Looking Back at a Life of Studying Lives Over Time: The Struggle for Tenure

My idea for a contribution to this Festschrift for Mac Runyan came from a narrative interview process that I have used in my Life Story Lab. It is heavily grounded in Jefferson A. Singer and Pavel S. Blagov’s introduction of the wonderful construct of, and method for eliciting, self-defining memories. My research has, of late, focused on endings in the life story—including death, the final ending. In previous research, we developed instructions for asking people about what we called their ultimate self-defining memory. That is, what is the one experience from your life that you most want to be remembered about you after you’re gone?

It dawned on me that a Festschrift honors one’s academic life and contributions, marking an ending of sorts, though not the final ending. Still, this type of ending may be a time for some life review. So, having previously provided him with instructions, I had a delightful time doing an oral interview with Mac Runyan on February 27, 2023, about his chosen ultimate self-defining memory. That interview transcript, edited, is reproduced below.

In my lab, the next step would be to content-analyze a whole sample of people’s memories. I will not subject Mac’s memory to content-analysis here, but as I read and re-read it, several potential content-analysis constructs came to mind: Is this largely a story of meaning-making, communion, redemption? Or, aha, this is it! It is a story of having a sense of purpose in life. I have settled on the idea that, while likely also many other things, Mac’s story is largely one of having and maintaining a clear sense of purpose, through thick and thin, across an entire academic career. It is one of confidently exploring and expanding one’s line of thinking regardless of

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its popularity in mainstream psychology of the day. His story shows not only humility but at the same time diligent scholarship and constant curiosity about important ideas for psychology and how they might be encouraged to flourish.

Mac’s ultimate self-defining memory, as you will read here, I believe represents the legacy that his colleagues all admire: his excellent voice, in person and in his writing, persistently calling for social science to fully recognize the importance of the study of individual lives.

Susan Bluck (SB): Please, start at the beginning and tell the whole memory just as you remember it happening, focusing on what you were experiencing, feeling, and thinking.

William McKinley “Mac” Runyan (MR): The specific memory is me trying to get tenure at Berkeley. The larger framework is the question, what is the place of the study of individual lives in relation to scientific psychology? As I said, that’s a theme I’ve been concerned with since I started graduate school in 1969. I’m very interested in that. I wrote a dissertation on life histories in 1975 and have written books related to it.

So, one preliminary event is being in graduate school at Harvard, which was incredibly exciting for me. I idealized Harvard. I showed up in 1969 and looked at the directory of all these names. These are the people I’ve been reading in college: Erik Erikson, Henry Murray, Robert White, a bunch of other people, and I say, being in graduate school is going to be great. The most positive parts were both Henry Murray and Robert White. Very late in his life, White was supposed to get some award, and he wasn’t mobile enough to do it. So he asked me to go to American Psychological Association (APA) and receive the award for him. It really choked me up. I was honored to do it.

Also setting the stage, Lee J. Cronbach’s presidential address to the APA was “The two disciplines of scientific psychology,” published in American Psychologist in 1957. This was referring to experimental psychology and correlational or quantitative psychology. He later published “Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology” in American Psychologist in 1975. This was referring to person-situation interaction, which I was supportive of. But I felt there was at least a fourth discipline of scientific psychology: the detailed study of individual lives.

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There are, of course, additional disciplines of scientific psychology, such as behavior genetics and neuroscience. In my view, detailed studies of individual lives can help understand the history of each of these different traditions. Before starting graduate school in 1969, I read the most recent in the series A History of Psychology in Autobiography (1967), with autobiographies by Gordon Allport, Henry A. Murray, Carl Rogers, and B. F. Skinner. I felt reading their autobiographies made it easier to engage with the work of each of these major psychologists. I was honored to edit the most recent volume in this series with Gardner Lindzey (Vol. 9, 2007).

In graduate school, we learned about major research methods in psychology, but the study of individual lives was often not included. A question for me is, what is the place of studying individual lives in relation to scientific psychology? Is it simply non-scientific and outside of real science? Or is it a foundation of the whole endeavor? That is still hotly debated.

I personally experienced some of this debate, starting in graduate school. I was lucky to go to a place where Henry Murray was, and still alive at that time. He would say about what I was doing, “This is the most important thing in the world to be working on right now.” But a number of other people said, “This is not real science.” In fact, in my second year in graduate school, a prominent faculty member wrote me a letter. It said, “What you are doing does not fit into our program. I suggest you save time. Our time and your time, and drop out of graduate school now.” In some ways that wasn’t so upsetting because a lot of people in my program were saying, “You’re doing fine. So just stay away from this guy. Have nothing to do with him.” To the extent possible, I did that, even though he was powerful in our program. I sort of just steered around him and avoided it.

But the central memory I wanted to share was something I couldn’t just avoid like that. It was when I came up for tenure in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Don McKinnon was there, as former Director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. But the Dean of the School of Social Welfare, where I was, was named Harry Specht. I applied for tenure after four years while people usually wait five or six. But my Dean was supportive. Well, after some time, the tenure committee didn’t respond. So the Dean kept having to contact them to ask, “Hurry up, what’s happening here?” By this time, he was away in London.

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Summer, I think. So, he’s contacting me on the phone. He said, “I finally heard from them and here I’ll read you what they said. In brief, they say your work does not make a substantial contribution to knowledge.” So basically, they were saying, “Thank you for your service to the University. Goodbye.”

I was mildly upset. We were both surprised. No other feedback. This is pretty unusual behavior for a tenure committee. But the thing that was encouraging to me is that the Dean says to me (this really makes me choke up remembering this), “Don’t worry, there are at least three things we can do.” So, he outlined the things and investigated what the committee process had been. It turns out the tenure committee had never even met! They never talked; they never discussed. They had no substantive criticism. This was the personal view of the guy who was head of the tenure committee! They hadn’t had a discussion. So the Dean says, “This is a piece of cake.” It took a year, but they put together a new committee and had a process for review.

But you know I was in no gigantic hurry. During that year, my book, On Life Histories and Psychobiography, was published in 1982 in hardcover and in paperback in 1984. There were a number of positive reviews of the book in different disciplines. I talked to the publisher, saying, “I’m being examined for tenure. Will you please put a bunch of these blurbs onto the book, on the back?” As best I recall, the reviews said things like: “This book contributes more to the study of lives than any book since Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958).” Another said: “This is the most important contribution to the study of lives since Henry Murray’s Explorations in Personality (1938). This book makes life history respectable again.”

People in the discipline, who knew the field, acknowledged the contribution of the book: Walter Jackson Bate, Robert White, Bertram J. Cohler as well as Alexander George and Juliette George, co-authors of the classic, Woodward Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (1964), said something like, “This valuable book will be read and re-read by generations of students of biography and historical explanation.”

It did take almost a year until they came back with the good news. They said, “We think you deserve tenure, and we’re going to give you a higher level of Associate Professor rank than you applied for.” I said, “Great, I appreciate that.”

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So, I felt, this is great. But also, one thing that was surprising to me is (and here I’m proud of this in a way) that the original tenure report says something like, “This makes no contribution,” but I was able to say what I felt myself. I said to myself: “I know the literature in this field pretty well, and I think it does make a contribution. I don’t believe this for a moment.”

I was delighted about getting tenure because I liked being in Berkeley. I like being around the Institute of Personality Assessment & Research. A lot of good people were there, like Ravenna Helson from the Society for Personology. It was one of the more congenial places in the country that I knew of, which had a number of people sympathetic to this tradition, and a lot of places are not that sympathetic. So I felt fortunate to be there, and I was delighted to get tenure. I said, “This is, from my standpoint, wonderful.” I was really happy. You sometimes have good luck and sometimes bad luck in your career.

SB: Why do you think you shared that particular memory out of all the memories in your life?

MR: I think I shared this memory to be remembered by because it’s really a central theme in my intellectual life. There’s probably more to explore about that—why did this Study of Lives become so important to me? Partly as I understand it is this: I had a sociology professor in college, J. Milton Yinger, who became president of the American Sociological Association. He wrote a book that helped shape my view of the world, Toward a Field Theory of Behavior: Personality and Social Structure (1965). He says that there are at least four levels of analysis that we need to pay attention to: biological, individual, cultural, and social. These can be identified roughly with the four sciences of biology, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.

You don’t know that much when you are starting graduate school, but even then I thought, the one thing I’d like to add to this is the study of individual lives. How does that fit in here? Because that’s also, to me, an important level of analysis.

So you asked me how this ties back to my memory about not getting, and then getting, tenure. I think there was some of that element, too, about what I was trying to do. Even though I didn’t feel the whole thing rested on my shoulders. I was less worried about that at the time but more concerned before and after. I’m still worried about it now in terms of the whole field of psychology and

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the social sciences. Where does the Study of Lives fit into efforts to be a rigorous social science? So I’ve tried to address that in things that I write.

SB: Do you think that that’s kind of a legacy for you—being dedicated to the study of individual lives over time—and that this memory you’ve told today in some way talks about your championing that as it intersected with your own life?

MR: Sure, I think so, and it’s maybe unusual because I never really thought about this. About how long I’ve been doing that work—it’s been since the beginning of graduate school. There was an overnight retreat for our new program. So everybody sits around in a circle with the faculty. They’ve done a lot of stuff, and they introduce themselves. You know, I’m David McClelland, and I did such and such. But graduate students are a totally different thing. It’s not like, “Look at all this great stuff I have done.” Instead, it’s about, “Here’s what I’d like to do.” Even at that first orientation meeting (54 years ago), I said something like, “I’d like to explore the extent to which the study of individual lives can be made more scientific or more rigorous.”

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