ORT SKINNER IN THE DESERT THE EMERGENCE AND … · 2019-05-03 · FORT SKINNER IN THE DESERT 29...

Behavior and Social Issues, 26, 27-50 (2017). © Travis Thompson. Readers of this article may copy it without the copyright owner’s permission, if the author and publisher are acknowledged in the copy and the copy is used for educational, not-for-profit purposes. doi: 10.5210/bsi.v.26i0.7107

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FORT SKINNER IN THE DESERT: THE EMERGENCE AND DISSOLUTION OF ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY’S BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1955–1970

Travis Thompson1 Department of Educational Psychology

University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT: An innovative behavior analysis program was created, developed and matured, then unexpectedly imploded at Arizona State University between 1955 and 1970. The program included many who later became leaders in behavior analysis, and trained distinguished doctoral students. The conditions giving rise to the program in the first instance, and what caused the abrupt dissolution of the program in 1970 is the subject of this historical investigation. Consideration is given to more general implications of this series of events with possible lessons learned. KEYWORDS: Fort Skinner; Arizona State University; Arthur Bachrach

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley.”

Robert Burns (1785)

Creating a new academic discipline requires intellectual torchbearers and foot soldiers laying the foundation for the new science. The first noteworthy academic teaching and research endeavor devoted to building the new field of behavior analytic science outside of programs at Harvard and Columbia Universities emerged de novo in 1955 in an unlikely place, at Arizona State University (ASU). “Fort Skinner,” as it was whimsically called by some,i was located in the midst of the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States. It was an archetypal American entrepreneurial story, blossoming of a vigorous new enterprise in an improbable setting, seemingly the result of grit and determination and more than a little chutzpah. The story of the sudden rise of “Fort Skinner in the Desert,” and its abrupt disappearance without explanation, is reminiscent of the similar chronicle of the desertion of the Lost Roanoke Colony, a late 16th-century attempt by Queen Elizabeth I to establish a permanent English settlement off the coast of Virginia, whose occupants suddenly vanished without explanation (Kupperman, 2007).

Many who observed the rise and fall of Fort Skinner from a distance wondered how such a large and thriving academic program could be established so rapidly in the first instance (14 faculty positions added within a few years) and then abruptly disappear, with no public accounting. Rumors flourished among fellow academics about internecine plots and personal vendettas, but

1 Contact: Travis Thompson, Ph.D., 2187 Ferris Lane, Roseville, MN 55113. Email: [email protected]

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none were verified. Over four decades later, there has been no account of what became of “Fort Skinner in the Desert.”

This article is based on an historical investigation of events at ASU from 1955 to 1970. This inquiry involves more than curiosity about what appear to be implausible events. It considers the possibility that events at Fort Skinner might have implications for continuing struggles within academia faced by the field of behavior analysis. This historical investigation is motivated in part by recognition that core faculty at ASU during those years later became major contributors to behavior analysis (Fred Keller, Israel Goldiamond, and Jack Michael) and that the program they developed was highly productive academically but evanescent. The Fort Skinner program trained doctoral students who became influential in the field. This examination begins by asking who made up the Fort Skinner program, reviews their accomplishments, and concludes by examining the circumstances responsible for the program unraveling. This article is based upon original documentary information from that era and interviews with those involved in what was then Fort Skinner in the Desert.

History of Early Doctoral Behavior Analysis Programs

The first doctoral degree-granting behavior analysis programs began in 1946 at Indiana University; next in 1948 after Skinner left Indiana University and became full professor at Harvard University (Skinner, 1980); and subsequently in 1950 at Columbia University under Fred S. Keller and W. Nat Schoenfeld. Indiana’s doctoral program was a traditional experimental psychology course of study, but students could emphasize operant behavior. After 1970, other behaviorally oriented graduate programs began emerging elsewhere in the United States.

Behavior analysis as a subfield of psychology gained increasing recognition between 1950 and 1960 after publication of Skinner’s widely read Science and Human Behavior (1953) and influential Schedules of Reinforcement (1957a). But a more important factor was the rapidly growing body of behavioral research and teaching within academic programs. The term behavior analysis came into vogue when the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) began publication in 1958. Previously, common names for people working in that field were “Skinnerians” or “operant learning people.” Not all behavior analysts were dedicated followers of B. F. Skinner, however, and the more general term provided an aegis for them, also.

The credibility of the newly developing field was bolstered by journal articles reporting research on human operant behavior in laboratory and controlled clinical situations, such as Lindsley, Skinner, and Solomon’s (1953) studies of the operant behavior of people with schizophrenia. Others conducted laboratory studies with children with developmental disabilities, using behavior analytic principles (Barrett & Lindsley, 1962; Bijou, 1955, 1957). These early reports appeared shortly before or coincided with the first of ASU’s behavior analysis faculty appointments in 1955 and 1961. Arizona State University’s was the first sizable academic behavior analysis doctoral program after Harvard’s, Columbia’s, and Indiana’s; this is what makes it especially noteworthy.

Despite its successes, the field of behavior analysis has continued to struggle to overcome resistance of traditional psychology fields to the legitimacy of the subdomain. It was often impossible to publish research findings based on operant strategies in mainline psychology journals. The founding of the field’s flagship journal, the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB), in 1958 was a consequence of those difficulties (Laties, 2008). Researchers were faced not only with methodological criticisms, such as reliance on small sample sizes, unorthodox

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measures, and experimental designs, but also misunderstandings due to different metatheoretical Weltanschauungen. Viewed from a longer-term historical scientific perspective within psychology, however, behavior analysis emerged and flourished between 1960 and 1970, and did so rapidly as compared with other new fields in the history of psychology.

The founding academic programs in behavior analysis at Harvard University, led by Skinner, and Columbia University, led by Keller and Schoenfeld, were broadly recognized within the field, but other academic subprograms within psychology departments struggled for recognition in their colleges and universities. Two early noteworthy applied behavior analysis programs were established at the University of Kansas in 1964 and at Western Michigan University in 1964–1967 shortly after the ASU program was founded. In Lawrence, Kansas, the Department of Home Economics was transformed into the Department of Human Development and Family Life, an applied behavioral science department, and at Western Michigan University, the dean began hiring its first cohort of behavior analysts in 1967 (Michael, 1993).

Background for This Investigation

Fort Skinner in the Desert

Between 1955 and 1970 a unique doctoral psychology program emerged, rapidly grew, and then imploded at ASU in Tempe, Arizona. The academic program, based largely on operant learning principles originating with B. F. Skinner, had distinctive promise, arising in an improbable enclave away from most of the other similar theoretically based programs on the East Coast or the few nascent applied programs in the Midwest. It was unique in several important ways, and during its relatively short existence, it was academically productive, with a lasting influence on the field of behavior analysis and beyond, though the program itself largely vanished.

Information resources

Because many of the faculty members who were involved from that era are now deceased, it was necessary to depend on printed documents from that period (newspaper and magazine articles), correspondence, departmental catalogs, other publications, and oral reports of retired faculty members and former graduate students who were involved in those events, for information. A substantial body of information was reviewed in the ASU Archive in the Luhr Reading Room of the Hayden Library, and interviews with and reports from four former faculty members and five graduate students were conducted to obtain information regarding events during the ASU behavior analysis program’s heyday. Another important information source about events surrounding the demise of Fort Skinner was contained in the 2005 doctoral dissertation of Ray Pence, First and Foremost a Scientist? Lee Meyerson and Changing Definitions of Disability, 1948–1988, which was Pence’s doctoral dissertation in the American Studies Program, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Pence interviewed Lee Meyerson and other faculty members at ASU in 2001 and 2002, including several witnesses to the rapid deterioration of Fort Skinner. Although the focus of his investigation was specifically on Meyerson’s positive contributions, many of his ancillary interview findings and qualitative report were relevant to the present analysis. ii

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Historical Context at Arizona State University

Growing enrollment demands on teaching

Arizona State University was first established as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe, with instruction beginning on February 8, 1886. It was later called Arizona State Teacher’s College, and in 1950 it became Arizona State College. Through legislative action in 1954 it became Arizona State University and began offering Ph.D. degrees. During the 1954–1955 academic year, the then Department of Psychology and Philosophy was created from what had previously been the Philosophy Department, and after 1955 changed to the Department of Psychology.

The state legislature was reportedly pressuring the ASU administration to develop its promise as a Ph.D.-granting university. The University’s primary interest was in educating a workforce with greater need after WWII when many Veterans returned to the region, but there was also growing pressure to capitalize on the economic potential of a national scientific research program from physics and engineering to biomedicine and the social sciences. This need was driven in part by the arrival of technology firms such as Honeywell, Sperry-Rand, Motorola, and Intel into the Valley of the Sun. They all needed an educated workforce.

Sudden creation of ASU’s Behavior Analysis program

The ASU president and college dean had reportedly offered the Psychology Department new faculty positions in order to meet the growing student enrollment demands. Allegedly, the university president gave Arthur Bachrach latitude in offering salaries and academic rank associated with positions to prospective faculty members, which may have contributed to rapid growth (F3). As a result, even though the previous Psychology Department faculty may have had no initial specific interest in promoting Skinnerian psychology, it appears they welcomed the chance to hire new faculty members to meet the college’s and university’s growing teaching demands.

Factors contributing to rapid program growth

Several possible factors may have contributed to the program’s origin. It is difficult to pinpoint any one variable, although some seem less plausible than others and a few emerge as more likely relevant. The reason for the sudden creation of a specific behavior analysis program was uncertain. Could it have been due to an unexpected interest in behaviorism by Arizona State Teacher’s College (and later, Arizona State University) administrators? Alternatively, the administration’s interest may have been less about behaviorism, than it may have been reflecting the need to rapidly create a credible doctoral program for the legislatively newly approved university, which was started in 1954 and finalized in 1958 (Arizona State University Archives, 2000).

The State College president in 1955 was Grady Gammage, who had studied law and public school administration and had been at Arizona Teacher’s College and State College for many years. The Liberal Arts College dean was Arnold Tilden, Ph.D., a professor specializing in military history, whose Ph.D. was from the University of Southern California. Neither Gammage nor Tilden had publicly expressed interest in behaviorism. The chairperson of the Department of Psychology and Philosophy was H. Clay Skinner, Ph.D., an educational psychologist hired in 1938 (unrelated to B. F Skinner). H. Clay Skinner’s published book titles included such topics as student


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reading ability and classroom teaching. He was known for a beginning educational psychology textbook. H. Clay Skinner had never expressed interest in behaviorism professionally, as far as can be determined.

None of these senior University administrators had any specific background in behaviorism, yet the president was reportedly very enthusiastic about strengthening the Department of Psychology (F3). The College was in the process of becoming a doctoral degree-granting university, and the Department of Psychology was reportedly targeted as one of the first to become sufficiently academically developed to grant Ph.D.s, according to former chairman Gus Levine. Arthur Staats was the first faculty member hired in 1955, and the Behavior Analysis (BA) faculty grew rapidly beginning in 1962 when Arthur Bachrach was made chairman, replacing Hudson Jost; see Table 1 and Figure 1. The president and dean may not have been specifically interested in hiring behaviorists, as much as they were in recruiting academics with publication and external funding track records (F3). Many of Chairman Bachrach’s professional connections were reportedly within the burgeoning field of behavior analysis and his own clinical research had been in operant approaches to physiological psychology and mental health problems.

Table 1. Arizona State University Behavior Analysis Faculty publications and citations 1955-71

Faculty Member

Total Pubs

Mean Pubs Yr

Citations Citations per Pub

55-57

57-59

59-61

61-63

63-65

65-67

67-69

69-71

Bachrach 32 4.0 354 11.1 X X X X X Brownstein 9 2.5 278 30.9 X X X Falk 6 1.25 625 104.1 X X Goldiamond 37 3.7 1235 34.2 X X X X X Greenspoon 11 2.75 300 27.3 X X Hegge 8 2.0 45 5.6 X X X Keller 9 1.5 1944 243 X X X Killeen 3 1.0 336 112 X X Michael 10 1.1 964 96.4 1/2 X X X Myerson 14 2.0 669 47.8 1/2 X X X X Pliskoff 12 3.0 917 76..4 X X Sherman 9 1.5 96 10.7 X X X X Staats A 53 5.3 /2 2759/ 2 52.1 per

2 X X X X X

Staats C See A. Staats

SeeA. Staats

(see above)

(see above)

X X X X X

Verhave 4 0.5 48 6.0 X X X X Total 230 12,850 2 2 3.5 6.5 11 11 11 6 Means 15.33 2.63 856.7 57.4

Legend: Faculty listed alphabetically, employed in the Arizona State University’s “Fort Skinner” Behavior Analysis program from 1955-1950. The right portion of the table indicates the periods during which person was appointed, while the left portion lists total publications, mean annual publications, total literature citations by others in Google Scholar, and the citations per year for each faculty member. The bottom rows show totals and means (where appropriate).

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Figure 1. Arthur J. Bachrach, PhD, Professor and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University from 1962–1970 during the era of the “Fort Skinner in the Desert” Behavior Analysis program.

None of the six faculty members of the prior

Department of Psychology and Philosophy (Arizona State College, 1954) appeared to be interested in behaviorism or B. F. Skinner.iii Several were very senior people approaching retirement, who may have had limited interest in planning for the department’s future. Two retired in 1954. Their interests were in education, educational and mental testing, and clinical psychology. Arthur Staats was the first faculty member hired as part of the Fort Skinner BA program. He was a recent Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in experimental psychology as well as

some training in clinical psychology, who was hired as a lecturer. He was highly productive and rapidly promoted to full professor. That his theoretical affiliation was loosely behaviorist did not seem to be important to the administrators or Chairman Jost who hired him. The university needed productive faculty members with Ph.D.s from credible doctoral-granting universities. Coincident with Arthur Bachrach’s recruitment in 1962, Chairman Jost had also recruited Lee Meyerson and Jack Michael from the University of Houston. Thus, Staats, Meyerson, and Michael were all hired by Jost, not Bachrach, who hired the remaining Fort Skinner faculty members. This is relevant later when Meyerson claimed he had been promised a tenured position by Chairman Jost, but Bachrach contended there were no records of such an offer.

Development of the Behavior Analysis Program

Departmental context

The ASU BA program evolved within a traditional psychology department alongside such programs as developmental, experimental, social, and clinical psychology emphases, but eventually became the departmental driving force. The BA program included 9 faculty members with expertise in experimental operant psychology and to a lesser degree in applications of behavior analysis (two faculty members). Over the 15 years between 1955 and 1970, a total of 15 faculty members with primary expertise in behavior analysis we hired as members of the ASU BA program. In addition, four physiological psychologists were incidentally involved in collaborative operant research, and the Psychology Department recruited two cognitive behavior therapists for the clinical program, David Rimm and John Masters, who aligned themselves with the BA group for some administrative and teaching purposes. They were not considered part of the Fort Skinner core faculty. Not all of these 21 faculty members (15 behavior analysts, 4 physiological psychology collaborators, and 2 cognitive behavior therapists) were employed simultaneously; the peak number at any one time was 11 during the 1967–1969 catalog years (Arizona State University


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Library Digital Repository, 2017). In the Psychology Department, there were an additional six faculty members in other substantive areas such as clinical, developmental, and social psychology.

The Behavior Analysis faculty

Other faculty members within the ASU Psychology Department referred to the BA group as “Operanters” or “The Learning Group” during that era. The BA faculty included several individuals who were or later became leaders in the field: Jack Michael, Israel Goldiamond, Fred Keller, John Falk, and Peter Killeen. The following faculty members were hired (see Table 1 for details): Arthur Staats (1955), Carolyn Staats (1957), Arthur Bachrach (1961), Jack Michael (1961), Israel Goldiamond (1962), Joel Greenspoon (1962), Lee Meyerson (1962), Aaron Brownstein (1963), Gilmour Sherman (1963), Thom Verhave (1964), Fred Keller (1965), Stanley Pliskoff (1966), Dwight Sutton (1967), Eugene Taylor (1967), Peter Killeen (1968), and John Falk (1969).The way in which decisions were made regarding specific faculty recruitments and hires is unclear. It appears that, at least in the beginning, initial faculty hires may have been in part opportunistic, in response to pressure from the university administration to hire more faculty members to meet the rapidly rising enrollment demands. Presumably as word spread nationally of a new academic BA program at ASU, position inquiries began appearing spontaneously. Reportedly, most of these faculty members were actively recruited by Chairman Bachrach (F5).

Quality of the Behavior Analysis program faculty

Overall, the number of faculty members affiliated with the Behavior Analysis program rose from 2 in 1955–1957 when the first person was hired to 12 in 1967–1969, with a total of 14 over the entire period; see Table 1. Most of the BA faculty members were involved in research typical of articles published in the JEAB (2017) during that era. Of the BA faculty members, most were well known researchers who had received doctoral training from highly regarded programs, or research scholars in the process of rising to positions of national prominence (e.g., John Falk [U. of Illinois], Israel Goldiamond [U. of Chicago], Fred S. Keller [Harvard U.)], Jack Michael [UCLA], Peter Killeen [Harvard U.], Stanley Pliskoff [New York U.], and Thom Verhave [Columbia U.]); see Table 2. Some of the courses they taught were traditional operant reinforcement theory and stimulus control topics; others were not, such as History of Psychology (Verhave), Scientific Logic and Theory (Greenspoon), and Perception (Goldiamond).

It is difficult to gauge research productivity over four decades ago. Publication citations rates were among the most widely accepted measures of academic standing and productivity during the era in question (Schaeffer & Sulyma, 1979; Wootton, 2013). A faculty member’s academic publications typically fluctuate from year to year depending on research funding and other exigencies, but overall trends are generally significantly related to productivity. In Table 1, professional publications (articles, chapters, and books) and citation rates from Google Scholar are reported for the entire period that each person was a member of the ASU faculty (means). Publications of Arthur and Carloyn Staats were combined because they co-authored nearly all of their publications and there is no way to rationally assign individual credit. The types of papers vary widely by author, with some publishing largely results of original empirical research (Falk), while others, such as Staats, Goldiamond, and Bachrach, published numerous review and theoretical articles and chapters. Some articles involve work significantly done elsewhere but

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Table 2. Arizona State University faculty members degree granting university, post-ASU faculty positions and specialty area

Bachrach, A. University of Virginia 1952 Sensory,

Physiological Naval Medical Research Institute

Brownstein, A. University of Missouri 1961 Experimental

Learning

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Falk, J. University of Illinois 1956 Physiological

Dept of Psychology, Rutgers University

Goldiamond, I University of Chicago 1955

Experimental Classical

Behaviorism

Southern Illinois University

Greenspoon, J. University of Indiana 1952 Clinical Temple Buell

College

Hegge, F. Brown University 1960 Experimental Learning Unknown

Keller, F. Harvard University 1931 Experimental

Learning Western Michigan University

Killeen, P. Harvard University 1969 Experimental

Behavior Analysis Arizona State University

Michael, J. UCLA 1955 Clinical Physiological

Western Michigan University

Meyerson, L. Stanford University 1950 Sensory

Communication Arizona State University

Pliskoff, S. New York University 1961 Animal Learning

University of Maine, Orono

Sherman, J.G. Columbia University 1959 Experimental

Behavior Analysis Georgetown University

Staats, A. UCLA 1955 Experimental Clinical

University of Honolulu

Staats, C. UCLA 1957 Speech Communication

University of Honolulu

Verhave, T. Columbia University 1956

Behavior Analysis Behavioral Pharmacology

Queens College New York City

published while at ASU. Despite these caveats, their publications generally indicate high levels of productivity.

The number of citations of their published work each year while they were members of the ASU faculty were tabulated, shown in an adjacent column next to their period on the faculty; see Table 1. For each year from 1955 to 1970, the mean number of publication citations per faculty member was determined using the Google Scholar database; the typical number of academic Ph.D.’s publications receive 1 to 2 citations per year (Byrnes, 2007; Rostad & Aksnes, 2015).


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The ASU BA faculty members were productive and visible nationally, as seen by peers who were doing noteworthy research as revealed by a commendable citation rate of a mean of 2.63 per year (range = 0.5–5.3); see Table 1. Even bearing in mind the few outlier publications with very large numbers of citations (e.g., Keller’s “Goodbye Teacher . . .”), the average citation rates of ASU BA faculty members was laudable. The overall number of citations was substantial, including Staats, Keller, and Goldiamond, whose range was 1,235 to 2,759 over only a decade or less. For most of the remaining faculty members, their works engendered 300 to 1000 citations, substantial indeed.

Doctoral teaching and mentoring

Faculty performance can also be judged in relation to adequacy of instruction and/or relationships with graduate students. The department had a well-developed general curriculum with advanced basic psychology courses which all new grad students were required to complete during the first year, and a comprehensive exam at the end of the year. Afterward, students split into specialty areas: clinical, developmental, social and behavior analysis (S5). In the 1950s and 1960s formal student teaching evaluations of university faculty were uncommon, and ASU was no exception. As a result, an interpretable quantitative assessment of BA faculty teaching is impossible. I interviewed a small sample of six former graduate students in an effort to qualitatively assess student perceptions of faculty members’ teaching and relations with graduate students.

All former students interviewed described the intellectual climate among BA teaching faculty as “exciting” or “stimulating,” even those who were critical of some faculty members’ instruction. They reported feeling that they were part of a significant new scientific and teaching undertaking and were well aware that several of their BA professors were highly regarded nationally. Several faculty members received mixed reviews. Among the faculty instructors most favorably commented upon were Brownstein, Michael, and Goldiamond, who were described as articulate, student-friendly, and very competent instructors. Jack Michael was uniformly praised for his positive, supportive attitude toward students. He opened his own home to graduate students for informal seminars and student-led study sessions and provided essentially unlimited access to his considerable behavior analysis library. Fred Keller taught no graduate courses, but was uniformly held in high esteem by graduate students. At that time (in 1967), the graduate students had the impression that the faculty got along well and were mutually respectful. There was reportedly no indication of strife between operant and non-operant faculty.

Several Fort Skinner doctoral graduates have made a mark, beginning with Montrose Wolf. He was described by a colleague in this way:

Mont Wolf’s was the first Ph.D. defense to be held at the university; the president of the Arizona State at that time was present .... We, Mont and I were officially awarded our Doctorates at the same time, May 1963, and were, also officially, among the first four Ph.D.’s awarded by the University. (J. Mabry, personal communication, May 7, 2016)

Other leaders and contributors in the field who graduated from the ASU BA program included Grayson Osborne, Carl Cheney, Scott Wood, Judy Smith, Jon Bailey, Joao Todorov, Tim Elsmore, and Rick Shull, although there were many others as well. Many of them went on to do significant work at major universities and held editorial positions on professional journals in the field.

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Among other measures of faculty teaching competence was their support for female graduate students. It was reported by one male and two female former graduate students interviewed that the atmosphere was less welcoming for female graduate students. The three students interviewed reported that some male faculty expressed doubt that female students were cut out for university research faculty positions. A male Ph.D. student remarked, “If you were a female student in 1965 you would not be happy. There were four to five women students who were generally given a hard time” (S3). Despite the unsupportive atmosphere that women were reported to have experienced, most of the enrolled female students completed their doctorates and went on to college teaching, research, or administrative positions. As an interpretive caveat, the women interviewed also remarked that the atmosphere in the Fort Skinner program differed little from that of in other male-dominated programs during that era (1960–1970) (Worrell, 2002).

Student perceptions of the moving intellectual force behind Fort Skinner

Because of the current stature of faculty members from Fort Skinner, we might make assumptions about who would likely have been the important moving force. The former graduate students were asked who they perceived to be the moving force behind the behavior analysis doctoral program. Because the BA program included several people who were later major figures in the field, it might be assumed they would have been the driving force. One previous doctoral student now on the faculty of a university in the eastern United States reported, “Jack Michael was NOT the intellectual moving force behind the program, though he was very well liked by students as an informal mentor ... Bachrach was clearly the one that made the program work, exciting, good leadership skills, instilled an enthusiastic atmosphere” (S3). Another student commented, “Izzy Goldiamond’s role in the behavior analysis group seemed uncertain, he didn’t appear to be a leader. He taught unusual courses, History and Perception” (S1). Despite mixed reviews of his personality, Bachrach appears to have been seen as a prime programmatic mover.

Possible Reasons for Fort Skinner’s Rapid Demise

Several hypotheses were considered in attempting to interpret the reasons for Fort Skinner’s abrupt decline, a virtual disappearance: (a) Arthur Bachrach may have been ineffective as chairman; (b) possible resistance to behavior analysis by some other departmental faculty, especially cognitive psychology; (c) problems arising from an aversive treatment program initiated by some faculty members; and (d) a new dean and chairman’s administrative chicanery.

Arthur Bachrach as chairman

It is customary for university departmental chairpersons to attempt to promote collegiality around their department’s subject matter, as well as an atmosphere of social camaraderie. The faculty members interviewed reported that Bachrach often invited faculty to his home for socializing but less often visited laboratories or attended departmental lectures and colloquia. This may have been interpreted as academic disengagement by some faculty and students (F1, F2, F3; S1, S2). Bachrach seldom taught courses and some faculty and students did not see him as a serious research scholar (S1, S2, S3). Despite his being seen by some as a bon vivant, Bachrach had a significant record of empirical research and theoretical publications, including while he was at ASU. In fact, he was one of the more prolific authors among the ASU BA faculty group, as shown in Table 1. He was described as effectively communicating the importance of research throughout


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the entire department, not only to the BA group (F3). One highly regarded former doctoral student was asked who was the leader of the BA faculty group: “There was no question, Bachrach was the moving force behind the program” (S3). An administrator who was very familiar with the program and its dissolution remarked,

Bachrach had leadership skills. He created an atmosphere of enthusiasm. He also had a good eye for intellectual strength, so recruited effectively .... Raising the operant flag so there was a sense of mission to the place also seemed to work .... it produced good ideas far more generally, most outside of the operant frame. (F3)

A less tangible aspect of leadership is the degree to which a chairperson successfully integrates the faculty s/he represents within the broader academic department and university communities. The ASU Psychology Department included smaller groups in clinical, social, and developmental psychology. To some faculty members and students at the time, it appeared that Bachrach viewed his main task as building a model behavior analysis program, not as much as creating a broadly integrated psychology department (F1, F2, F3, S3). One emeritus professor commented, “Overall, then, my general point is that there was no major collaborative research going on, building empirical bonds between pairs or groups” (F2). Bachrach’s leadership style was respected by some, but viewed much less generously by others who saw him as an intellectually disengaged chairman. One retired professor wrote, “Bachrach was a socio-emotional leader. He was fun, he gave good parties, and he organized lunches at local restaurants, and he was funny in hallway chats. Flipside, I see him scoring near zero on the task oriented leadership dimension” (F2). Another former department chairperson commented,

Despite what so many perceived as character flaws, Bachrach had leadership skills. He created an atmosphere of enthusiasm ... . But he did not appear to have the patience to know what questions individual researchers were asking, and who was and wasn't productive. (F3)

Possible resistance from non-behavior analytic departmental faculty programs, especially cognitive psychology

Perhaps the program’s demise might have resulted from repercussions of the cognitive restructuring of the field of psychology nationally, which had roots in 1960 in Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of Behavior, gained momentum with Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology (1967), and culminated in Chomsky’s infamous 1959 critique of Skinner’s (1957b) Verbal Behavior. This sea change was often called the cognitive revolution (Leahey, 1992), though it was more of an intellectual insurgency.

Whereas it is true that this national shift in priorities may have facilitated the program's ultimate disposition, those contingencies do not appear to be causally related to the disintegration of Fort Skinner. Interviews with former graduate students and faculty members revealed no pattern of criticisms of the BA faculty members or of Bachrach based on cognitive psychology’s anti-Skinnerian theoretical perspective. Based on all of the interviews conducted with four former faculty members and five former graduate students, there was no apparent uprising of cognitive psychologists against the ASU BA group. Not only did none of them mention such a clash, the faculty members interviewed actively insisted that it had not occurred. Gus Levine, former chair of the Psychology Department (and not a behavior analyst) wrote, “Raising the operant flag so

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there was a sense of mission to the place also seemed to work. But in the end it produced good ideas far more generally, most outside of the operant frame” (G. Levine, personal communication, April 26, 2016). There was no credible evidence of any orchestrated hostility of non-behavior analysts as a group toward behaviorism as a field of study or the behavior analysts as an entire group.

One of the other reasons there may have been little dissension between traditional departmental groups and the experimentally oriented BA’s rapidly growing program was that there were very few non-BA faculty members to object (i.e., six faculty members, two of whom retired in 1954). Arizona State College was about to become Arizona State University; hence there was pressure to become academically more productive. The existing faculty members were also facing pressure from the university administration to increase class sizes and teach new courses to accommodate increased enrolment. Newly appointed psychology faculty members who assumed teaching responsibilities may have been welcomed by prior faculty members, who may have seen their operant emphasis as less relevant at the time.

Problems arising from use of shock and slapping

In 1962 two senior ASU BA faculty members and one affiliated junior faculty member began applying reinforcement-based teaching procedures to improve self-help skills of children and youth with developmental disabilities at the Valley of the Sun School (VSS), a residential facility in Phoenix, Arizona (Wilson, 1962, June 26). This program became visible to the community through articles written in the local Arizona Republic newspaper. The two senior applied faculty members seemed to have drawn limited specific attention from the rest of the faculty over several years for their work with the residents with developmental disabilities. But several favorable reports of Lee Meyerson’s work at VSS in the Arizona Republic newspaper appeared to occasion praise from some fellow faculty members, including those outside the BA group (F2).

Lee Meyerson, was an associate professor in the Department of Psychology affiliated with the ASU BA group. Meyerson’s doctoral research had been in sensation and perception psychology at Stanford University; his dissertation was entitled Hearing for Speech in Children: A Verbal Audiometric Test (Meyerson, 1950). His research was mainly related to his interest in deafness and rehabilitation strategies. Staats commented, “Meyerson was not a behaviorist, his background was more traditional” (Pence, 2005, p. 114). When Meyerson arrived at ASU, he “redefined himself ... . In (Jack) Michael, Meyerson found a connection to behaviorism that was rigorous but flexible enough to appreciate and accommodate his Lewinian beliefs” (Pence, 2005, p. 143). Meyerson’s training had been in gestalt field theory (Pence, 2005). Before meeting Michael, Meyerson had no formal exposure to operant conditioning.

Meyerson and Michael met in 1957 when they were both recently arrived faculty members in psychology at the University of Houston (Meyerson in 1956, Michael in 1957) (Pence, 2005). Meyerson and Michael did their first operant conditioning research together in 1959 and 1960, using federal grant money from the U.S. Office of Education to devise a hearing test for children with developmental disabilities who lacked language and verbal skills and had difficulties in responding to spoken instructions (Meyerson & Michael, 1960).

At ASU, Lee Meyerson was the principal investigator on a U.S. Vocational Rehabilitation Services federal training grant (“ASU Helping the Handicapped,” 1963, December 22) to teach students and staff members how to improve self-help skills of children with developmental disabilities. Meyerson was well established as a practitioner-advocate in the field of physical


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disability, with the publication of “Physical Disability as a Social Psychological Problem” in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (Meyerson, 1948). Meyerson and Michael published several articles and chapters on the use of operant methods in rehabilitation (Kerr, Meyerson, & Michael, 1965; Michael & Meyerson, 1962). Although newspaper articles and a brochure referred to Meyerson’s “research” at VSS, in fact the grant under which the work was being done at VSS was a demonstration-training grant. The difference between training and demonstration projects and rigorous research may have eluded Arizona newspaper readers but was fundamentally important to academic expectations of professional conduct.

While teaching adaptive skills to these residents with developmental disabilities, the faculty members and their graduate students also began using contingent skin-shock punishment, face slapping, and other aversive methods to reduce self-injurious behavior of some residents in 1967–1968 (Wilson, 1968, January 4, 1968 ). Initially, these aversive procedures seemed to draw little attention; indeed, a student volunteer from Vassar College had written an article published in Reader’s Digest describing the program in glowing terms, but with no mention of shock (Frank, 1968). That article led to less enthusiastic reports in the Arizona Republic and anger from the VSS administration. The administration reported that parents of other children at VSS who saw children being shocked and slapped reportedly filed an abuse complaint with the residence’s administration (Wilson, 1968, January 4). In newspaper interviews, Meyerson vociferously defended the use of skin shock and other aversive methods to treat self-injury. His remarks, some of which may have been misinterpreted, were published in the Arizona Republic newspaper.

Intervention from the dean of the Graduate School. The Dean of the Graduate School appeared to have his own ethical concerns, as well as being responsive to adverse publicity arising from using shock procedures for doctoral dissertation research by one of Meyerson’s graduate students (F3). A psychology doctoral student who allegedly administered a very large number of skin shocks (4000 shocks as per F2) to a child with autism, became involved in the dispute at the time of her final oral exam (F2, F3). According to two of the retired faculty members who were interviewed, several experimental analysis of behavior faculty members questioned the adequacy of the student’s training and knowledge of operant theory, concepts, and their application in practical situations (F2). Shortly before her oral examination, the Graduate School Dean added another Psychology Department faculty member to the student’s final oral examination committee, who was reported to be neutral on the matter. The student did not pass her oral exam, engendering animosity between the two applied psychology department faculty members and an affiliated faculty member versus most of the rest of the faculty on the other side (F2, F3).

Faculty meeting to discuss the use of shock. Chairman Bachrach called a meeting of the entire Department of Psychology faculty to discuss the adverse publicity regarding the use of skin-shock punishment by several department faculty and their graduate students. That project, which provided training for graduate students in rehabilitation (but not clinical psychology), was funded in part by a grant administered by the Psychology Department. According to oral reports of two retired faculty members who attended that meeting and one former department chairman, it appears that the other faculty had been unaware of the use of shock under the auspices of department grant funds. Whether the entire department had held a prior discussion of the ethics of using aversive methods is unknown, but the use of shock as punishment appears to have come as a surprise. During that meeting, the view was expressed that skin-shock procedures were considered very questionable by some colleagues in the Psychology Department, including other behavior analysts (F2, F3). After an animated discussion involving some of the more prominent members of the faculty, a vote was taken denying continued departmental training grant support

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for graduate students at VSS using those methods. As Meyerson’s training grant was administered through the Department of Psychology, his grant was in jeopardy. At the conclusion of the faculty meeting, an emeritus faculty member recalls hearing the comment, “They took away (their) grant,” referring to discontinuing support for the shock program (F2). Considerable bitterness resulted that led eventually to the departure of one senior faculty member from ASU (F3).

Who received shock, who administered it, and its reported effectiveness. In 1967 there were 150 children at VSS with IQ scores ranging from 26 to 75; 13 were in the 0–25 range, 5 were ranked 76–80, and scores for the remaining 53 residents were “unknown” (Pence, 2005, p. 149). Most children at VSS had a diagnosis of “mental retardation”; other primary diagnoses included “microcephaly, cerebral defect, phenylketonuria, Mongolism, gargoylism, and hydrocephaly”

(Pence, 2005, pp. 148–149). Nearly one third of the VSS population had additional disabilities grouped into “secondary diagnoses”: hemiplegia, quadriplegia, visual or hearing handicaps, and major motor seizures (Pence, 2005, pp. 148–149). The administration of VSS (included) “executive director Clayton Lorenzen, program director William Karnes, medical director Clarence R. Laing, M.D., head teacher James Riggins, and social services director Ruth Green, offered educational, medical, and vocational services” (Pence, 2005, p. 151.

In the 1960s there were few specific interventions for such individuals in institutions such as VSS. Meyerson and his students had begun to develop positive behavioral skills using simple positive reinforcement methods. “Examples of behaviors include essentials such as toilet training, walking, and talking, as well as paying attention to teachers and following their directions” (Pence, 2005, p. 57). It is unclear how many children received aversive treatments because no records are available. In an old VSS brochure, the caption of one photograph states that Cammie’s early training required near total physical restraint because she “would violently strike her face with both hands 160 times per minute, bang her knees together with resounding cracks, and hit her head against the floor, the wall, or any hard object nearby” (Valley of the Sun School 1966 Annual Report, p. 7, as cited in Pence, 2005, p. 155). A comment by a volunteer student reported that she hit, bit, and banged her head 700 times in 5 minutes when unrestrained (Pence, 2005). In the 1960s institutions such as VSS had no effective treatments other than high doses of sedating antipsychotic medications. Few were familiar with positive behavioral interventions based on operant conditioning principles.

There are no precise records indicating when the use of severe aversive methods began at VSS under Meyerson’s supervision. His students reported that Meyerson delivered most of the shocks and slaps privately so that they were unseen by others. But one graduate student, Brian Jacobson, recalled to Ray Pence:

When she (Cammie) hit herself, my job was to slap her, and I slapped her right across the face. If she hit herself, I would hit her immediately. We exchanged blows on many, many occasions over a long time. . .[Meyerson] struck her, but not much – not nearly as much as I did. (Pence, 2005, p. 179)

By year’s close 1967 and in early 1968, several demonstration projects elsewhere had shown it was possible to teach and maintain positive behavioral skills among such individuals despite their disturbed behavior, including some individuals with severe self-injury, by using positive reinforcement strategies (Birnbrauer & Lawler, 1964; Girardeau & Spradlin, 1964; Thompson & Arhelger, 1968). Within several years, a more comprehensive demonstration project based on positive reinforcement had demonstrated most aggressive and self-injurious behavior could be


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eliminated without aversive methods (Thompson & Grabowski, 1972). Whether shock punishment procedures were necessary or effective in reducing self-injurious behavior among various children with developmental disabilities at VSS is unknown. This author attempted to obtain treatment records from the original VSS building in which those interventions were used, but that facility had moved from its original location in 1989 and it appears that records were lost. The current executive director of VSS reported that no records exist from that period (C. Thiebeau, personal communication, October 17, 2016). What descriptions publicly existed were in Meyerson’s own words in the Arizona Republic, such as in the Thursday, January 4, 1968 article in which Meyerson was quoted.

Sure there were times during the project ... when slapping Cammie and shouting at her in calculated “Outrage” was part of the treatment. Our slaps were with cupped hands to make more noise. Noise enough to get through in (to) her. Our shocks were deliberate in an infuriated vein. It was part of the process to bring her around to a normal verbal “no” when she forgot herself and brought her fist up to hit herself. (Wilson, 1968, January 4, p. 80)

Later Meyerson continued, “Mothers are skittish about looking” (Wilson, 1968, January 4, p.

80). “The work at [VSS] came to a screeching halt when one mother, who had a profoundly retarded child that we had worked with without any startling results, became irate when one day she saw Lee holler at Cammie and slapped her for hitting herself” (Pence, 2005, p. 185).

At the time, according to the Arizona Republic, “The researchers claim ‘good positive results, perhaps the best achieved so far with a [such a] severely self-destructive child’” (Wilson, 1968, March 30, p. 45). Meyerson further added to the reporter, “Do we demonstrate a cure, and drop the whole thing and let the child go by the wayside?” (Wilson, 1968, March 30, p. 45). Regarding the ethical concerns, the director Lorentzen commented:

Do we have to go slap or shock a kid to stop her destructive behavior? ... This magazine article [Reader’s Digest about Cammie, the child who had received so many shocks] is an embarrassment to us. We are beginning to get letters of inquiry. Undoubtedly we’ll be getting letters from parents who want us to accomplish happy endings for their children. But we are not miracle workers, and Cammie is not a success story ... . Can you imagine how we feel when someone comes and wants to see the golden haired child they have read about. We have success stories, but Cammie is not one of them. (Wilson, 1968, January 4, p. 82)

Nor are records of Meyerson’s and his colleagues’ shock procedures available in the current Department of Psychology archives at ASU. The ASU Central Archives personnel files might conceivably contain relevant information, but are sealed under state law. There are no objective records available which include baseline measures, procedures used, or measured behavioral outcomes. There was neither parental nor institutional consent by the VSS administration or ASU. This statement from the Pence dissertation captures the apparent lack of commitment to ethical standards:

Some of Meyerson’s responses to Cammie’s SIB came in the form of physical punishment, and documenting them publicly was unthinkable. That Meyerson and his staff could punish Cammie (albeit reluctantly and with resistance from at least one participant) without

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informing her parents and authorities at VSS or elsewhere, says much about ethical standards (or lack thereof) in human subject research 40 years ago. (Pence, 2005, p. 160)

Administrative chicanery

The rift between the BA faculty members and others in the Department of Psychology became more relevant when a new dean, George Peek, was appointed in 1967, at a time when the University had no president. Dean Peek quickly hired one of his friends, Austin Jones, a clinical psychologist colleague from the University of Michigan, to head the clinical psychology program at ASU. Jones’s prior background had been mostly in research related to information dissemination and cognitive contributions to motivation, and he had interests in theater and dance. He had no professional expertise relevant to behavior analysis (Obituary: Austin Edward Jones, 2014, December 21). Once Jones had been hired as the head of Clinical Psychology (replacing Joel Greenspoon, who had left the department earlier), the dean and Jones as head of Clinical Psychology reportedly built on the existing dissension between the practitioners and the rest of the department to seed further discord. Dean Peek used the discord to rationalize the replacement of Bachrach with Austin Jones (F3).

Jones reportedly told Bachrach at the time of the latter’s replacement that he planned to use his discretionary power to refuse tenure, to limit raises, and to employ other means of making life uncomfortable for BA faculty members (F3). Bachrach reportedly told BA faculty members that they would have an uncertain future under Jones’s leadership and urged graduate students to complete their requirements as quickly as possible. That led five BA Ph.D. students to take their final oral examinations during the week of August 12, 1968 (S1). Because of Jones’s close relationship with the dean, the BA faculty and their graduate students had no recourse without a higher administrative appeal possible. It later turned out that the new department chair was equally harsh in his dealings with other departmental faculty whom he disfavored (F4) and was eventually removed by Chuck Wolf when he became dean (F3). That was too late for the Behavior Analysis program, which had entirely unraveled.

The speed with which the program disintegrated was stunning. According to a newspaper report:

The former Chair and five other members of the Psychology Department are quitting in the wake of an administrative feud over operations ... . The resignations represent one third of the Psychology staff and the nucleus of the Experimental division ... . Counting its current losses the Psychology Department has experienced 75% turnover in the past two years. (Meek, 1969, July 30, p. 13)

Summary and interpretations of unravelling Fort Skinner

Although details remain uncertain, the main issues leading to the schism in the program and the vulnerability to administrative takeover are apparent. The department had no history of significant dissension between behavior analyst and non-behavior analyst faculty groups. A former chairman, who was not himself a behavior analyst, remarked that the “behaviorist banner” was welcomed over the department. But when it became apparent that a treatment program being conducted under the auspices of the Psychology Department involved the use of skin shock at a community treatment center for children with disabilities, a cleavage occurred within the department.


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Some faculty colleagues in the Department of Psychology had significant reservations about the use of shock as part of behavioral treatment conducted by fellow departmental faculty members. By subjecting vulnerable children to such controversial methods, the BA practitioner faculty members had inadvertently exposed the Department of Psychology, ASU, its officers, and the State of Arizona to potential legal liability. In addition, those actions tarnished the ethical credibility of behavior analysis as a professional field. Applied behavioral treatment had enjoyed a favorable reputation in Phoenix and at ASU to that point, as evidenced by several laudatory newspaper articles, but now that reputation was in doubt.

Complicating matters, the project was being conducted as part of a federal grant to conduct model rehabilitation services in a community setting. Painful skin shock was generally not included within the methods recommended by the Vocational Rehabilitation Agency at that time in 1967. This posed potential problems between the granting agency and the University. The enabling federal legislation, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1965 (P.L. 89-333) made no reference to such procedures, which were intended to provide services to people with physical disabilities, deafness, and blindness and to expand services to other groups, but which provided little specificity regarding methods. Meyerson was also the principal investigator of a grant entitled “Arizona’s Comprehensive Plan to Help the Mentally Retarded, Arizona State Dept. of Health, Phoenix. Mental Retardation Section. Governor’s Advisory Council on Mental Retardation.” This plan would not have included aversive methods, which were prohibited by most state agencies at that time.

Based on newspaper reports, it appears that Meyerson and colleagues began to use shock punishment to treat self -injurious behavior at VSS sometime in 1967. While an extensive laboratory animal research literature existed, stretching back many years and demonstrating the conditions under which aversive skin shock (usually to an animal’s feet) reduced the frequency of a variety of operant responses (Azrin & Holz, 1966; Church, Raymond, & Beauchamp, 1967; Dinsmoor, 1954), the human applied research literature was very small in 1967 when the ASU work was done. In their briefly stated rationale for using shock punishment, Meyerson referred to Lovaas’s use of shock and food rewards, which reduced self-injury of children with autism (Wilson, 1968, January 4). As of 1966, four articles had been published in professional journals using skin-shock punishment to treat behavior of several young children with autism and self-injury in restricted settings. All of the children had demonstrated temporary reductions in frequency of self-injury when shock was delivered contingently, but without generalization or maintenance on discontinuing shock (Lovaas, Freitag, Gold, & Kassorla, 1965; Lovaas, Schaeffer, & Simmons, 1965; Tate & Baroff, 1966; Wolf, Risley, & Mees, 1964). Additionally, the Moser and Grant (1965) article about Lovaas’s UCLA research appeared in Life Magazine.

Whether there may have been scientific justification for use of shock at VSS was unclear, but there was no established clinical precedent at that time. The rift between the practitioner group and the remaining behavior analysts and the rest of the Department of Psychology faculty was a first step in the undermining of behavior analysis at Fort Skinner. The practitioner faculty members’ inflexibility in defending the use of shock in treating children with self-injury to their faculty colleagues may have made matters worse (F2, F3).

Until the new ASU Dean of Arts and Sciences had surreptitiously introduced his protégé to replace Bachrach, what dissension had existed within the program had been largely manageable. However, it seems that the shock intervention controversy tested the program’s unity. Once Dean Peek and Chairman Jones were in place, in the absence of a university president, Bachrach had no administrative support, and the new dean’s control was undeterred. Peek and Jones undermined

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Bachrach’s support sufficiently among the non-operant faculty that it led to unraveling of the ASU Behavior Analysis program, as well as its relation to the other psychology faculty. Most of the BA faculty left ASU over the next 18 months as a result of Jones’s portentous comments to Bachrach and other faculty members (F1, F2, F3). The last behavior analyst faculty member, Peter Killeen, was not seen as a protégé of Bachrach’s or as a conformist Skinnerian, sparing him from Jones’s animosity. Killeen kept the Skinnerian flag aloft over the derelict fort for 40 years and then passed it to a successor.

Summary: Fort Skinner in the Desert Establishment and Dissolution

B. F. Skinner was committed to creating a veritable intellectual fortress for behavior analysis, fending off what he perceived to be the misguided incursions of traditional psychological theory and increasingly what he saw as the epistemological quicksand of neuroscience (Skinner, 1993). His 1993 call for “a world of our own” made no mention that at one point more than a half century earlier, such a world had begun to be created at Arizona State University in Tempe. During the 1960s, ASU behavior analysts had begun to establish what Skinner later called “a world of their own,” but lost the opportunity to build a modern experimental analysis of behavior program, due in part to their insistence on using aversive methods contrary to the norms at the time. As I pointed out in my comment on Skinner’s 1993 article, “In this pluralistic world in which most genuine change and assimilation of new ideas occurs incremental, he (Skinner) had helped create such a science-rooted movement ... but not with the purity of commitment he demanded, nor which could reasonably expect” (Thompson, 2014, p. 108).

Several of the applied behavior analysts at ASU seemed to have been drawn to the romanticism of Dylan Thomas’s (1971) famous quote, “Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.” They seem to have forgotten that they were not the only ones doing the dying. They dug the first shovel of their own group’s grave, making it easier for a hostile administrator to complete the job. And Dean Peek and the new Chairman, Austin Jones, happily dispatched the remainder of the BA program over succeeding months. The behavior analyst practitioners seemed to have been unable to entertain the possibility that there might be some merit to the ethical perspectives of their colleagues and the community around them.

In most universities, academic departments and programs evolve organically around a few central figures who provide the intellectual and theoretical driving force. The ASU Behavior Analysis Program emanated from a more synthetic platform, significantly motivated by factors outside the department (i.e., the need for more faculty to meet rapidly growing enrollment needs, central administrators’ desire to create an immediate doctoral degree-granting university). The vehicle for fulfilling these needs was an entrepreneurial department chairman, Arthur Bachrach, who could rapidly respond to these outside forces at the expense of attending sufficiently to the organic variables that are usually in play when a program evolves over time.

It appears that the president and dean of the College encouraged the chairman to recruit the best and brightest behaviorally oriented psychologists as quickly as possible, which Bachrach did decisively. Many reports indicate that he did a brilliant job of recruiting top scientist faculty members to ASU and creating an atmosphere of respect and excitement in the program and throughout the department. Bachrach created an impressive behavior analysis academic program within 5 years.

By most metrics Bachrach was very successful, as shown in Table 1. But the approach he adopted had a fundamental weakness. Bachrach’s strategy assumed the faculty members and their


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administrators, who had developed the ASU BA program under rule-governed contingencies, would be as adept as those acquired under contingency-shaped strategies. But that was unlikely. The concept of a “rule” in this case, meant a verbal formula that described what behavior would be reinforced under specific conditions, but it did not extend to the complex contingencies operating in a large academic university and surrounding community. Contingency-shaped behavior referred to the shaping of various academic and administrative skills over time through successive approximations (differential success and failure), including fading, generalization, equivalence class formation, which often engenders looser control but much greater flexibility and generalization (Catania, Shimoff, & Matthews, 1989; Place, 1988; Skinner, 1966). In this case, it could not be assumed that simply instructing the faculty to work well together in the face of conflict was likely to be effective, i.e., statement of a rule.

Bachrach and the administration had not prepared the faculty for the possibility that there might be serious internal conflicts and strategies for coping with them. The subtleties of relationships within an academic department that typically develop in an organically grown program, of collaborations, joint teaching, of mutually supporting one another, all take time and a wide variety of experiences to develop. The synthetic rule governed program at ASU may not have developed the cohesiveness required to respond to internal conflict. One of the more insightful comments that emerged in the course of this author’s interviews was made by a former graduate student: “The behavioral psychologists were used to standing on their own apart from other psychologists,” and at ASU, “They continued to stand alone. They didn’t know how to be collaborative and Bachrach didn’t help” (S3). Indeed that was the case. They had insufficient skills working informally to solve complex interpersonal problems.

The decision by several faculty members to use aversive methods under the auspices of ASU was an important factor in the dissolution of the Fort Skinner program, which had ripple effects beyond their specific actions. There was very little evidence to support or deny the effectiveness of shock for treating self-injury in 1967. Members of the surrounding community as well as fellow academics within the university and administrators objected strenuously to the use of such methods. Some ASU BA faculty members insisted that shock and other aversive methods were necessary to treat self-injurious behavior of children with developmental disabilities. The research literature in 1967 did not inevitably lead to that conclusion. The two ASU faculty members seemed to sincerely believe that shock treatment was necessary, although their evidence and arguments were judged to be not convincing by their peers. This was the first step in dismantling the ASU academic behavior analysis program. Developmental, social, and clinical psychologists who had previously sided with behavior analysts were suddenly standing apart in opposition. Even some of their fellow behavior analysts found themselves opposing the use of such aversive methods. It seems that the faculty members committed to using shock could not seriously consider the possibility that there was merit in other perspectives.

Bachrach’s strategy for building the program had worked very well until the conflict occurred between the small practitioner group and the majority experimental analysis of behavior group and other psychology faculty members. That clash, combined with the coordinated subterfuge of a pre-selected chair and dean, led to erosion of internal support. In the absence of a president to intervene, the ASU program succumbed, ending one of the more promising behavior analysis programs of that era and possibly for a very long time. What lessons might be learned from the saga of Fort Skinner that might inform future program builders and academic behavior analysts, as well as others?

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Lessons Learned

• Some leaders are more effective in recruiting and building a program, while others’ strength is in creating intellectual and collegial depth. One must be clear about the goals in selecting a leader at a given point in a program’s history.

• In hiring academic colleagues, priority should be placed not only on scientific stature and accomplishment, but collegial competence and willingness to work for community goals.

• A credible academic department must, within its faculty composition, represent the expertise of a believable segment of the field’s sub-disciplines; failing to do so jeopardizes the department’s external credibility, contributing to internal long-term programmatic instability.

• An essential part of faculty buy-in involves accepting responsibility for their individual actions and avoids jeopardizing their department and university in order to make a personal point or derive professional benefit. That should be part of identifying new faculty and their mentoring.

• The decision of a faculty member to use methods in their professional activities which deviate significantly from cultural norms must be justifiable to one’s fellow academicians. If one finds it necessary to conceal one’s activities from the light of day, and feels assailed when called upon to justify their actions to colleagues and administrators, those actions are inherently suspect.

• It is a mistake to assume that broad theoretical agreement about a scientific perspective (e.g., behavior analysis as a scientific epistemology) necessarily indicates shared views regarding acceptable individual ethical conduct.

• Ex parte faculty socialization can be helpful, but it does not substitute for substantive interactions in university laboratories and seminar rooms around fundamentally important subject matter.

• Several ASU behavior analysts adopted what Goldiamond (1974/2002) called a “pathological” perspective, common in many institutional settings. The goal was to eliminate the troubling behavior, rather than what he called a “constructionist” perspective, which was to construct a behavioral repertoire making the self-injurious behavior unnecessary, as it solves the problem leading to self-injury. Goldiamond discussed the various factors leading institutional settings, such as VSS, to adopt institutional pathological perspectives. The constructional perspective is the approach taken by many experts in the positive behavior support field (Carr et al., 2002).

• Academic freedom refers to the right of individuals to pursue truth as they know it, but it does not include the right to jeopardize the very existence of the institutions within which they work. In the case of experimental treatments that violate cultural norms, the onus is upon the individual and university to assure that there is unassailable evidence of the safety, efficacy, and ethical propriety of such treatments.

• Building an effective faculty committed to an intellectual academic program requires time and varied communal activities from collaborative research, joint teaching, planning departmental curriculum and speaker series, and annual colloquia. The types of relationships that are built


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over time have the necessary flexibility and creativity in problem solving to overcome unforeseen difficulties encountered by any program or department.

• A “fort” is a poor metaphor to describe an academic program, whimsical or not. It is a mistake to view oneself and colleagues as a beleaguered group of scientists in conflict surrounding academics and the world more generally. As Robert Frost (1914) so aptly wrote, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was likely to give offence.”

Notes

i. “Fort Skinner in the Desert” was the name whimsically given to Arizona State University’s Behavior Analysis program by the program’s chairman, Arthur J. Bachrach.

ii. Between mid-April and mid-May 2016 the author conducted face to face oral and email interviews with three former and one current ASU Fort Skinner faculty members and former doctoral students. To protect their anonymity, they will be indicated here by letter and number designations as follows: Interviewed faculty members: F1: Retired former ASU professor in experimental analysis of behavior, and department chairman (male); F2: Retired former ASU professor in social psychology (male); F3: Retired former ASU professor of quantitative psychology and former department chairman (male), F4: Current senior professor of developmental psychology (female), Interviewed former students: S1: Retired Ph.D. in behavior analysis and neuroscience/sensory psychology (female); S2: Retired Ph.D. in applied behavior analysis (female); S3: Current Professor of psychology at an eastern university, experimental analysis of behavior (male); S4: Former Fort Skinner graduate in applied behavior analysis (male), S5: former clinical psychology and experimental analysis of behavior graduate student later a leader in behavior analysis and now a distinguished retired professor of psychology. Ray Pence’s (2005) doctoral dissertation, which came to light in January 2017, was useful as well. Pence had interviewed Lee Meyerson and various faculty members at ASU in 2001 and 2002, including several witnesses to the rapid deterioration of Fort Skinner. Although the focus of his investigation was specifically on Meyerson’s contributions, many of his ancillary interview findings and qualitative report were relevant to the present analysis. The author is grateful to Keith Crnic, chairman of the Arizona State University Department of Psychology for providing work space and to Robert Spindler of the ASU Special Archives for facilitating access to historic documents. In addition the author acknowledges the suggestions of Peter Killeen and John Reich on the first drafts of this article.

iii. None of the six previous faculty members of the Department of Psychology in 1955 had

any known professional activities related to behaviorism. They were: Rachel S. Ball (1947–1964), University of Chicago, Development of Merrill Palmer Scales for children; Rexford Bolling (1950–1955), Assistant Professor, BEd Fredonia State Teachers College, MA, Syracuse University; John O. Grimes (1928–1955), Ph.D. Eastern Michigan, former public school teacher and school principal, Director of ASU Correspondence School; H. Clay Skinner (1938–1954), Professor and Head, MS Education, Indiana University, role of personality in student instruction, classroom

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educational practices, psychology in everyday life; Sydney R. Smith (1947–1968), Ph.D., California, Associate Professor, delinquency, clinical psychology; and George P. Young (1947–1961), Ph.D., Yale University, Associate Professor, Director of reading clinic, educational measurement. Drs. Grimes and Skinner retired in 1954 immediately before Arthur Staats was hired.

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