ABSTRACT
I returned to the University of Pennsylvania in fall 1972 as an associate professor. Reneé Fox had been appointed chair of the sociology department. For many years, the chair of the department had alternated between a criminologist and a demographer drawn from the two largest and strongest sectors of the department. But over the past ten years new sociologists were brought in who specialized in other areas, and their numbers exceeded those of the criminologists and demographers combined. The year before I went to England, I joined several junior and a few senior faculty in expressing the view that the next chair be someone who represented the newer, more cosmopolitan make-up of the department. We agreed that Reneé Fox was the obvious choice for this position. With the leadership of E. Digby Baltzell, this view was presented to the dean, who saw its merits and approved Fox as the next chair. This was not only a palace coup confined to the sociology department. Fox was the first woman to take the chair of any department in the Wharton School and, I believe, of the university as a whole. Small revolutions are sometimes a prelude to larger ones. Other than the small-scale uprising in the sociology department, which had been quiet and peaceful (but with lingering resentment from the powers that once had been), the university was calmer than it had been a year earlier.
