1960s experiment left mark on social sciences

BY SHERRI CRUZ
2014-05-14 15:40:15
The research was sparked by a compelling set of black-and-white
photographs of the Farm, a bizarre and failed experiment that took
place at UC Irvine over about six months in 1968 and 1969.
It wound up as the focus of an art exhibit and then a book, Learning
by Doing at The Farm, published this year by UCI doctoral students
Robert Kett and Anna Kryczka.
On a quest to uncover the history of social sciences at UCI, dean Bill
Maurer shared the photos with Kett, who shared them with Kryczka.
Kett and Kryczka had a similar reaction: This happened?
Given the long-standing conservative image of Orange County, the
photos of people making crafts in a communal setting on undeveloped
ranch land at UCI are both intriguing and strange.
The photos portray an ambitious and bold experiment launched by
UCIs School of Social Sciences, the largest school at UCI with 5,000
undergrads currently enrolled. The intent was to come up with a
universal theory of cultures.
About 15 indigenous craftspeople, including pottery makers and weavers, were brought from Samoa,
Mexico and Guatemala to live and teach their crafts at the Farm.
The setup at the Farm was intended to simulate living conditions in developing nations. As part of the
experiment, students and faculty learned to speak Yucatec Maya.
They really wanted to do social sciences in a whole new way, Maurer said. Founding dean of social
sciences James March wanted to shake things up, Maurer said.
When you shake things up, some crazy stuff can happen, Maurer said. I dont want to diminish the
importance of the Farm because it was really truly important for its time. It did leave a lasting legacy. But it
was also a really crazy experiment.
The visitors lived in small houses and sheds under a cover of trees. They also built homes a Mayan
house made of adobe soil and an oval-shaped Yucatecan house with a thatched roof.
Communal living at the Farm drew counterculture types hippies who werent part of UCI. They lived in
chicken coops, an abandoned bus and self-made structures, alongside some of the faculty and students.
One of the Samoan craftsmen, known as UliUli, built a canoe that was launched in Newport Harbor and is
hanging in the Social Sciences Tower at UCI.
Kryczka and Kett uncovered two-hour footage of UliUli launching his boat and taking a tour of the yachts in
Newport Harbor. There is no soundtrack with the film, leaving viewers to imagine his thoughts. The
imagery is quite striking, Kryczka said.
The Farm was conceived by the late UCI professor Duane Metzger. Faculty wanted to acclimate
anthropology students to fieldwork in a more controlled environment.
They brought the research field to the university. The faculty had previously established relationships with
the native people who were brought to the Farm when they did their respective field work as graduate
students.
Faculty also wanted to make and measure observations in a more hard-science way, like a chemist or
biologist might, by isolating the subject.
The Farm informants, the anthropological word for research subjects, were the native people who lived
there. There is little information about how they felt about being participants.
At the heart of the research was the newfangled computer. Academia was discovering ways that
mathematical modeling could create, analyze and measure observational data.
They thought through intensive observation they could arrive at a universal theory of culture, Kett said.
Their hypothesis was is if we isolate people as representative of different cultures in controlled contexts,
then well be much better able to understand the cultural beliefs and action systems that motivate them,
Kett said.
What were interested in is how that dream gets disrupted, Kett said. Thats what Kett and Kryczkas book
delves into.
Instead of yielding a universal theory of culture, you get a counterculture commune at the farm when late
60s communalists and hippies are attracted to this place for very different reasons.
The counterculture of the 1960s transformed the experiment, instead of the experiment yielding theories
about culture.
While the experiment seems bizarre, it needs to be examined in context. Founded in 1965, UCI was a
fledgling university aspiring to be bold. Founding Chancellor Daniel Aldrich allowed faculty freedom to
experiment and imagine new ways to teach. UCI was designed to be the engine of Irvine, dubbed the city
of intellect at the time.
Within a broader context, UCI was birthed during a time of social upheaval 1960s anti-establishment
culture was in full swing amid the Vietnam and Cold wars, space exploration, and the Civil Rights and
womens rights movements.
Communes were a new idea in the U.S.; thousands were popping up with all sorts of purposes and
ideologies, Kett said.
The commune at the Farm was about growing food, building homes, interacting with native craftspeople
and living an alternative lifestyle as the threat of nuclear war loomed.
This kind of primitive way of living, at that moment in the Cold War moment, was an important
reference point, Kett said. People were interested in learning how to rebuild in a post-nuclear world.
The Farm experiment ended after becoming troublesome for UCI administration. The commune was seen
as a threat to public health a den of drug use, promiscuity and other sorts of mischief, Kryczka said.
Dean March left in 1970 for Stanford University, where he retired as an international management
professor.
And though the experiment failed in its purpose, it succeeded in other ways.
One of the residual effects of the experiment on social sciences and UCI as a whole is the way research is
done collaboratively at UCI across schools and departments.
The Farm creators decided that the future of education was going to be interdisciplinary, meaning
representatives from all of the educational fields, such as psychology and anthropology, needed to solve
problems together, Maurer said.
Social sciences was founded without departments. The idea was it would unleash all kinds of creativity, it
would unleash cross fertilization among fields to tackle the pressing problems of the day, Maurer said. The
School of Social Sciences has departments today, but it still holds fast to an interdisciplinary approach.
There are 22 centers at the school today that provide the support for faculty to work together, he said.
Many of the people who were involved in the Farm went on to distinguished academic careers, Maurer
said. He was recently contacted by two original student researchers at the Farm who plan to study how the
experiment affected their peers. One is John Van Maanen, a retired professor of organizational studies at
MIT Sloan School of Management. The other is Lynn Mather, a law professor at State University of New
York Buffalo Law School.
Those who stayed in academia all went on to change their own fields, Maurer said.
The other legacy of the Farm is it reinforced the importance of learning outside the classroom.
It did instill among the faculty that we should be doing experiential learning, that it shouldnt be just lecture
and books, Maurer said.
These are some of the things that drew Kryczka and Kett to study at UCI after graduating from their
respective Illinois schools, Knox College and Northwestern University.
You can easily cross pollinate, Kryczka said.
Irvine is a place that has fame in very funny corners of academia, Kett said.
Contact the writer: scruz@ocregister.com
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