Hi, I’m Richard K Caputo, a Brooklyn-born under the radar Professor of Social Policy and Research at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work in New York City. In Connecting the Dots I chronicle and reflect on the my zigzag intellectual and career development, while acknowledging the mentors who helped shape my thinking and actions: primarily from undergraduate days at Brooklyn College during the late 1960s, through graduate study in history at Iowa State University and social work at Arizona State University in the 1970s, and in social service administration at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. Prior to becoming an academic in 1989, I worked for the Arizona State Hospital in the mid-1970s and for a large family service agency, then known as United Charities of Chicago, in the mid-1980s. I share lessons learned negotiating my way through social service agency life and finding my voice over time as a scholar overcoming obstacles, and navigating, with varying degrees of success, the rigors of academia.

This blog is my first foray into social media, so I approach this with some degree of uncertainty given the apparent deterioration of public discourse regarding political and social issues that I plan to discuss in subsequent posts. I am not sure what my learning curve will be, though I hope to become sufficiently “tweet-smart” within a week or two from this post, preferring to keep things civil, especially in later posts regarding social issues informed my pursuit of social work as a career.

I began thinking about and drafting this memoir during academic year 2014–2015, in part to provide a coherent narrative of the major ideas which and people who most influenced my career. The book is also a response to my now deceased parents who over the years wondered what I was doing professionally and asked that I put my scholarship into layperson’s terminology. This dual motivation gave me the opportunity step back from the day-to-day details of the branches and trees that went into career development and to view and reflect upon an aerial view of the intellectual forest, so to speak, that formed the overarching bedrock of my career. Fortunately, I had kept a diary from 1966, which I relied upon to aid my recall about what was going on in my life at any given time, and how I felt and what I thought about it.

I had read several intellectual autobiographies during the summer months of 2014, including those of the sociologist Peter Berger (an autobiography) and the political economist Albert O. Hirschman, and subsequently read a biography of Karl Pearson, known primarily as a statistician (at least in the circles I travel—the Pearson correlation). Others included Edward Shils and Karl Popper. Part of my fascination with reading intellectual autobiographies and biographies was my long-standing interest the social/cultural context within which the intellectuals develop their ideas and my curiosity about how they accomplished what they did. In my profession of social work, I was familiar with related works by Jane Addams and Bertha Kaplan Reynolds and thought it might be a great idea to encourage contemporary social work scholars to do likewise as a way of capturing and chronicling the intellectual history of the profession for future years.

With input from Professor Michael Reisch, who was editing the Social Work for the Twenty-First Century series of which my textbook, Policy Analysis for Social Workers, was part, I drafted a proposal to edit a book series on social work scholars and sent it to Sage Publications. Although Sage rejected it due to their estimation of insufficient sales, I decided to pursue the matter further with other presses. Shortly after Sage rejected the proposal, with input from my former colleague at Yeshiva University Professor Vicki Lens, I sent it to Columbia University Press (CUP). I had misgivings about such a venture, which intrigued and scared me. Initially I had discerned no coherent trajectory or story from a cursory perusal of my diary. I nearly nixed the whole idea. Fortunately, Professor Lens liked the idea and linked me up with Jennifer Perillo, an acquisitions editor for social work texts on the Columbia University Press editorial board.

Jennifer also loved the proposal. Despite Jennifer’s advocating on my behalf, CUP too rejected the proposal for the series – fearing that the series would lack sufficiently wide appeal, which I took to mean it would not generate sufficient revenue. I gave up on the series and decided to go ahead on my own book anyway, though I broadened the memoir to focus on my professional career and intellectual development.

If nothing else, Connecting the Dots serves as my albeit tardy response to my parents’ inquiries, something also to pass on to my sibs, nieces and nephews, and as a document to which current and future generations can refer should they want to know about intellectual and career development in general, or about mine in particular, in light of facing uncertainties that life has to offer and making choices about career paths to take, or not, along the way.