by Gina Perry
Allport replied at length:
He has constantly been an intense and productive scholar. Even as a student he was a tenacious eager-beaver, holding the highest standards over himself. His level of ‘drive’ has remained continuously high. From my point of view he deserves extra credit for tackling the really tough type of problem in social psychology, and not settling for easy and methodologically ‘safe’ topics.
Yes, I think he would be called ‘distinguished’ by the majority of social psychologists in this country. His researches and theoretical writing have aroused much attention and are constantly cited. Professionally he ‘gets around’ and at meetings one can see him arguing vigorously in some corner with colleagues from a variety of institutions.
If I have any hesitation, it concerns his personality. Sometimes he has seemed difficult to work with. He is somewhat intolerant of other points of view, and keeps his own pace rather than adapting to a team. But you know far better than I whether these traits that I noted in past years are any sense disqualifying. I realise that the honor you are considering is in recognition of scholarly productiveness and not of charm. I am personally rather critical of Sherif’s manners, but even I would endorse the choice, if you decide to make it.
Sherif was offered and accepted the position and remained at the University of Oklahoma until 1966, when he took leave of absence so he and Carolyn could take up one-year visiting professorships at Penn State. The temporary positions turned into permanent ones, and Sherif would never work in Oklahoma again.
No one knows exactly where or when Sherif’s illness started — whether it began in Turkey or if it was triggered in America — but there are hints of it along the way: his recklessness with money, his impulsiveness, his seeming imperviousness to danger, the bouts of furious energy alternating with troughs of depression. Sherif’s children have little memory of him being ill when they were small, remembering a warm and loving, funny father. But Carolyn saw the roller-coaster of his highs and lows, and it must have been frightening for them both. In the 1950s and 1960s, mental illness was stigmatising, and Sherif was reluctant to seek treatment. Carolyn did her best, but it was a struggle without professional help.
Sherif’s graduate students from this period remember he and Carolyn as unfailingly generous and interested in their work, always hospitable, hosting parties and get-togethers and treating them like family. Some engaged couples learned not to show surprise when Sherif gave them autographed copies of his books as wedding presents. He could be gregarious and charming, when he wasn’t morose or depressed. His students saw him as indomitable and eccentric. Colleagues, however, increasingly had their reservations about his effectiveness as an educator. Sherif’s former supervisor Gardner Murphy wrote to him in 1956 saying he had something to communicate that Sherif probably wouldn’t like to hear:
A considerable number of people have told me within the last few years that you have given public addresses which would be very effectual, if they were carefully planned and completed within the time allowance, and if you stuck to your text. They say you frequently leave your notes and become excited and ramble and that you frequently go on an hour or more beyond the time which has been strictly defined as closing hour.
Murphy’s letter reminded me of some of the critical comments some of Sherif’s colleagues had made about him around the time of the FBI investigation. Perhaps Murphy, who knew Sherif well, thought that his former student could make use of this feedback to improve his public speaking. Or did he sense that underneath this arrogance and passionate excitability there was perhaps evidence of irrationality and disorganised thinking? I wondered how Sherif, who held grudges for years against people he felt had slighted him — he carried a mildly critical review of one of his books around for twenty years and periodically urged one of his graduate students to write to the reviewer to ‘set the record straight’ — would have taken Murphy’s letter. There’s no reply in the archives and no evidence of whether it had any impact on Sherif’s behaviour. But their warm correspondence continued over the years, and Sherif seems not to have taken offence. Ten years after Murphy’s letter Sherif was renowned at the University of Oklahoma for evening seminars that went way beyond the allotted time. As for Carolyn, I wondered if she knew of the letter, and if she felt defensive on her husband’s behalf or secretly relieved that Murphy had put his finger on something that worried her too.
In 1966, after seventeen years at the University of Oklahoma, Sherif was offered a position at Penn State, along with Carolyn, and they left Oklahoma for good. But after their move, things began unravelling.
For someone whose identity was so tied up with his work, the move from Oklahoma was a wrench for Sherif. Penn State was not the University of Oklahoma; he was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Small-group research was becoming unfashionable in the wake of the Cold War, and funding was drying up. And while Carolyn settled in and soon developed a happy and successful professional life, Muzafer’s behaviour made it increasingly hard for him to make new friends or hold onto old ones. He became very jealous and aggressive if he thought a man was paying Carolyn too much attention, and one colleague described how at one conference Sherif physically attacked a man he thought was flirting with her. To Carolyn’s dismay, he entertained his students with stories of eating dog food when there was nothing to eat at home. Physically, he was in poor shape. Years of heavy smoking and drinking and untreated diabetes caught up with him. In November 1968, he had a car accident under the influence of alcohol, and soon after had a stroke. It was then that the doctors looking at his brain scan asked Carolyn about earlier head trauma, and she remembered the story Sherif had told of being kicked by a camel as a boy.
In November 1969, Carolyn made some notes on some loose sheets of paper as if gathering her thoughts. She described Sherif’s drinking and aggression towards her, his paranoia, and his seemingly unshakeable belief in his own ‘delusions’. Despite her insistence that ‘he must get well, then he would see things in perspective’, it made no difference. She wrote, ‘What does this add up to? I am too terrified to say. The symptoms add up to a megalomaniac … who sees everyone plotting against him.’
Three months later, Sherif received a letter from his lawyer brother in Turkey, who wrote to say he wanted to visit, clearly hoping to make amends. But Muzafer was still bitter and didn’t want to see him. Carolyn wrote down the details of a dream she had around this time — ‘I had a terrible dream. Terrible because I fear it is true.’ In the dream, she wrote a reply to Muzafer’s brother: ‘Don’t let your conscience as a brother trouble you. I have been living with a crazy man — a mad man — for 25 years. The madness has only become worse until it affects every aspect of life …’
Despite these personal pressures, Carolyn’s career was flourishing. Penn State had offered her a position as part of its efforts to employ more female faculty, and even though she felt like the ‘token woman’ in the psychology department, she began to gain recognition for the twenty years of research and co-authorship of more than five books with Sherif. But at the same time Sherif’s career languished. His bouts of depression got deeper and more frequent, and he was hospitalised several times. Stanley Milgram arranged for Sherif to join him at City University of New York, organising a visiting professorship, but at the last minute Sherif dropped out. When a former student wrote to Sherif from Turkey, asking if he was interested in a position at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Sherif never replied, although he kept the letter until the end of his life.
He had been cut adrift from Turkey. He had no passport, so no official proof that he had ever been a Turkish citizen. Sherif’s daughter Ann said he was often embarrassed to speak the language because it had changed so much that his Turkish sounded antiquated. I imagined how painful it must have been to be marked out a relic of the past, when he’d begun as a symbol of Turkey’s future. But he never stopped thinking about Turkey. He loved travelling, a
nd on family trips in Northern New Mexico or Texas or Arizona, he often stopped at some scenic or wild spot to exclaim to his daughters, ‘Oh, babies, this reminds me of Turkey!’ As he aged, he became increasingly nostalgic for his country of origin, but remained paranoid about whether he would be safe in going back. He didn’t know what kind of welcome, if any, he would get. He was bitter that his older brother had had him legally disowned from the family, that his colleagues at the university in Ankara had not come to his aid when he was jailed. He was never able to shake off the suspicion and paranoia, and perhaps partly understandably: in Turkey he had been under surveillance and informed on, and in America he had been investigated by the FBI.
He worried especially that the Turkish government might still be out to punish him. One of his colleagues from Ankara University, folklorist Pertev Boratav, who had been jailed for undermining nationalism and ‘promoting leftism’ in his classes at Ankara University, had moved to France upon his release, in 1952. In 1974, the Turkish Ministry of Culture inaugurated an International Folklore Conference and accepted Boratav’s submission to present, but at the last minute his paper was removed from the program.
Sherif didn’t renounce his Turkish citizenship, but he didn’t take up US citizenship, either. This meant he couldn’t vote, but it also meant he couldn’t travel to international conferences because he had no passport. Although his daughter Sue said he quipped that he was a ‘citizen of the world’, without citizenship or a passport of any country, his status meant he remained an outsider.
I wondered at what point Sherif realised or admitted to himself that he would never go back to Turkey. Perhaps it was towards the end of his life, when his daughters were able to coax stories about his childhood from him. But for a long time he felt a bitter sense of betrayal for being unexpectedly exiled from his homeland. And talking about Turkey must have been a painful reminder of what he had lost.
The world was slow to catch on to what Muzafer Sherif already knew: he was a giant in social psychology. And until people acknowledged the fact, he chafed and complained about the slowness of his well-deserved recognition. But underneath this bluster and bravado, OJ Harvey told me, Sherif yearned for acceptance.
‘He always felt like an outsider.’ A horse whinnied from the paddock next door to OJ’s house and OJ cocked his ear, listening for a moment, before continuing. ‘When he came over here to America in 1945, he got a ride on a military plane. He still told the story of that plane ride decades later, in vivid detail, like it had just happened.’ OJ shook his head. ‘Some of the guys on the plane were military brass and they asked him, “What do you do?” And Muzafer told them, “I’m a social psychologist.” And they couldn’t believe it — a Turk being a psychologist!’ OJ’s voice went up and he waved his arms, imitating Sherif’s outrage. Sherif never got over it, OJ said. A decade later, Sherif was still bitter, recounting the story of their incredulity and prejudice and his humiliation. He had this craving, OJ said. Sherif felt that nobody understood him, or took his work seriously enough. He wanted recognition of his genius.
‘He was terribly bright. But despite being so bright and well educated, he never felt equal. Isn’t that amazing?’ OJ said this with a kind of wonder. ‘He viewed himself as top of the heap — oh, no question. But he felt he never got the accolades he deserved. He was his own worst enemy that way. He thought it was prejudice that meant he didn’t get recognition he deserved. I mentioned to him a couple of times — you know, if he hadn’t been so insistent then maybe people would have been more generous in their recognition of his ability? But that didn’t change him.’ OJ laughed. ‘Maybe it was true that people begrudged him awards. He could be very competitive, he could be very difficult, and so people had very mixed feelings about him.’
In the late 1960s, Sherif was presented with both the prestigious Kurt Lewin Memorial Award and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. But he seemed incapable of enjoying the honours and made his displeasure known. Two of his former graduate students wrote that he complained the award citation was sloppily written and incorrect, he should have gotten the award sooner, and he wondered why so many social psychologists he regarded as inferior had been awarded it before him.
By now Sherif’s intellectual influence was waning. In 1948, he and Carolyn had published An Outline of Social Psychology, a well-received textbook. But a subsequent revision in 1956 was less successful, and the final revision in 1969 was even less so, seemingly outdated as it reflected their own particular view of social psychology rather than the rest of the ever-expanding field. Bob Hood used their textbook when he moved from the University of Oklahoma and taught at a women’s college in Pittsburgh. One of his students that I spoke to told me, ‘I went to graduate school in social psychology having no idea that there were any other social psychologists in the world other than the Sherifs. But at graduate school I discovered all these new theories and ways of looking at the world. And I called Bob and I was furious.’ Several of Sherif’s former graduate students agree that the Sherifs’ book looked ‘selective and unrepresentative’, but suggest that before the 1960s this was typical of social scientists, who used their texts to promote their own theories and cite their own research.
By 1967, there were only three rather tatty-looking copies of The Robbers Cave Experiment left for sale in the University of Oklahoma’s bookstore, where it had sold 5,000 copies over the previous thirteen years. But when Bob Hood approached them about reprinting it, they refused on the grounds that Sherif had left the university — and also, Hood suspected, processing orders and distribution was a ‘headache’. The bookshop declared it out of print. The Sherifs had kept the story of the experiment alive in their books and articles published during this period.
Between 1970 and 1977, Carolyn, perhaps in an attempt to lift Muzafer’s flagging spirits as much as to maintain the profile of their research, tried to get the book published. They sent out a proposal to more than twenty publishers, pointing out they received a steady stream of requests for copies of the now out-of-print monolith and that ‘most introductory books in psychology, sociology and social psychology include the experiment’. But they had no success, even though by then the Robbers Cave study was regarded as something of a classic.
In 1977, the CIA released thousands of documents, after a freedom of information lawsuit, about its funding of research into mind control and interrogation techniques that could be used against enemies. Carolyn was horrified to find that Muzafer had unwittingly accepted funding from the CIA for small-group research he conducted while she had been completing her PhD a decade earlier. Sherif had conducted a covert observational study on groups of adolescent gangs. It was part of a program of top-secret experiments called MKUltra. But while Sherif was studying urban gang members, the CIA applied the same research to techniques for renegade members of the KGB: ‘Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivationally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one.’
The Sherifs weren’t the only social scientists duped by the CIA, but the news must have been distressing, given their idealism and political views. At a professional forum and in the pages of the APA Monitor, Carolyn reiterated that she and Muzafer ‘did not share the Cold War consensus’ and had no idea that the funds had come from the CIA.
It was likely they shared the same sense of incredulity and outrage expressed by sociologist Jay Schulman, who wrote:
… it had to do with my own naivete. Even though my politics were socialist, I had no understanding at that time of how the real world operated … In 1957, I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that the study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I would have been associated with that study or that work … My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of funding, and the fact that I didn’t do it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naivete and political innocence
in spite of my ideological bent.
However, Carolyn’s career continued to blossom. At Penn State she was quickly promoted from temporary faculty to tenure track and from associate to professor within four years. She wrote in an autobiographical essay that, after years of teaching and research and writing with Muzafer, first at Princeton, then at Oklahoma, finally ‘academia made room for me’. She had had what one friend called ‘an epiphany’ about her own experiences as a woman psychologist, and gender discrimination became her intellectual passion:
To me, the atmosphere created by the women’s movement was like breathing fresh air after years of gasping for breath. If anyone believes that I credit it too much for changes in my own life, I have only this reply: I know I did not become a significantly better social psychologist between 1969–1972, but I surely was treated as a better social psychologist.
But even before he retired in 1972, Muzafer was often depressed, and friends recall how Carolyn tried to keep him engaged, inviting students over for meals and parties. Most times, Sherif stayed in his room instead of coming out to join them. He had by now been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was in hospital again in 1982 when Carolyn was admitted with a sudden illness. And he was still in hospital when she died of cancer, aged sixty, just a few months later.
Carolyn had been his lover and wife, his co-author and intellectual partner, his voice of reason, his port in the storm, his carer. He was devoted to her. During one of the group experiments, he wrote to tell her how he felt after she had called him one night: ‘In the midst of all this, your voice … adds so much beauty to … the terribly complex circumstances of my life and … keeps me standing on my feet.’
Carolyn had shared his idealism, his belief that social psychology was a calling, his great faith that they could do something important for humanity, and a steadfast belief in his brilliance. They talked social psychology and ideas at the dinner table, at the beach, on family camping holidays. In her own way, Carolyn was as driven as he had been.