In a break from tradition, the Burnham Committee also wishes to award an Honorable
Mention to Dr. Jamie Cohen-Cole for his stimulating essay on the perceived problem
of mid-twentieth-century specialization, in both intellectual circles and American
society at large. Examining Harvard's 1945 General Education in Free Society,
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), and the struggle waged over the structure
of social scientific disciplines at Harvard in the mid-1940s, Cohen-Cole documents
academics' convergence around a solution: cultivation of the "right-thinking
individual," a broad-minded, flexible, democratic subject able to withstand,
and thrive in, modern American society.
Jamie Cohen-Cole holds a 2003 Ph.D. in History of Science from Princeton University
and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of History and a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Fishbein Center for the History of Science at the University Chicago.
2005 Burnham Award Committee: Ellen Herman, Sarah Igo, and Deborah Weinstein