Brij Mohan: the evolution of a social scientist

Thementor–protégé cycle is a perpetual trajectory of generational evolution.My three great mentors – Radha Kamal Mukerjee, Nathan C. Cohen and Eveline M. Burns – represented a tradition of scholarship, which one does not obtain in the current academic culture. Radha Kamal Mukerjee was an intellectual giant, institutionbuilder and a savant of immeasurable human depth; Nathan C. Cohen and Eveline M. Burns offered the same as pioneers in shaping the academic social welfare culture. While these three individuals vastly differed in temperamental and personal attributes, they all shared one common attribute: an uncompromising passion and indelible commitment to scholarship as the core of institutional leadership. It was my privilege to have been one of their protégés in the 1950s. They embodied the best that the three great institutions – Lucknow Unversity, the London School of Economics (LSE), and Columbia University – would offer to the world of social sciences. Brij Mohan, my first successful doctoral graduate and subsequently a colleague, embodies the continued quest of a classic professorial tradition, which seems to be fading away in the fog of new corporate culture. Someone, very important, informally said: ‘‘He may indeed be the last professor in the RKM tradition’’. I had come to the Columbia University School of Social Work, New York in 1954 on a United Nations Social Welfare Scholarship, and enrolled in the New York School of Social Work, Columbia University – later renamed the Columbia University School of Social Work – earning the degrees of Master of Sciences in Social Work (1955) and Doctor of Social Welfare (1958). On my return to my native alma mater, Lucknow University, under the leadership of Dr Radha Kamal Mukerjee, the father of Indian Sociology, social work was emerging as a new profession. Even though it had taken its roots in a few places – Bombay, Varanasi, and Delhi – nowhere in the world was doctoral education available in social work beyond the United States. Lucknow University initiated a PhD in social work in the late 1950s, and two MSW candidates (A.B. Bose and Hira Singh) obtained PhDs under the aegis of the J.K. Institute of Sociology and Human Relations at Lucknow University. Brij Mohan, who joined Lucknow University in 1960, obtained the first PhD degree in the Department of Social Work