Julius Gould

(Samuel) Julius Gould (born 13 October 1924) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham. Gould was founder Chairman of the Social Affairs Unit and is also an academic advisor for the Bruges Group.

In 1977, he achieved brief notoriety in the British academic community as the author of the intelligence connected Institute for the Study of Conflict's "Gould Report" on alleged Marxist penetration into British sociology, "the closest British academic life got to a McCarthy-ite witch-hunt of radicals""

According to Robert Young, his paper on functionalist sociology was used by the intelligence connected ISc as a means to attack left Sociology:

The essay had a revealing set of sequelae. It was published in an obscure local periodical which was only sold on the streets of Cambridge. Even so, the American sociologist, Edward Shils, got hold of a copy and sent it to his fellow conservative, Julius Gould, then a professor at Leicester. Gould used it as a stick with which to beat me over and over again in the infamous 'Gould Report'... I was one of the two most oft-mentioned pariahs in that document, something which made me both proud and afraid. I am glad to say that I subsequently had a hand in helping the King's College Fellowship Electors to decide to terminate Shils' fellowship, given that he made little contribution to the academic life of the college and used it as a base for CIA-related investigation of radicals. It was claimed on Shils' behalf that he was of considerable help to graduate students, and I was able (in my capacity as Tutor for Graduate Students) to show that he had made himself remarkably unavailable to them. He was immediately taken up by Peterhouse, who gave him a fellowship. Shils was a member of the set of American conservative intellectuals who made up the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which published Encounter and various other periodicals, all financed (as Christopher Lasch was able to show in a remarkable essay on 'The Cultural Cold War') by the CIA. Academic politics of this kind constituted a front during the Vietnam War, and showing the political and ideological dimensions of theory in the social sciences was a not insignificant battle in that struggle.

Career

Education: University of Oxford (MA).

• 1956-1964 Reader in Social Institutions, London School of Economics
• 1964-1982 Professor of Sociology, University of Nottingham
• 1983-5 Research director, Institute for Policy Research

Other positions

• 1981-2007 Chairman of trustees, Social Affairs Unit
• 1993-4 Council of the United Synagogue
• Government and Opposition on Editorial board (with, amongst others, right wing operative Leonard Schapiro) circa 1974.

Publications

• Gould, J. Attack on Higher Education: Marxist and Radical Penetration, 1977, report of a study group of the Institute for the Study of Conflict
• Dictionary of the Social Sciences (joint editor)
• Jewish Life in Modern Britain (joint editor)
• The Attack on Higher Education
• Jewish Commitment: A study in London