In my dim youth I surrendered to the Commencement pieties and despite irony and experience I remain in their custody. I still think of education as a secular creed, the university as a worldly church, and the faculty as lay priests pursuing a calling. This conception implies that the social sciences properly serve as the empirical wing of moral philosophy and that each, in its own fashion, addresses the Kantian questions: What can I know? What may I hope? what shall I do? Sociology confronts these tasks from multiple perspectives and we may distinguish four overlapping scholarly roles which may be described as Scientists, Messengers, Advocates and Heretics.

Scientists are possessed by an austere and audacious vision of a mature science of society that would approximate the power and elegance of the natural sciences; Messengers live by Leopold von Ranke's injunction to "show what actually happened" and are content to bring us the news; Advocates, unlike their more cloistered colleagues, try to influence social policy by choosing among alternative courses of social action when the probability of error is high and ultimate outcome is beyond their control; Heretics are variously sages, scholars, prophets, or scolds who do battle with the prevailing orthodoxy in order to change the terms of discourse on the Big Thoughts and the Big Issues confronting sociology and society.

My own contributions to sociology consists mainly of departmental administration, university service, and primarily teaching and my writings have been chiefly devoted to education and also to such other areas as health care, cultural pluralism, the moral implications of sociobiology and the state of the discipline. Each of sociology's diverse intellectual styles has enlarged my understanding of some aspects of all these activities. The power of our discipline has been especially clear at such times as I have ventured from the campus to translate sociology into education and social policy as, for instance, in my two. = decade tour of duty as the chair of the academic research and education advisory panel of the General Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.