katz-Newcomb, I have attempted to include as comprehensive a list of speakers as possible for the years 1973-1997 (below). Based on my own memories, information I've been able to locate on the web, and the helpful recollections of participants in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) electronic discussion group (listed by name at the bottom), I've constructed a partial list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers. Clearly, some additional work is needed to finish the list, but I wanted to get this entry up in a timely fashion. I will continue to refine the list. Any information that would help fill in the gaps or correct any errors would be greatly appreciated.

[Update, August 5, 2004: While going through some piles in my office, I just found a complete list of Katz-Newcomb lecturers -- and titles -- covering 1973-1992. I have updated the list below, accordingly. The document I found is probably an enclosure with the invitation I -- and probably all program alumni -- received for the 1993 talk.]

1973 Ivan Steiner, Whatever happened to the group in social psychology?
1974 Henri Tajfel, When do we want to be different? And from social mobility to social movements.
1975 Harold Kelley, Action and perception: An attribution analysis of social interaction.
1976 Herbert Simon, Why cognitive psychology is social psychology, and vice versa.
1977 Erving Goffman, The lecture.
1978 Dorwin Cartwright, Contemporary social psychology in historical perspective.
1979 Amos Tversky, On the psychology of possible worlds, and Daniel Kahneman, Decision-making: Rationality and psychophysics.
1980 Roger Brown, Natural categories and basic objects in the domain of persons.
1981 Phil Converse, Generalization and the social psychology of "other worlds."
1982 Shelley Taylor, The cognitive management of life-threatening illness: Dynamics of psychological homeostasis.
1983 Jerome Bruner, The pragmatics of language and the language of pragmatics.
1984 Judith Rodin, The era of the women's revolution: Why have weight obsessions escalated?
1985 Ralph Turner, Self in society: Who am I really?
1986 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Dilemmas and paradoxes in organizational change.
1987 David Sears, Group interest: A symbolic politics perspective.
1988 Edward E. (Ned) Jones, Attributional anomalies during social interaction: Some consequences of perceiving while acting.
1989 William Gamson, Media discourse and political thinking.
1990 Walter Mischel, Searching for personality: Toward a conditional analysis of dispositions.
1991 Kristin Luker, The social construction of human crises: The case of teenage pregnancy.
1992 Bob Zajonc, Cognition, communication and consciousness.
1993 Karl E. Weick
1994 Jane Allyn Piliavin
1995 Susan T. Fiske
1996 Lawrence Bobo
1997 Herb Kelman

I would like to thank the following people for offering their recollections: Chris Crandall, Phoebe Ellsworth, Donelson Forsyth, Markus Kemmelmeier, Arthur Miller, Chuck Miller, Kerth O'Brien, Howard Schuman, and Elissa Wurf.

Just a relatively brief entry this week. One of my aims in creating this website is to inspire alumni of other social psychology graduate programs to create retrospective websites on their programs. It seemed likely that there would already be other historical sites on the web devoted to various psychology departments and/or programs therein. Up to this point, however, I had not really done much searching in this area.

As often seems to happen, it's when searching for something else totally unrelated that one finds an item of interest. That's how I recently came across the Historical Archives of the Department of Psychology at Florida State University.

These archives include a large number of different write-ups, focusing on the different eras, programs, department chairs, other prominent people, and even the buildings that have housed the department. Among the essays is a history of social psychology at FSU, written by Jack Brigham.

To follow up on this discovery, I went to the Google search engine and typed the following in the seach field: "history" "psychology department". Over 77,000 hits came up. In looking at the first few screens of hits, however, it seemed that in most cases, when a given department provided a history, it consisted of a single, relatively brief page on the entire department, unlike Florida State's approach of providing essays on multiple facets of its department.

I'm sure there are other psychology departments and/or social psychology programs out there that have extensive historical websites. If anyone knows of any, please e-mail the links to me (via my faculty webpage, which is among the links in the upper right portion of this page).

This semester, I am teaching a graduate course on structural equation modeling (SEM), an advanced statistical application. This is my third time teaching the course at Texas Tech University and my fourth time overall, as I taught it in 1996 at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York), while I was a researcher at the Research Institute on Addictions.

In developing my lectures, I draw heavily from notes I took myself while taking SEM at Michigan in the Winter 1988 semester from Frank Andrews and Laura Klem. I also took multivariate analysis from Frank and Laura in Fall 1985. I save a lot of stuff, so I have syllabi, notebooks, an extensive set of handouts, and my graded assignments from these two courses.

The classes met twice a week. The way Frank and Laura co-taught their courses was that Frank would lecture one day on the substantive aspects of the relevant statistical technique, and then Laura would teach us how to implement the technique on the computer.

Frank was the clearest, most enthusiastic lecturer one would ever want to hear. In addition to the lecture itself, Frank would hand out extensive bibliographies on the topic, as well as sheets with examples of the technique that had been worked out.

I can't help but think that teaching computer applications of statistical programs must have been so much harder and more time-consuming in the 80s than is currently the case. Back then, data sets were stored on magnetic tape and implementing the commands just to access the data you wanted to work on was a not insubstantial task. Further, we would have to hand type our statistical commands, which usually were quite cryptic. In more recent years, students, faculty members, and other data analysts have had access to much more user-friendly programs that give you an actual spread sheet of your data right on your screen and allow you to select commands from menus. Also, data sets can be transmitted via the Internet and stored/carried on disk.

Despite the seemingly more cumbersome nature of computer data analyses 15-20 years ago compared to now, Laura managed to pull it off. Further, she would use her encyclopedic knowledge of the statistical/data analytic literature in grading our papers. On one paper I just pulled out, for example, she directed me to "See Kenny page 143..."

Frank Andrews died in 1992. To honor Frank, the UM's Survey Research Center created a fellowship to help people attend the Summer Institute. A brief summary of Frank's career is available at this link.

Laura Klem is still around at UM, as seen in this webpage, as a Senior Research Associate with the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research. In fact, she will be teaching a short course on applied structural equation modeling this upcoming May 17 - 20, 2004.

The aforementioned course announcement website notes that, "Enrollees will receive substantial handouts." I couldn't imagine it any other way!

Michigan's men's basketball team last night won the championship of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), essentially a consolation bracket for teams that did not get into the more prestigious National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament.

In doing so, the Wolverines repeated their NIT championship of 20 years earlier. Some of you may be wondering what is the significance of this to Michigan social psychology. The answer is that on the very evening the Wolverines defeated Notre Dame to win the 1984 NIT title, I had just arrived in Ann Arbor to visit UM as a potential graduate school. I thus watched the game on television from an Ann Arbor hotel room.

Accompanied by my mother and brother, I used my spring break from UCLA to visit four midwestern (Big Ten) universities to help me decide where to pursue graduate studies in social psychology. Although I grew up in L.A., my family has strong midwestern roots, as my mother's side of the family is from Chicago (I was actually born in the Windy City, but didn't live there very long). All the schools I visited had strong social psychology programs, and these just seemed like they'd be interesting places to go to school.

The first school I visited was Northwestern. One of the faculty there at the time, whom I met, was Geoff Fong, a recent Michigan social psych Ph. D. (a link to Geoff's current facullty webpage at the University of Waterloo is included in one of my earlier postings).

Next, we went to Indiana University in Bloomington. One of the faculty members I met there was Jim Sherman, who is still at IU. Jim is also a Michigan Ph.D. (1967). I was beginning to see a trend. I figured that if Michigan Ph.D. recipients were getting faculty positions at these nice universities, UM might be the best place to go. (I had also visited one school on the West Coast, UC Santa Barbara, and one of the professors I met there, Chuck McClintock, was also a Michigan Ph.D.)

Michigan was third on the itinerary, and we ended the trip at Ohio State. I liked all four schools I visited on the midwestern tour, but then and now Michigan seemed to be the best choice for me.

I still run into Geoff Fong and Jim Sherman at various conferences. Jim and I have really renewed our acquaintance in recent years, as he co-organized an informal sports statistics/decision-making conference in 2003 in Scottsdale, Arizona, timed to coincide with spring-training, naturally. I was fortunate enough to be invited, based presumably on the attention my hot hand website (which involves statistical analyses of sports streaks) had gotten.

For whatever reason, even growing up on the West Coast, I've had a fascination with the Big Ten for as long as I can remember (perhaps because the Pacific Ten and Big Ten winners always met in the Rose Bowl). Those of you who want to get more of a flavor for the towns, campuses, and traditions of the Big Ten (pre-Penn State) would probably enjoy the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood (available pretty cheaply over the Internet).

The March 2004 Ann Arbor Observer magazine had an interesting story on what had become of the town's music/record/CD stores over the last four decades. I used to pick up the Observer regularly when I lived in Ann Arbor and then when I moved away in 1989, I signed up for a subscription that I've maintained to this day.

According to the article, Ann Arbor was at one time "the Midwest's mecca for recorded music buyers."

Apparently referring to various points in the span of time from the 1960s through the 1990s, the article notes:

"On Liberty Street there were the Liberty Music Shop, Borders Books and Music, Schoolkids' Records, and SKR Classical. Around the corner on State Street were Discount Records and Harmony House. Across campus on South University, there was Tower Records. At their peak, those seven stores alone took up almost 40,000 square feet of prime retail space and took in approximately $15 million annually."

Now, however:

"For the past couple of years, Borders has been the only store of the original seven still standing, and its music department is a joke among collectors..."

Schoolkids has survived also, but in a different location (below Bivouac on State Street) and with a new name, Schoolkids in Exile.

The article also notes that two venerable used-record stores, Wazoo and PJ's, have remained. (I remember meeting PJ.) There's also another used-record store called Encore Recordings.

Why the huge decline? As the article notes, the combination of online purchasing of CDs and downloading of music cut into the stores' business.

I bought a decent amount of music (cassette tapes) during my UM years, but was never a huge purchaser. My reaction to the changing nature of the recorded music industry would be as follows. Ann Arbor is a great walking town and being able to engage in window-shopping or actual shopping is part of the atmosphere. To the extent that music stores seem to be disappearing from this scene, then a portion of the town's history and social fabric will have been lost.

Visiting with Michigan-Linked Developmental Psych Folks at Society for Research on Adolescence Conference

Just got back from the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in Baltimore. I added another Pizzeria Uno to my national dining list (see earlier posting on my favorite Ann Arbor restaurants) and also took the tour at the Baltimore Orioles' baseball park at Camden Yards.

As I've alluded to previously in connection with the overlap between the social and personality psychology programs at Michigan and the joint psychology-social work programs, boundaries between intellectually kindred programs tend to be very permeable. This is also the case, to some extent, for the social and developmental psychology programs, with extensive research in social development.

I personally was a late comer to the social-developmental intersection, in fact not until my postdoctoral work at the Research Institute on Addictions in Buffalo from 1991-1997. It was there that I applied my social psychology training to the study of adolescent and young-adult drinking and really began incorporating literatures in adolescent development and family studies into my research. The first SRA conference I attended was in 1996, and this research track propelled me to a faculty position in Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University.

Back when I was in grad school at Michigan from 1984-1989, I related to the developmental psychology students pretty much exclusively on a social/collegial basis. Now when we see each other, we talk about common research interests.

Jacque (pronounced Jackie) Eccles, who has spent most of her 30-year faculty career at Michigan, continues to lead an extensive program of studies involving numerous graduate students and postdocs under the rubric of the Gender & Achievement Research Program (GARP). Not only that, but Jacque served this past biennium as the President of SRA.

I ran into several current and former GARP researchers at the conference. The first person I always look for at SRA is Bonnie Barber, with whom I was friends not only during graduate school at Michigan, but also as undergraduates at UCLA (the Michigan-UCLA connection, of which Jacque Eccles is also a part, is a topic on which I plan to do a future entry). Bonnie has been at the University of Arizona for the last several years, and also remains an "affiliate" to GARP according to the aformentioned GARP web link. I also saw Jan Jacobs, now a Vice-Provost at Penn State and also a GARP affiliate.

Other GARP researchers and affiliates I saw (including some I met for the first time) included Oksana Malanchuk (who overlapped with me in the social psych grad program), Katie Jodl, Steve Peck, Robert Roeser, Mina Vida (web links for these individuals are available at the GARP site), and Pamela Frome.

I also had a chance to visit briefly with Christy Miller Buchanan, who was in the same course with me on socialization at UM (taught by Joe Veroff and Libby Douvan). Among Christy's numerous publications, she authored the following major one with Jacque Eccles that I use as lecture material in my Problems of Adolescence course at Texas Tech:

Buchanan, C. M., Eccles, J. S., & Becker, J. B. (1992). Are adolescents the victims of raging hormones?: Evidence for activational effects of hormones on moods and behavior at adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 62-107.

Another contemporary of mine from grad school days I saw was Liz Mazur. We entered the same year, so presumably took first-year proseminar and stats together.

Also, I saw two leading researchers who study longitudinal change in adolescent problem behaviors, Wayne Osgood (another UCLA-Michigan person), who was a Research Scientist in the UM's Institute for Social Research on Marty Gold's delinquency project in the 1980s and is now at Penn State, and John Schulenberg, who since 1991 has been with UM's Monitoring the Future study of high school drug use.

Lastly, to close out this maize-and-blue weekend, I met an interesting person sitting in the very next seat to me on the flight from Baltimore to Dallas-Ft. Worth (a leading connecting hub). He looked to be reading some academic-type papers, so I asked him if he indeed was an academic. The gentleman, named James Adams, turned out to be a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Michigan Ph.D. at that! He noted that he had taken a group behavior class from social psychologist Gene Burnstein while at UM.

"Michigan Thursday" Clothing Tradition

Today's Thursday, so I thought I'd tell everyone about the "Michigan Thursday" tradition I started shortly after arriving as a faculty member at Texas Tech University in the fall of 1997.

As early as my Texas Tech job interview in February of '97, I was told by some of the faculty members in the department (Human Development and Family Studies) that faculty and staff members throughout the campus were requested to wear the school colors of red and black on Fridays. As someone who has always had a lot of school spirit, I have adhered to the "Red and Black Fridays" dress code at probably a 99.99% rate during my seven years (thus far) at Texas Tech. Not only that; I sometimes nag new faculty members about wearing red and black on Fridays (in a friendly kind of way).

I don't know why, but early on it somehow occurred to me that I could start my own tradition of wearing maize and blue University of Michigan clothing on Thursdays, hence "Michigan Thursday." Probably the most fun aspect of Michigan Thursday is the reaction of students in my undergraduate classes, whom I inform about my tradition right at the beginning of the semester. The students seem to get a kick out of it, and I've even had a couple of students join in with me in wearing Michigan items (e.g., shirt, cap) on Thursdays. One of my departmental faculty colleagues told me once that her father had attended UM Law School. While up in Ann Arbor a few years ago, I bought my colleague a "Michigan Law" T-shirt for her birthday, and she's worn it a few times on Thursdays.

Upon learning of the tradition, people ask me if I have a "UCLA Wednesday" in honor of my undergraduate alma mater. I don't (it would mean having a majority -- three-fifths -- of my weekday clothing decisions governed by rules and I don't want to cross that line). I do, however, frequently wear UCLA clothing on an ad hoc basis.

Talking about school spirit, an article about a teaching activity I organized with colleagues from 20 colleges and universities around the nation on measuring school spirit has just come out. With a primary focus on how to define and measure a conceptual variable (in this case, school spirit), we had students in our research and statistics classes go around our respective campuses counting the number of students wearing school garb, displaying school decals on their cars, etc. The reference is shown below or you can contact me to receive a faxed copy (see right-hand side of page for web link to me, which contains an e-mail link).

School Spirit Study Group (A. Reifman, organizer). (2004). Measuring school spirit: A national teaching exercise. Teaching of Psychology, 31, 18-21.