Leonard Cottrell

Leonard Cottrell wiki

"Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. served as the 40th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, "Some Neglected Problems in Social Psychology," was delivered on September 7, 1950 at the Association's Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, and was later published in the December 1950 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR, Vol 15 No 6, pp 705-712)...

"In 1950 he served as president of the American Sociological Society, the first year it met beyond the Mississippi (and was regaled by the first and only musical comedy about itself). A year later, Donald Young, with whom Cottrell had served on the board of the Social Science Research Council, persuaded him to leave Cornell to help reorient the Russell Sage Foundation from social work education to the broader application of social science to other professions and to public policy studies. There, Slats toiled for the next seventeen years as the gentle but stubbornly persistent sponsor and adviser of dozens of ventures on applied sociology, never despairing that academics could be found and prepared for the role of practitioner foreseen for them by Lester F. Ward, the founder and first president of the ASA. Much of the triumph of medical sociology traces back to hundreds of episodes of quiet consultation with beneficiaries of the Sage Foundation (and also of the National Institute of Mental Health, which Slats long served also as consultant). Slats confessed he found the legal profession a harder nut to crack than the medical but never halted his hammering.

"All this while he kept his hand in teaching by leading a seminar and directing doctoral dissertations at New York University. After retiring from Sage in 1968 to return to his beloved South, he was to spend five years on the faculty of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - where he kept his home until he died on March 20."