ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Computing and the University: An Intellectual History of Computer Science and Motivation

• In Event: Computer Sciences

English Abstract

My paper explores how ethics and emotions influenced computer science (CS) as it became an undergraduate major at U.S. universities in the 1970s and 1980s. At the heart of this project is a historical case-study method that compares three knowledge institutions: Stanford University, Wellesley College, and Clemson University. Although historians have provided several cogent political and social histories of computing, such as Margaret O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge (2004) and Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), my research for the first time tells the narrative from the perspective of higher education institutions as they grappled with how computing inaugurated new modes of knowledge production, intimate structures of relations, and crises in expertise. Using the tools of intellectual history (e.g., life biography, the history of ideas, academic disciplinary history, and institutional history), I undermine the common-sense opinion that people pursued computer science only for instrumental reasons, such as more influence and money. With an archive that includes oral histories, correspondence, and administrative documents in university archives, I show that intellectual stimulation, the media environment, ethics, emotional attachments, network connections, institutional structures, and creative pursuits all motivated people to embed the science of computing within the university in the first place. My project’s tryptic formulation of a selective university on the U.S. West Coast, a women’s liberal arts college in the Northeast, and a large public university in the South also enables me to capture the heterogeneity of U.S. higher education and the plural worlds and controversies of computer science over time.

Author

• David Timothy Bates, Stanford University