ABSTRACT

Yet the fact is that Milgram was also a teacher throughout his career-first at Yale (1960-1963), then at Harvard (1963-1967), and finally at the City University of New York (1967-1984). In fact, his teaching at CUNY began at age 33, as a full professor and head of the social psychology doctoral program, and ended by chairing a student’s defense of her dissertation at 2 pm on December 20, 1984, a few hours before he succumbed to heart failure. His 24 continuous years of teaching were punctuated only by a few sabbaticals and, starting in 1980, some brief medical leaves interspersed among his 4 heart attacks. His teaching materials fill some 106 boxes in the Yale University archives. Soon after his untimely death, the American Psychological Foundation (APF) considered Milgram’s nomination by his students for its annual award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology, but APF policy ultimately excluded a posthumous Award. (See Appendix.)

and Harvard were too few to allow him to serve on more than a handful of dissertation committees, despite his popularity as “a bright young professor who connected with students” (Silver, 1993). His years at CUNY were almost exclusively with doctoral students in small classes of as few as 3 students, averaging only 15 or so in his two classes per semester. Milgram himself (1980b) acknowledged that, unlike other key social psychologists, he headed no theoretical “school” of social psychology that would attract students into a systematic research program, comparable to the theories of cognitive dissonance or attribution. Not least of all, he had a reputation as a demanding advisor and teacher, who expected from his students the same intensity for research that he himself felt, thus attracting only a certain type of student for his classes and dissertation research. Consequently, the extensive literature on Milgram’s research (e.g., Miller, Collins, & Brief, 1995), eclipses what little there is on his teaching (Blass, 1996; Silver, 1993; Takooshian, 1993).