Daniel Patrick Moynihan - Career As Scholar

Career As Scholar

In addition to his career as a politician and a diplomat, Moynihan worked as a sociologist. He was Director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Fellow on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University from 1964 to 1967. In magazines such as Commentary and The Public Interest, he published articles on urban ethnic politics and on the problems of the poor in cities of the Northeast.

Moynihan coined the term "professionalization of reform," by which the government bureaucracy thinks up problems for government to solve rather than simply responding to problems identified elsewhere.

Soon after his 1971 return to Harvard, having served two years in the Nixon White House as Counselor to the President, Moynihan became a professor in the Department of Government. In 1983 he was awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey Award given by the American Political Science Association "in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist." He wrote 19 books, leading his personal friend, columnist and former professor George F. Will, to remark that Dr. Moynihan "wrote more books than most senators have read." He also joined the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs as a public administration faculty after retiring from the Senate.

Moynihan's scholarly accomplishments led Michael Barone, writing in the Almanac of American Politics to describe the senator as "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." Moynihan's 1993 article, "Defining Deviancy Down", was notably controversial.