Joseph Kirk Folsom
Read at Vassar Faculty Meeting 10/12/60
Joseph Kirk Folsom, Professor Emeritus of Sociolsgy at Vassar
College, died suddenly on May 27, 1960, within a year of his retire-
ment. He came to Vassar College as Professor of Sociology and
Economics in 1931, after having taught at the University of Pittsburgh
(1922-24), Dartmouth, and Sweet Briar College (1924-1931). During
his last year, he taught as Lecturer at Boston University. He was to
have conducted a seminar in sociology in Germany as a Fulbright
Scholar in the spring of 1961, and had made plans for a trip to the
Soviet Union to study the contemporary Russian family.
He graduated from Rutgers University with a B.S. degree in Civil
Engineering in 1913, received a Masters Degree in Sociology at Clark
University in 1915, and a Ph.D. in Psychology at Columbia University
in 1917. In World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as Psychologi-
cal Examiner, and shortly after the war went to Czechoslovakia as
Regional Director of the American YMCA. During the Second world war
he took a leave from Vassar to serve as Psychological warfare Execu-
tive in the Office of war Information in this country and in England.
He was the author of several books, a contributor to others, and
wrote scores of articles for professional and semi-professional Jour-
nals. His first two books were written prior to his selection of the
family as a field of specialization - Culture and Social Pro ress in
1929 and Social Psychology in 1931. He later contrituted two major
books to the iiterature on marriage and family living - The Family,
Its Sociology and Social Psychiatry in 1934 (revised as The Family
and Democratic Society in 1943) and Youth Family and Education in
1941. He was editor and contributor to a series of pioneering Vassar
lectures published under the title of A Plan for Marriage in 1938.
In 1939 he was elected President of the Eastern Sociological
Society. From 1942 to 1944, he served as editor of the American
Sociological Review, culminating his work with a special number
devoted to Recent Trends in the Soviet Union. Here his knowledge
of the Russian language, one of four languages he had mastered, was
of great assistance in getting at the sources.
In his articles appearing in various journals, one senses the
urgency he felt to counsel and educate people in the skills of inter-
personal relations in order to help them increase their satisfactions
in living. This concern for the distribution of useful information
on the sociology and psychology of personality formation within the
family is borne out by his administrative and consultative roles in
such organizations as the National Congress of Parents and Teacher,
the National Council on Parent Education, the National Conference on
Family Life and the National Council of Family Relations. He was
one of the founders of the American Association of Marriage Counse-
lors, and upon his retirement from Vassar, began a practice as a
marriage counselor in Boston.
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At the time of his death, he had almost completed an inter-
disciplinary social science test, to be called Society for Man. He
was also well along on a new book on the family.
Through the years at Vassar College, the courses which became
most closely identified with Professor Folsom were those in the
Family, Social Theory, Social Institutions, and the interdepartmental
course on the Soviet Union. He was one of the first social scientists
at any college to introduce fieldwork as a part of academic course
work. In 1936, he wrote an account of his students’ activities in
local social agencies and organizations, in a Report to the President
of the College.
Temperamentally, Joe Folsom was a liberal, a pragmatic social
scientist, and a man who cared very much about what happened to
people. In attempting to trace the strands of his interests, his
point of view, and the nature of his association with faculty and
students at Vassar, one becomes increasingly aware that even those
colleagues who worked most closely with him never really knew him
as a person. what is evident is that he was a shy man. He was also
a courageous man, for in 1953, his teaching and writing were inter-
rupted by a period of hospitalization which he sought voluntarily.
Moreover, after a semester's leave, he returned to the College and
quietly took up his teaching and research. In his last years at
Vassar, he continued to speak eloquently in faculty meetings, es-
pecially urging us to entertain "outrageous hypotheses" as a stimulus
to rethinking educational policy in a wider frame of reference. He
was creative, experimental, and of liberal outlook to the end. He
was a man who believed deeply that a liberal education could lead to
a life of self-fulfillment in work and personal relations. He be-
lieved that, since family life is located at the very core of society,
in understanding it, one finds many clues to an understanding of the
larger culture. Once he said in tribute to Ernest Groves, what can
now be said of Professor Folsom himself: "in (his) life we may read
this meaning, that family living can be made better through science,
if it be guided by the faith that man was not made for the family,
but the family for man".
Joan Gordon
John Murra
Leslie Koempel, Chairman