The Posse Stops a "Softie"

By Ezra Bowen

In a December issue, Science magazine likened Yale Mathematician Serge Lang, a proud and contentious member of the august National Academy of Sciences, to a "sheriff of scholarship, leading a posse of academics on a hunt for error." Last week the sheriff rode again. At the NAS annual meeting in its imposing marble headquarters in Washington, the normally stately proceedings were shattered by an acrimonious debate in which Lang led a successful drive to refuse membership to a distinguished Harvard political scientist: Samuel P. Huntington, director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and president of the American Political Science Association.

Though entry comes hard to the 1,500-member NAS, essentially an honor society that doubles as policy adviser to the Federal Government, rarely have the incumbents barred so weighty a nominee as Huntington. The main objection raised by the zealous Lang and his supporters: an allegedly specious use of mathematics in Huntington's work to quantify unquantifiable material. For example, Lang cites a passage in the best-known of Huntington's dozen books, Political Order in Changing Societies, in which the ratio of aspiration to % satisfaction was examined in 62 countries. "The overall correlation between frustration and instability," Huntington wrote, "was 0.50." Says Lang: "This is utter nonsense. How does Huntington measure things like social frustration? Does he have a social-frustration meter? I object to the academy's certifying as science what are merely political opinions."

Beyond such charges, what really seemed at issue was a long-standing tension in U.S. academic circles between two groups -- physical, or "hard," scientists such as chemists, physicists and biologists, whose work traces cause-effect relationships and lends itself to mathematical proofs, and social, or "soft," scientists such as sociologists, psychologists and political scientists, whose work involves speculation about human motives and mixes subjective evaluation with fact. A political scientist, for example, cannot prove mathematically that Hitler's political regime was an inevitable consequence of Germany's post-World War I disarray, but he can make a pretty good case. Nevertheless, claim hard-liners, softies often resort to equations and logarithmic curves to try to prove such points, thereby not only confusing their own issues but also traducing the methods of pure science.

Another component in Huntington's rejection seems to have been his political loyalties, though Lang denies this. A conservative, Huntington has consulted with the Pentagon, served on the National Security Council, supported the Viet Nam War and done research underwritten by the CIA -- all anathema in the liberal-leaning world of academe.

In the Washington debates, Huntington drew some vehement support, particularly among the NAS's 177 social scientists, who have been admitted since membership criteria were widened 16 years ago to provide a broader social context for counsel to the Government. One social-scientist member said in a speech, "His work is quite impressive, and he is a very fine scholar and a good scientist." After the vote, Huntington defended equations in his writings as "simply a way of summing up a complicated argument." He added, "Good Lord, any good social scientist knows the things he studies are constantly changing, full of exceptions and contradictions. People are more difficult to study than atoms."

Several NAS members faulted Lang, 59, for violating the traditional probity of the academy's proceedings. Says Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University (and a Huntington backer): "In my 20 years in the academy, I've never seen a member who felt it necessary to start such a public fracas." Since winning a postponement of Huntington's initial 1986 nomination, Lang has fired off three anti-Huntington mailings to the full membership. "Just imagine," says NAS Member Julian Wolpert, professor of geography at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, "if we could get all that letter- writing energy into a campaign against Gaddafi, say, or for human rights. I wish he'd pick his causes better."

Nevertheless, at least a third of the 527 members meeting in Washington (the proportion needed to bar an election) seem to have been swayed by Lang's underlying argument that social scientists, however eminent, may not belong to the NAS and perhaps should form an academy of their own. Says one physical scientist: "It's not enough to be excellent. One has to meet the norms of science as well." But that view leaves wide open the question of who, inside the NAS or out, ought to define those norms.

With reporting by Robert Ajemian/Boston