Hughes is, however, more commonly associated with the Chicago school, as he returned to the University of Chicago in 1938 and became a core figure at its sociology department (Abbott 1999). He is recognized as either teacher or mentor to numerous well-known scholars associated with the Chicago tradition of qualitative, interactionist sociology, including Howard S. Becker, Erving Goffman, Anselm Strauss and Eliot Freidson (Chapoulie 1996). In the late 1950s, the research style that Hughes represented withered in Chicago (Abbott 1999) and in 1961, Hughes accepted a position as professor of sociology at Brandeis University, where he helped to found the school's Graduate Department of Sociology. Under Hughes's influence, the Chicago tradition of fieldwork-oriented interactionism continued in Brandeis, where scholars such as Irving Kenneth Zola came to be "changed forever" (Conrad et al. 1995). In 1968, he left Brandeis University for Boston College (Chapoulie 1996).