If there is a-"desert island" book in the conduct of social research, it is arguably this book. Whether in terms of sociological structures or psychological nuances, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, originally published in 1955, is a recognized landmark. Stouffer helped strengthen the fundamental liberties of all Americans by showing dangerous consequences of efforts to thwart a perceived Communist conspiracy, including some of the very real liberties that can be destroyed in the process of a witch-hunt. Stouffer explores attitudes of Americans against a backdrop of a history of intolerance that dates back to the Know-Nothing party before the Civil War and extending through the Ku Klux Klan after World War I. The overall results show a markedly strong relationship between perception of high national risk and personal intolerance of differences, and also the perception of threat and tolerance that operates as a predisposing tendency that affects judgments about specific political movements and events. Stouffer enriches the sense and meaning of survey research by emphasizing patterns of percentages rather than actual amounts; survey craftsmanship; the use of paired sampling techniques to reduce problems of chance; the importance of completion rates in survey research work; the importance of interruptions during a questioning period; the choice of field workers in performing the surveys. The actual survey instruments are included as prepared by the National Opinion Research Center and the Gallup Organization. They remain a model for large-scale samples of this kind. The beautiful, highly personal, introduction by James Davis places Stouffer in an appropriate academic and professional context. Stouffer was a great sociologist with two landmark efforts to his credit: The American Soldier and then Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties. Professor Davis calls this "a great classic of empirical sociology." It is

This path-breaking book reconceptualizes our understanding of political tolerance as well as of its foundations. Previous studies, the authors contend, overemphasized the role of education in explaining the presence of tolerance, while giving insufficient weight to personality and ideological factors. With an innovative methodology for measuring levels of tolerance more accurately, the authors are able to explain why particular groups are targeted and why tolerance is an inherently political concept. Far from abating, the degree of intolerance in America today is probably as great as it ever was; it is the targets of intolerance that have changed.

Although America's universities have become the envy of the world for their creative energy and their production of transformative knowledge, few understand how and why they have become preeminent. This groundbreaking book traces the origins and the evolution of our great universities. It shows how they grew out of sleepy colleges at the turn of the twentieth century into powerful institutions that continue to generate new industries and advance our standard of living. Far from inevitable, this transformation was enabled by a highly competitive system that invested public tax dollars in university research and students while granting universities substantial autonomy. Today, America's universities face considerable threats. Even greater than foreign competition are the threats from within the United States. Under the Bush administration, government increasingly imposed ideological constraints on the freedom of academic inquiry. Restrictive visa policies instituted after 9/11 continue to discourage talented foreign graduate students from training in the United States. The international financial crisis, which has depleted university endowments and state investments in higher education, threatens the vitality of some of our greatest institutions of higher learning. In order to sustain and enhance the American tradition of excellence, we must nurture this powerful -- yet underappreciated -- national resource.