Harvey J. Graff

Harvey J. Graff (born 1949) is a comparative

Career

This section of a poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Harvey J. Graff" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message )

Harvey J. Graff received the

The University of Toronto

in 1975.

Before coming to his current residence at Ohio State University in 2004, Graff taught at the University of Texas at Dallas from 1975 to 1998 and the University of Texas at San Antonio from 1998 to 2004.^[4] He was a strong proponent of quantitative social science methods in history. He was elected the president of the Social Science History Association (1999-2000). In his presidential address Graff argued that traditional historians had successfully counterattacked against quantification and the innovations of the "new social history":

The case against the new mixed and confused a lengthy list of ingredients, including the following: history’s supposed loss of identity and humanity in the stain of social science, the fear of subordinating quality to quantity, conceptual and technical fallacies, violation of the literary character and biographical base of “good” history (rhetorical and aesthetic concern), loss of audiences, derogation of history rooted in “great men” and “great events,” trivialization in general, a hodge-podge of ideological objections from all directions, and a fear that new historians were reaping research funds that might otherwise come to their detractors. To defenders of history as they knew it, the discipline was in crisis, and the pursuit of the new was a major cause.^[5]

Books

The Literacy Myth

Written in 1979, this book studies 19th century educators who supported the "literacy myth", as Graff calls it, which is the assumption that literacy translates to economic, social, and cultural success. Graff suggests that this myth views literacy as a necessity for success, and a means to an economic, social, or political end. His research contradicts this, suggesting “that connections between schooling and social mobility are not natural ones".^[6] He goes on to say that reality contradicts inborn assumptions correlating literacy and success.^[6]

Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America

The assumption has been made by scholars and the general populace alike “that children have followed in the paths marked out for them by adults, and the possibility that they developed their own reactions and behavior in the course of their maturation has been ignored”.

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. According to the description provided in Google Books:[9] "Interdisciplinarity — or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems — is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it... Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides."

Awards

In 2001 he was presented the Doctor of Philosophy