As part of a 1983 Items symposium on the history of research support for the social sciences in the United States, Harvey Brooks discusses how government funding for social science has shaped its postwar development. Brooks’ essay provides background for the issues discussed in our current forum on Kenneth Prewitt’s “Can Social Science Matter?” He especially emphasizes public support for social science in juxtaposition to the natural sciences in the 1950s, and changes brought on by the upheavals of the 1960s and beyond.

Published in March of 1969, this essay by then SSRC president Henry Riecken grapples with many of the same issues raised by Prewitt and his interlocutors in “Can Social Science Matter?” The major upheavals of that historical moment are not discussed in any detail in Riecken’s essay, but they clearly influenced the timing and the content, as Riecken discusses how social science can contribute to addressing public problems, the differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences and engineering in this regard, and the limits to the ways in which social science can contribute given how it is organized and incentivized. Riecken concludes with an extremely prescient analysis of the ethical dimensions of certain kinds of social science work, specifically social experimentation and the collection and use of what we now call “big data.”

A new essay by Richard Arum and Eleanor Blair, and responses from Lisa Anderson and Thomas Schwandt to Kenneth Prewitt’s inaugural Items essay, engage in different ways with the social responsibility of higher education. Here, we republish a 1993 essay from our archives by then-president David Featherman about role of higher education as it was being debated in the early post–Cold War era. There are more than a few echoes of today’s debates in Featherman’s account, which engages with questions of internationalization, scholarly collaboration, and student learning in a globalized context.