This is a copy of an article in the journal Society, vol. 50, no. 2, 2013.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9634-4
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9634-4
Also available rom the publisher and in PDF format.
Abstract
The advent of public sociology over the past decade represents the
end of a string of crisis moments in sociology. Since the 1950s and, especially,
the 1960s, sociology was argued to be in a crisis because the discipline was
thought to be conservative and contributing to sustain the status quo. As a
result, the 1970s witnessed a radicalization of sociology, but the 1980s saw a
general decline of sociology. Upon a resurgence during the 1990s, the crisis advocates
have come back with a vengeance in the form of a renewed commitment to a heavily
politicized sociology under the heading of public sociology, a perspective that
is now thoroughly institutionalized and widely embraced. In sociology, the effects
of the 1960s thus began to be felt in earnest some forty years late.
Keywords: Sociology – Public sociology – Sociological profession – Radical
sociology – Higher education
Against the background of the development of academic culture
since the 1960s, I discuss selected prospects and problems in the institutionalization
of American sociology, especially with respect to the organization of the
sociological profession and the repercussions thereof for the teaching and
learning of sociology in higher education. I begin by describing the role of
sociology as it was envisioned by the discipline’s founders. In the development
of modern sociology, I will show, sociology almost immediately became
preoccupied with the idea that it was not doing what it ought to be doing and
that the discipline therefore was in some state of crisis. Certain cultural
currents of the 1960s amplified these ideas and greatly influenced the practice
of sociology in the following years, especially in terms of the professional
organization of sociology and its teaching in higher education.
It
should come as no great surprise that the sixties had a special impact on the
discipline of sociology in a manner other sciences will not have experienced,
given the simple fact that sociology and society are specially connected. The
crisis of (Western) society that was proclaimed during the 1960s indeed also
brought about the argument that sociology was in a crisis. More striking and, I
suspect, much less well known is that more recent decades have seen a
reinvigorated response to the idea of sociology’s crisis, with an increasing
impact far beyond what the older crisis guard may have anticipated and others
will have feared. Situated in the context of the history of sociology’s crisis
moments, I discuss the implications of these developments for the professional
organization of sociology and its standing at America’s colleges and
universities. I argue that, among other transformations, a renewal of the moral
functions of education will be in order to restore the true nature of
sociology.
The
Promise of Sociology
The word ‘sociologie’ was
invented by Auguste Comte as early as 1838, but the science of sociology did not
begin to develop and become institutionalized until later in the second half of
the 19th century. Sociology as an academic discipline owes its birth
to the endeavors of such notable classic scholars as Herbert Spencer, William
Graham Sumner, Albion Small, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and --the two undisputed classics of
sociology-- Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. It was readily understood by these
classics, and often also explicated in their written works, that sociology was
both a discipline and a profession and that a great responsibility was placed
on the practitioners of the new science of society to take on the right to
practice their duties with all due consideration of scientific rigor and academic
professionalism.
Emile
Durkheim (1858-1917), more than any other classical sociologist, made great
efforts to institutionalize sociology as an academic discipline with its own
distinct rules and object of study within the context of the university
(Durkheim 1895). Durkheim had been educated in philosophy and education and
also took up professorships in those fields, but only to introduce and practice
a new field of study, sociology, that was occupied with the scientific study of
society as a reality in itself. In the course of practicing his scholarship,
Durkheim was also a teacher and a builder of a veritable school of sociology,
with its own research programs and publications (most notably, the periodicals L’Annee Sociologique and the Annales Sociologiques), which involved a
multitude of sociologists as well as scholars in related scientific fields,
such as history, law, and criminology.
Whereas
Durkheim primarily advocated the role of the sociological professional by
practicing it, Max Weber (1864-1920) was less directly involved in building a
school of sociology because, hindered by poor health, he held formal teaching positions
only for a limited number of years over the course of his career. Weber
nonetheless contributed greatly to the formal standing of sociology as an academic
field, first of all because of his broad appeal as an important public
intellectual. Additionally, along with Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies, Weber
founded the German Society for Sociology in 1909 and thus had a direct
influence on the institutionalization of sociology.
Most
importantly in the present context is that Weber also explicitly explicated the
role of the scientist in a systematic way. Specifically in his famous lecture
on science as a vocation, Weber (1918) suggested how the graduate student can work
towards becoming a professional scientist, taking into account certain external
conditions but also relying upon an internal calling to the profession and its
mission. Written as the professional counterpart to his methodological treatise
on value-freedom and value-neutrality (Weber 1904), Weber’s writing remains
among the most quoted authoritative statements on what it means to be a
sociologist and what the challenges and the rights and responsibilities are of
those who choose to practice sociology professionally. Among his prescriptions,
Weber especially highlighted the duty of the teacher to keep politics out of
the lecture-room and practice an intellectual integrity to rely upon analyses and
perspectives that are located within the province of one’s discipline and
specialties (Weber 1918, 145-146).
In
the development towards modern sociology, the name of Talcott Parsons stands
out above all others, both in scholarly respects and in matters of
professionalization. Originally educated in sociology in Heidelberg, Germany, just
a few years after Max Weber had died there, Parsons had an initially slow rise
in his career. He joined the faculty at Harvard in economics in 1927 and, in
1931, moved to the sociology department that had been newly founded by Pitirim
Sorokin. The dynamics of the ensuing internal struggle for domination between
Sorokin and Parsons need not concern us here. Suffice it to know that Parsons
came out victorious because of the intrinsic contributions of his great
scholarly work, no doubt, but also because of his keen awareness that sociology
as a practice involves a professional dimension as well. In fact, among
Parsons’ major substantive areas of research is the sociology of professions (especially
in the fields of medicine and law), a specialty area of which he is considered
the founding father.
Not
content with writing about the professions, Parsons also worked concretely
towards the institutionalization of sociology and its professionalization in a
number of ways. He was instrumental in establishing and leading Harvard’s famous
Department of Social Relations, a unit that housed sociology along with psychology
and anthropology. This interdisciplinary experiment lasted for almost three
decades, from 1946 until 1972, during which time Parsons was also widely revered
as the leading sociologist (especially theorist) in the United States and much
of the rest of the world. Whatever the intrinsic merits were of Parsons’ work
and whatever the extent to which those merits were responsible for his stature
among other sociologists, there is no denying his factual impact in building
sociology as a scholarly field by attracting sociologists into the profession,
both directly via his work at Harvard as well as indirectly because of his
reputation, and giving them a core set of concepts and shared values of scholarly
commitment.
Parsons
also contributed to the professionalization of (American) sociology by founding
the specialist journal The American
Sociologist, devoted to professional issues concerning the community of
sociologists (as a counterpart to the leading journals of sociological
scholarship: the American Journal of
Sociology and the American
Sociological Review). The professional journal, edited by Parsons from 1965
until 1970 , was expressly conceived as a forum for communications among
sociologists about professional issues in order to itself with the self-study
and understanding of the profession (Parsons 1965). But despite Parsons’ noble
intentions, this profession of sociology was not to be.
Sociology’s
Original Crisis
In his historical study of the modern prison system, Michel
Foucault once argued that it was astonishing to observe that the reform of the
prison system was virtually contemporaneous with its development. As soon as
new prison models were introduced, a crisis was proclaimed, necessitating
reform and the development of alternative models of punishment (Foucault 1975,
234). A similar story can be told of sociology in the modern age. Sociology in
the post-World War II period had barely begun when voices could be heard that proclaimed
an intellectual and professional crisis. The trouble with this relatively young
science of society was basically argued to be an absence of a more critically
oriented scholarly perspective, basically the absence of Marxian thought in modern
(American) sociology. An intellectual change was therefore needed that should (and
would) also impact the standing of the profession.
In
Europe, where the science of sociology originated, there was historically no need
for a re-orientation of sociology and the social sciences on the basis of Marx,
because social philosophy and sociology had retained a connection more intimate
than in the United States. To be sure, Durkheim and Weber mostly reacted
against Marx, but they did relate their respective works to him as well as
other classics of social philosophy. There was a mutual recognition, if not
always admiration, of sociology and philosophy. Following the tragedy of the
Great War, this situation changed and Marx began to be entertained favorably within
the European social sciences. In the 1930s, for instance, the Institute for
Social Research was founded in Frankfurt, Germany, to develop the so-called
Critical Theory tradition that was developed by the likes of Max Horkheimer, TheodoreAdorno, and Herbert Marcuse. Explicitly inspired by Marx, these scholars sought
to respond social-scientifically to deeply troubling currents in society, rapid
change, economic trouble, and the rise of fascism and Nazism.
In
Europe, the Marxist orientation in the social sciences was always an
intellectual undertaking and was embedded within, rather than a reaction
against, the sociological profession and related academic enterprises. In the
United States, however, the importation of Marx into the pantheon of
sociological thought and the re-direction of the works of other classical
scholars in a critical or conflict-theoretical direction also involved, and was
deliberately meant to be, an attack on the objectives of sociology, both as
scholarship and as profession. Since this re-direction took place after World
War II, the shift in world power towards the United States would not be without
consequence for the standing of sociology on a global level as well. From
within American sociology, a revolution could now take place with all due consequence
for world sociology. Specifically, since the 1950s, sociology was claimed to be
in a crisis as explicated in some publications at least once every two decades.
I will show that the direction of these crises and their suggested resolutions
have not been stable and greatly impact sociology in the academia today.
Crisis
1a: The Sociological Imagination by
C. Wright Mills, 1959:
In
this popular book, C. Wright Mills has little to say about what the
sociological imagination would be other than the capacity to relate private
troubles with public issues or to bridge biography and history and to do so in
a simple language. On both counts, of course, Mills is reacting against Parsons,
whose work Mills dismisses as a ‘grand theory’ that is too abstract and
insufficiently tuned to analyze conflict. The leisurely times of the 1950s
allowed other sociologists to make similar critical statements: Ralf Dahrendorf’s "Out of
Utopia” (1958) and Dennis Wrong’s “Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern
Sociology” (1961) are among the more noteworthy efforts. The important
consequences of these programmatic statements are not merely intellectual but were
also meant to involve a reorientation of the sociological profession. Once
power, inequality, and conflict are introduced as analytical categories of
sociological thought, an activist attitude positioning the sociologist as an advocate
of change is never far behind. Mills (1959, 179-181) explicitly clarifies this
role of the new, radical sociologist as one being directed simultaneously at the
king and to the public, rather than being a philosopher-king or a royal
advisor.
Crisis
1b: The Coming Crisis of Western
Sociology by Alvin Gouldner, 1970:
In
this highly influential book, Alvin Gouldner seeks to resolutely destroy the
Parsonian framework by claiming it to be conservative. Even more strongly,
Gouldner argues that any endeavor to develop sociology as an objective science
would be doomed to fail from the very start. For that reason, Gouldner not only
condemned the entire world of Parsons but also a range of alternative theories
that were developed in response to his thinking (e.g., exchange theory and ethnomethodology). And, unlike
Mills in the 1950s, Gouldner could now rely on a new generation of
sociologists, the generation of the “young radicals” of the 1960s, who had
“sentiments” which the “old theories” could not meet (Gouldner 1970, 7). In
other words, Gouldner argued that the subjective nature of social life should
also be recognized by the sociologist as being applicable to sociological
knowledge itself. Sociologists should therefore translate their attitudes, their
sentiments, their feelings into their work and thereby seek to liberate society
and practice a truly radical sociology.
The
crisis pronouncements of the 1950s and 1960s effectively brought about an activist
radicalization of sociology (Lipset 2001). Especially the early 1970s, when the
60s generation came off age, witnessed the production of many, more and less
radical variations of a new sociology. Some of these developments were
intellectual and some of them were waged at the professional level.
In
matters of scholarship, a slue of radical sociological writings began to be
published from the early 1970s onwards. Almost overnight, Karl Marx became one of the founding
fathers of sociology (Manza and McCarthy 2011). Marxist sociological research began to appear more
and more in the established sociology journals, while new specialized journals
of an explicitly critical bent were founded as well and major books in the
field were influenced by Marxian and otherwise radical thought.
On
a professional level, there occurred a radicalization of sociologists as well,
specifically in the American Sociological Association (ASA). This redirection involved
a call for broader acceptance of more diverse perspectives and sociologists of
diverse backgrounds. The ASA at times engaged in explicitly political and moral
issues and accordingly did not even shy away from acting against some of its own
members. Two moments stand out. In 1967, a demonstration was organized at the
annual meeting in San Francisco against the Vietnam War (Rhoades 1981). The
Sociology Liberation Movement sponsored an ASA resolution that called for an
end to the War. The resolution was defeated when a majority of members voted for
the Association not to adopt a formal policy. Reintroduced in 1968, the
resolution was again defeated. The other telling episode occurred in 1976, when
the ASA leadership, under direction of then ASA President Alfred McClung Lee, sought
to have Chicago sociologist James Coleman censured by the Association because
of his work on education and desegregation policies. In his research, Coleman
had found that whites tended to move
out of the public schools that had busing programs. The censure effort failed,
but only after a plenary session had been held at the Association’s annual
meeting where posters were displayed with Coleman’s name appearing alongside of
Nazi swastikas (Coleman 1989).
The
radical crisis sociologists relied on favorable demographic circumstances. The
60s generation of sociology was notable in terms of size, especially because
the optimism that existed in sociology in the post-World War II period had
contributed to an increase in the number of students majoring and receiving
graduate degrees in sociology (Turner and Turner 1990). By 1960, the American
Sociological Association had more than 6,000 members, more than twice as much
as ten years before. The 1960s were no doubt a fruitful decade for sociology,
to wit not just the numbers but also the kind of and, especially to be noted in
the present context, the variety of sociologists produced in those days (see,
e.g., the autobiographies in Sica and Turner 2005).
The
New Crisis and The Anti-Crisis
During the 1980s, the decade which the owner of the famous New York
nightclub Studio 54 once called the ‘dull age,’ sociology was not doing well. The
heyday of the post-1960s generation was leveling off and the number of students
and sociological professionals was declining. In 1970, the ASA had again been
able to more than double its membership from the decade before to almost
15,000, but by the mid-1980s the number was down to about 11,000. Sociology’s
negative growth was a curious outcome considering the renewed optimism, in a
radical direction, that was ushered in during the 1970s.
More
bad news came by the end of the dull decade as an assault was taking place on the
very existence of sociology in higher education, an event that even reached the
popular press (something very rare for sociology) (Kantrowitz 1992). Among
the most troubling signs were the plan to cut the Sociology Department at Yale University
by 40% and the actual closure of some sociology departments, such as at the University of Rochester and at Washington
University in St. Louis. Although it is not clear if those events were
disconnected incidents or if there was a trend that affected sociology more
broadly, the discipline was thought to be in trouble. In response, a new and altogether
different crisis of sociology was announced.
Crisis
2a: The Decomposition of Sociology
by Irving Louis Horowitz, 1993:
This
book by a critical biographer of C. Wright Mills (Horowitz 1983) develops the
argument that sociology is in decline as a discipline because of its
ideological leanings, especially in the Marxist vein, and its simultaneous
irrelevance to policy (Horowitz 1993). Infested with ideology, Horowitz
maintains, sociology is at the same time very fractured and lacking in
cohesion. Moreover, certain areas of study, such as crime and law, have become
subject matters of newly developing fields of study (criminology, law and
society) and have thus been taken out of sociology, which has, in consequence,
been shrinking.
Crisis
2b: What’s Wrong with Sociology?
edited by Stephen Cole, 1994/2001:
Originally
published in 1994 as an eight-article special issue of the journal Sociological Forum and expanded with an additional
eight chapters as an edited book appearing in 2001, this volume addresses a wide
variety of troubles associated with sociology’s radicalization (Cole 2001a). The
authors chiefly lament the ideological nature of sociology and, relatedly,
point out various commonplace and largely unacknowledged intellectual
deficiencies in sociological theory and research. The answer to the question of
the book, then, was decidedly that a lot was wrong with sociology and that the
prospects for improvement were not good. How much was really wrong with
sociology could not even have been foreseen by those who accepted the basic
premise of the new crisis of an ideologically perverted and intellectually
incoherent sociology. For whereas the old crisis could rely on the counterculture
generation of the 1960s to radicalize sociology, the new crisis had to deal
with the implications of sociology’s decline during the 1980s.
Anti-Crisis:
Public Sociology by Michael Burawoy et
al. (1999-2004):
The
final moment in sociology’s history of crises did not originate or crystallize with
a specific publication but began with a professional event in the history of
American sociology. In 1999, the then Chair of the ASA Publications Committee,
Michael Burawoy, decided to resign from his position in protest of the fact
that his Committee’s suggestions for the editorship of the American Sociological Review were not followed by the Council of
the ASA, which instead appointed another team of two sociologists to edit the
organization’s flagship journal (ASA 1999). The resignation was Burawoy’s
prerogative, but he also elected to communicate with others about his decision
and divulge information about the selection process, thereby violating the Association’s
confidentiality policy.
The
resignation of the Chair of the ASA Publications Committee received a lot of
attention among sociologists, especially in view of the fact that the matter had
political and racial undertones as the new editor was projected to be a person
of color and the decision was also hoped, and deliberately crafted, to involve
a substantive re-orientation of the journal to reflect more diverse forms of
sociology. No doubt sensing that the time for victory and revenge was upon him,
Burawoy almost immediately following his resignation, in 2001, ran for the
Presidency of the ASA. A year later, he was elected (beating out Teresa Sullivan,
then a professor at the University of Texas in Austin) and he took up the
Presidency in 2003 after serving a year as President-Elect.
Burawoy
had run on a platform of a program that he dubbed ‘public sociology’ and which
he defined in terms of sociology’s function as “mirror and conscience of society” inspired by an
explicitly activist notion that
“the world could be different” (Burawoy 2002). By the time the annual
meeting organized by Burawoy under the theme of public sociology was held in
San Francisco in August 2004, the perspective had already garnered broad
support for what was a heavily politicized understanding of sociology in the
tradition of the usual leftist activism. The meeting was not only the most
explicitly politicized but also the best-attended meeting the ASA had ever held
(ASA 2004).
The
precise nature and problems of public sociology need not concern us here
(Deflem 2004a, 2005), but suffice it to say that public sociology has, since
its initial introduction, continued to be eagerly embraced, in all kinds of
meanings and with all kinds of variations, not only in the United States, but
in many other parts of the world where sociology is practiced. This world-wide
absorption was aided by the fact that Burawoy was funded by the ASA as its
President to tour the country and many parts of the world to lecture on
the virtues of public sociology. More than two dozen symposia have to date been
devoted to public sociology in academic journals across the world. In 2010,
Burawoy took up a 4-year term as President
of the International Sociological Association (ISA Website). Considering
its global success, it can safely be concluded that public sociology has
ushered in a new era of sociology, one without any sense of crisis at all.
Sociological radicalization has now been accomplished to the point of a full
institutionalization of public sociology as an approach that can no longer be
objected to without destroying or, at least, attacking the whole of actually
existing sociology itself. In what follows, I discuss some of the conditions
and implications of this development, especially with respect to the position and
role of sociology in the university.
Sociological
Professionals and Professors
The
Organization of Sociology
The
sociological profession is presently doing extremely well in a quantitative
sense, to wit the increase in membership in the ASA since 2001 (since when
annual membership is around 13,000) and the consistently high attendance at the
Association’s annual meetings (Scelza, Spalter-Roth, and Mayorova 2010). I
argue that this success of the sociological profession has taken place with an extremely
underdeveloped group of sociologists who are educated and skilled with less
distinction than ever before. It is not entirely without merit to suggest that
entrance into the profession of sociology has moved back from achievement to
ascription as an ever-growing group of politicized sociologists and activists
has taken over the ranks of the profession. Today’s professionalization of
sociology has been enabled by unprofessionalism. The old crisis of sociology
has ended in a two-fold sense: sociologists today are many, and many are
political.
The
success of this new radical, highly politicized sociology cannot simply be the
result of an increased politicization of its practitioners, for most people who
practice sociology have generally always been left-leaning to some degree or
another. Even the older (and younger) guard of sociologists who lamented the
decomposition and wrong turn of sociology in the early 1990s were themselves,
politically, most all leftists. However, as Lipset (2001) notes, this
generation of sociologists kept their politics and activist orientations
clearly separated from their scholarly activities, even when the initial
impulse to do the latter was rooted in the former. Once a field of study was
selected, at least partly under the influence of explicit political and otherwise
moral concerns, the further development of theory and research was conducted
scientifically.
But
the analytical separation between theory and praxis is no longer widely
accepted today, as political and activist agendas are now much more easily
embraced by sociologists in conducting various activities of their profession. The
ASA’s most promoted and visible recent activities, for instance, have nothing
to do with the scientific study of society or the improvement of sociological
scholarship (even though that is explicitly stated as the Association’s
objective in its constitution[1]).
Instead, the organization is more predominantly oriented at political-activist
issues that aspire to relate to certain important issues of the day.
With
respect to its organization, for example, the ASA is
committed to a ‘Diversity Statement,’ which reads that it is the organization’s
policy “to include people of color, women, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered persons, persons with disabilities, sociologists from smaller
institutions or who work in government, business, or other applied settings,
and international scholars in all of its programmatic activities and in the
business of the Association” (ASA Website). It would be awkward, to put it
mildly, for any professional organization in the United States that it would exclude
any of the specified categories. But why the organization chooses to include
only some categories (and lump them all together on some sort of equal footing
of repression) and why it excludes others is far from clear. The Diversity
Statement is also decidedly skewed and outdated. Most strikingly, the number of
minorities in sociology continues to be extremely low, so low in fact that it must
be asked what is wrong with sociology that it has not been more effective in
recruiting scholars of color irrespective of any structural obstacles and
cultural dispositions. In 2010, the ASA counted only 6% African-Americans and
4.3% Hispanics among its total 13,708 members (Scelza, Spalter-Roth, and Mayorova 2010). In contrast, the number of
women in sociology has increased sharply, and since the early 1990s, women
in the ASA and in sociology at large outnumber men, especially among students.
Among
its activist programs, the ASA has passed resolutions against the war in Iraq in
2003 and in favor of same-sex marriage in 2004 (Deflem 2005). The Association further
prides itself on having filed amicus
curiae briefs in several Supreme Court cases (ASA Website). Activism also
rules supreme at the Association’s annual meetings. The themes of the most
recent meetings include such topics as “Social Conflict” (2011), “Real Utopias”
(2012), and “Interrogating Inequality” (2013). Politicized sociology even fills
the pages of the sociology journals, where it co-exists with bland work that is
highly scientific in its methodological approach rather than its substantive
orientation, whereby the latter which occasionally masks political motives.
No
doubt, without Burawoy’s introduction of public sociology, the recent history of
sociology would have been different. But even a professor of sociology at the
University of California at Berkeley needs favorable circumstances to
successfully execute his revenge and launch an effective crusade to take over
the whole of the sociological profession. In that respect it can be noted that
the concept of public
sociology had been introduced in American sociology once before, when Columbia
University sociologist Herbert Gans suggested the term, with a different
meaning than Burawoy, in his 1988 address as ASA President (Gans 1989). By Gans’
(2011) own admission, his effort had not been able to greatly affect the
discipline. Things changed when Burawoy appropriated the term, an event greeted
with initially reserved, but eventually less qualified enthusiasm by Gans. When
Burawoy had announced his candidacy for the ASA Presidency on a public
sociology platform, Gans quickly sought to remind sociologists that he had
introduced the term (Gans 2002). Since the success of public sociology
following the 2004 ASA meeting, however, Gans has accepted his status as a
founding-father of a public sociology he does not advocate (Gans 2011). In 2006
he was given the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the
ASA. The matter over the
proper meaning of public sociology, in any case, is now mute as a strategic and
convenient move has taken place towards the acceptance of any kind of public sociology (sometimes expressed in the pluralized
version of public sociologies). Based on the understanding of public sociology,
then, the discipline is now well beyond the crisis, not because a
postmodern condition would have been reached in which no one can agree anymore
(Lemert 1995), but, on the contrary, because there is nothing but agreement
among sociologists as all are expected to be adherents of public sociology.
Those who disagree no longer belong.
Given
the warm embrace of public sociology, in whichever meaning found suitable, and
its continued success among a large group of sociologists, it can be assumed
that the return of the old-crisis proponents was enabled, in no small measure,
by the impact of the cultural climate that was created during the U.S.
Presidency of George W. Bush. Yet, there must have been more, for the political
turn to the right can only have contributed to the success of public sociology
from about 2004 onwards following the invasion of Iraq, but cannot be
responsible for its initial rise in 1999 when such politically divisive issues
were not yet formulated (and possibly also not since the election of President
Obama, when all would have been normalized again).
I
argue that it is not the political orientation of many of today’s sociologists,
but the relative weakness of their intellectual prowess that must be considered
to account for the contemporary radicalization of sociology. Many sociologists
today have fallen for the trappings of a radicalized sociology, under the
seemingly benign heading of public sociology, simply because they do not have
the intellectual skills necessary to think critically about their own
activities, to take epistemological challenges seriously, to differentiate
between theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, on the one
hand, and the professional questions of the various sociological crises, on the
other, or even to conceptualize the distinction between profession and
scholarship, let alone understand its implications.
At
the organizational level of the profession of sociology, especially in the ASA,
the rise and rise of public sociology has been able to connect itself with the
organization’s turn towards a market model, the managerialization of its staff,
and an organizational quest for publicity. Rather than orient itself towards
advancing sociological scholarship, the ASA has been publishing press releases
and issuing statements concerning political and moral issues, while boasting successes
of the profession in quantitative terms. Examples include reports on the number
of students in sociology programs, the number of graduate degrees awarded, and the
participation at the ASA annual meetings (ASA Website). On the wikipedia page,
the ASA is described as
“the largest professional association of sociologists in the world, even larger
than the International Sociological Association” (Wikipedia). The
statement is definitely the product of the ASA itself –in 2001 the Association
initiated a “ Sociology in Wikipedia” project-- and a deliberate form of self-presentation,
betraying a market orientation that is amazingly lacking in geo-cultural sensitivity
or even a simple understanding of demographics. Otherwise it would have been
recognized that the number of sociologists per capita in the U.S. is actually
lower than in many other western nations.
The
marketization of the sociological profession was already going on for some
years before the advent of public sociology. The development was largely the
result of the flight of intellectually qualified members of the sociological
community away from the time-consuming duties of professional positions and,
concomitantly, the importation of managers into central positions in the
profession. Especially noteworthy in this respect is the fact that the position
of Executive Officer in the ASA has since about two decades now been in the
hands of individuals who are primarily known as managers with highly developed
technical skills and whose earned doctorates in sociology merely serve as a
legitimizing tool. The adoption of public sociology could rely on earlier
publicity efforts that were oriented at making sociology more policy relevant,
for instance by setting up a “Public Affairs” division (ASA Website), even when
public sociology defines itself as being distinctly different from policy
sociology. Relatedly, the ASA sells various promotional items --featuring the
organization’s logo and annual meeting themes-- such as sweatshirts, mousepads,
mugs, buttons, dog t-shirts, bibs, and infant creepers (Deflem 2004b).
The
managerialization of sociology should cause no great consternation on the part
of anyone, least of all the informed sociologist. After all, it would be intellectually
puzzling to assume that what applies to most organizations under conditions of
advanced capitalism would not also apply to the profession of sociology. As an
organized profession, sociology is an economic entity as well. This is no
problem as such, as every human endeavor, however noble or ideal, needs an organizational
infrastructure to sustain itself. What is more problematic is that the dictates
of the material infrastructure of sociology have also intruded upon the
discipline’s mission and have redirected what sociologists think about who they
are and what they should do. The ironic conclusion, in any case, is that the
radicalization of sociology has been facilitated by the profession’s
marketization. The success of sociological Marxism is a product of American
capitalism.
The
Education of Sociology
How
has sociology’s perpetual crisis until the turn of the current century and its
resolution by public sociology’s anti-crisis since then affected the discipline
as it is taught in the setting of American colleges and universities? To some
extent, of course, things have gone on as before and they may also go on as
usual for some time to come. Courses are taught and degrees are awarded. But
there have been important changes as well.
Confirming
what I said about the intellectual standing of sociological professionals, students
who major in sociology at America’s colleges and universities do not tend to be
recruited from the top-performing categories, as measured by GPA and test
scores such as GRE results (D’Antonio 1992). Especially in recent decades,
smart students do not tend to think of developing a career in sociology. Of
course, our society being what it is, the brightest students will disproportionately
move to disciplines with more financially rewarding prospects. Yet that cannot
be the only reason, for the post-World War II era did attract highly talented
people even though the stratification of the professional reward structure could
not have been much different then than it is today. The post-War golden era of
sociology can be said to have benefitted from the urgency that was felt to
study society and to work towards alleviating social ills by means of
sociological scholarship. Yet every era has its own pressing social needs and
concerns, and societal changes will always affect academic sociology differently
and more profoundly than other disciplines. Today’s problems with respect to
such issues as international violence and economic turmoil can hardly be
assumed to be any less relevant to sociology than the problems societies were
facing in earlier decades. The conclusion must therefore be that sociology is
no longer able to deliver on its original promise. Society is still relevant to
sociology, but sociology is not generally thought to be relevant to society.
The problem, then, must be at the supply side of sociological education.
Sociology
can only reap what it has sown. Attracted to sociology because of ill-conceived
political leanings and poorly educated at a time when sociology was thought to
be in an intellectual crisis but also enjoyed the richness of being able to
graduate a multitude of students, many of the students of sociology from the
1970s onwards could only become poorly educated professionals. And poorly
educated professionals can simply not be expected to educate well. Because
sociologists today do not even agree on what is most important to study and
what the most appropriate perspectives and methodologies are, they are
accordingly inconsistent in teaching what they think is most necessary. The lack
of consensus among sociologists what constitutes good work implies that people working
in the most esteemed schools or receiving the most attention for their work are
not necessarily the brightest (Stinchcombe 2001).
As
a result of the poor understanding of the mission of sociology, politics has
now taken the place of scholarship. Max Weber’s (1918, 146) admonition that
“the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform” has been
completely lost on a considerable number of sociology professors today. Adherents
of public sociology, in particular, have done much to advocate the activist
sociologist on the college campus, one of the few terrains incidentally where
they have been able to do so, as their skills as individual scholars affecting
society otherwise are extremely weak. Public sociology has even become an area
of specialization and/or teaching subject or perspective at several U.S.
college colleges and universities.[2]
As a result, left-leaning students are more drawn to sociology than their
conservative counterparts, contributing to a further homogenization of the
political make-up of the discipline (Fosse and Gross 2012).
The
effects of the radicalization of sociology are mostly felt on campus. On the
few occasions when public sociology actually manages to venture out into the
mainstream, especially in the media, the consequences are dumbfounding. The
blandest dribble is presented as a grand act of public sociology just because
it appears in the popular press. Even a theoretical sociologist esteemed and
(rightly) acclaimed as Jeffrey Alexander recently described one of his writings
as public sociology because it appeared in the Huffington Post (Yale Sociology website). The article explains that
Barack Obama lost the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney because of the
“theatrical failure” that Obama’s “gestures
were not eloquent” (Alexander 2012). More than a month after the article had
been posted online, it had received a mere 11 Facebook shares and 25 Twitter
posts.
Unlike
the politicized populists in the profession, sociologists who remain committed to
scholarship on the basis of scientific standards do not become as well known to
the public at large or to potential students, because the relatively high
degree of scienticity (even when it is low as compared to other sciences) of
their work will be perceived as an obstacle. And when popular themes are taught
from a scholarly perspective, it will be perceived through the hazy mist of a
perverted context. As somebody who works mostly in the area of law and society,
I can testify to the negative implications of teaching classes on topics that
have a high degree of societal relevance (e.g., crime, police, terrorism) but
that are, within the present academic context, also easily misunderstood. I
became even more acutely aware of this problem when I began teaching a sociology
course that contains the words ‘Lady’ and ‘Gaga.’[3]
Scientifically
minded sociologists face an uphill battle against their politicized and less
than stellar colleagues. As sociologist of science Stephen Cole (2001b) has
remarked, many sociologists are not only ideological but so overtly ideological
that it has contributed to the widespread notion that sociology itself is
all-out and necessarily leftist. Not rarely enough, the perception among
students is that sociology is not a science and is often seen as or confused
with socialism.[4] Sociologists
who see themselves as committed to a political cause in their teaching would
not wish to see it any other way. When public sociology was launched a decade
ago, Michael Burawoy (2002) immediately emphasized the centrality of teaching and the relevance of students
as “our first public.”
The
politicized nature of sociology has influenced university administrators, policymakers,
and the general public to doubt the credibility of the discipline. The truly
sad aspect of such perceptions is not so much that it is not true that sociology
is necessarily political or even that some sociologists obviously do not have
leftist leanings and not even that some sociologists still manage to keep their
politics out of the classroom. Instead, it is most troublesome for sociology,
as it has to be for any academic discipline, that the intellectual incapacities
of many sociologists are not recognized and are perceived as a matter of politics.
No science can advance, by definition, if it refuses to entertain the force of
the better argument rather than rely on the comfort of political expediency.
It
is one thing for sociologists to be political and to act accordingly in their
teaching. It is quite another to contemplate on the reasons if and why this
attitude can persist and flourish in the setting of higher education. To some
extent, sociology has been in trouble over its politics, to wit the discussions
on the closing of some departments. However, in view of the politicization of sociology
on a much larger scale than the few departments that faced cancelation in the
early 1990s and in view of the fact that the politicization of sociological education
has increased exponentially in more recent years, it is more remarkable that so
many sociology departments in America’s higher-educational settings still exist
today and still operate as if nothing has changed at all.
It
has occasionally been remarked that university administrators, deans in
particular, have rather low ideas about sociology departments and their faculty
(Lipset 2001). A recent study found that academic deans
rate sociology professors unfavorably on several other important areas, such as
maintaining academic rigor, success in attracting graduate students, ability to
secure grants and publish peer-reviewed publications, and overall prestige on
campus (Hohm 2008). It has also been suggested that deans
hold relatively negative views of their sociology departments because they
generally attract leftist and otherwise activist-leaning students, lack consistency
and agreement on substantive and methodological issues, and espouse anti-rationalist
currents (Huber 2001).
What
deans say does not necessarily harmonize with what they think and do. If the
problems of sociology are so obvious and so clearly recognized by deans, the
important question is why the departments have allowed to continue to exist. In
this respect, I maintain that it is not the supposed political nature of higher
education that has sustained the politicization of sociological education, but
instead its marketization. The former argument is a popular one and is often
voiced in the media or among the public at large: that colleges and
universities are leftist across the board, that they breed liberals, that they
tend to secularize students, and so on. But this idea is neither descriptively accurate
not analytically capable to account for the development of higher education. Rather,
the politicization of sociology has been able to continue to exist in American
colleges and universities because of the economic functions that sociology
departments can fulfill.
Universities
today have lowered their standards of admission and accepted more students
regardless of their level of preparation. For example, at the University of
South Carolina, where I am presently employed, the number of undergraduates has
gone up from about 18,000 in 2006 to 22,000 in 2011. As a purely educational
matter, the masses of students that have to be taught despite their relatively
low intellectual skills place a rather distinct pressure on teachers to
maintain standards in the face of resistance. Even for the best teacher working
under these circumstances it is not an easy job to maintain academic standards
to accommodate students and avoid trouble (Becker and Rau 2001). Political correctness
has brought about that holding a student to an intellectual standard may be
perceived to imply a political act as part of a politics of exclusion. Most tragically,
there are pressures exerted by university administrators towards departments to
maintain enrollment. Students of lesser skill-levels are not only admitted,
they must also graduate. Obtaining a college degree has become a matter of justice,
and the very notion of an earned degree has become a mockery. The integrative
functions that are attributed to higher education and the need for increasing
diversity of the student population produce additional ironic consequences.
In their
comprehensive study Academically Adrift,
sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa
Roksa
(2011) indeed show that there exists a dual structure of students in colleges
and universities today. A large and growing proportion of undergraduate
students lack adequate reasoning and writing skills. Unfocused and lacking in
purpose, they tend to choose the easiest courses and spend as little time as
possible studying. Professors and (an increasing proportion of) graduate assistants
who teach these courses are pressured, and often surrender, to give unearned
grades. Other students, who typically come from privileged backgrounds and good
high schools, are still intellectually challenged and do learn significantly
during their college careers. Academic administrators are well aware of these
issues, but their managerialized thinking leads them to accommodate the
situation rather than deal with the problem.
The
societal changes influencing the organization of higher education affect the
various disciplines differentially. It is extremely doubtful that a department
of chemical engineering or cell biology will have to welcome a lot of the
supplementary admitted students who lack the necessary intellectual abilities
for higher education. But sociology and other social and behavioral sciences
and the humanities that are somehow thought to be less challenging are more adversely
affected and have to accept the worst students. Ironically, ever more sociologists
today can fulfill this task rather well. And the deans know it and like it. Where
once sociologists feared that their departments would be vulnerable to budget
cuts and lose respect from the university administration because the discipline
attracted the least intellectual students (Becker and Rau 2001), today the
exact opposite is true as administrators warmly embrace sociology for the very
same reason. Sociology is allowed to continue to exist for fulfilling an economic
function. University administrators have reconfigured universities as businesses
and have abandoned the idea of teaching as a calling. Again using the
university that presently employs me as an example, the University of South
Carolina in 2012 launched an “integrated marketing and branding campaign” in
which students and university employees are encouraged to “Live the Brand!”
(USC Times 2012). Under such circumstances of the entrepreneurial university
(Etzkowitz et al. 2000), it is a lack of morality, not a particular political
or ethical direction, but an absence of any moral guidance that has contributed
that sociology has been able to go on in its own radicalized and politicized
form.
Sociology and Politics
Sociology has historically gone through various
cycles, passing from and to dominant explanations and their opposing
approaches. Today, the cycle of crises has ended as a new era of stability has
been ushered in. I showed that the current success of sociology on campus is a
result of the manner in which economic changes interact with developments in sociology.
Societal changes that are external to sociology (especially the fiscal crisis)
have led university administrators to cop out to a marketization model and make
an irresponsible economic choice
that de facto abrogates the academic mission of the university and evades any
sense of individual responsibility in the name of a sustained sound financial position. This culturally weak response has
allowed a heavily politicized sociology to continue to exist in the university because
it is intellectually not as challenging and therefore more popular. Sociology’s
politicization is itself a result of the poor intellectual development of its practitioners
who, in view of the direction of sociology since the discipline’s anti-crisis, do
not even understand their proper role as scholars and educators and do not know
better than to have their politics take the place of scholarship. The fact that
politicized sociology is predominantly leftist in orientation is but a modality
of its deeper causes in a lack or, at least, low degree of intellectualism. The
war on science is bipartisan.
External
societal changes and sociology-internal dynamics have met at the institutional
level of higher education where colleges and universities have abandoned their
moral missions in favor of a business model based on the bottom line. A century
ago, Max Weber (1918) already remarked that “the
American's conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his
knowledge and his methods for my father's money, just as the greengrocer sells
my mother cabbage” (149). Today, the administrators of higher learning ask
their teachers to adopt the same attitude and consider themselves greengrocers
and their students customers. In contemporary sociology, there are many who comply.
Much
of sociology today is too political to attract good students and intellectually
not sufficiently equipped to properly teach the ones that do enter. What is to
be done? Internally, in the discipline of sociology, what has to happen is to
launch a new crisis, to strengthen the idea of sociology as a science, to
emphasize quality instead of quantity, to make sociology unpopular, and to
relaunch the original promise of sociology. Sociologists should become more
rigid in their work on the basis of a clear scientific standard. Towards
students, this attitude should translate in specifying precise criteria for theory
and research and judge work accordingly rather than on the basis of political
or humane considerations (Cole 2001b). Externally, in the face of economic
pressures, changes need to take place as well. Because these problems are
structural, this task cannot be easy. Yet, it is necessary that we work
collectively towards a renewal of the moral functions of education.
Further Reading
- Alexander, Jeffrey. 2012. Obama’s Downcast Eyes. The Huffington Post, October 4, 2012. Available online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-c-alexander/obama-debate-performance_b_1938755.html
- Allen, Charlotte. 2011. Lady Gaga Makes It to Harvard. Minding the Campus, November 18, 2011. Available online: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/11/lady_gaga_makes_it_to_harvard.html
- Arum, Richard & Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- ASA (American Sociological Association). 1999. Public Forum (includes resignation letter by Michael Burawoy, and response by Alejandro Portes, ASA President). Footnotes, July/August 1999. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/julaug99/pf.html
- ASA. 2004. Public Sociologists Broke Records in San Francisco. Footnotes, September/October 2004. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/indextwo.html
- ASA. 2009. Report of the American Sociological Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Sociology. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/about/Council_Statements/Rpt%20of%20Cmte%20Status%20Women%20Aug%202009.pdf
- ASA. Website of the American Sociological Association. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/
- Becker, Howard S. & William C. Rau. 2001. Sociology in the 1990s. In S. Cole (Ed.), What’s Wrong with Sociology (pp. 121-129). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Burawoy, Michael. 2002. Personal Statement (for candidacy as President-Elect). Footnotes, March 2002, Available online: http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/mar02/fn11.html
- Cole, Stephen (Ed.). 2001a. What’s Wrong with Sociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Cole, Stephen. 2001b. Introduction: The Social Construction of Sociology. In S. Cole (Ed.), What’s Wrong with Sociology (pp. 7-36). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Coleman, James S. 1989. Response to the Sociology of Education Award. Academic Questions, 2(3), 76-78.
- D'Antonio, William V. 1992. Recruiting Sociologists in a Time of Changing Opportunities. In T. Halliday & M. Janowitz (Eds.), Sociology and Its Publics (pp. 99-136). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Dahrendorf, Ralph. 1958. Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 64(2), 115-127.
- Deflem, Mathieu. 2004a. The War inIraq and the Peace of San Francisco: Breaking the Code of Public Sociology. Peace, War & Social Conflict, Newsletter of the ASA section, November 2004, pp. 3-5.
- Deflem, Mathieu. 2004b. Large Mug, Mousepad, Infant Creeper, Bib, Dog T-Shirt: The Professional GroupRevisited. Perspectives, the ASA Theory section newsletter, 27(4), 15.
- Deflem, Mathieu. 2005. PublicSociology, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet. The Journal of Professional and Public Sociology 1(1), Article 4. Available online: http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/jpps/vol1/iss1/4
- Deflem, Mathieu. 2012. The Presentation of Fame in Everyday Life: The Case of LadyGaga. Margin, Vol. 1 (Spring), 58-68.
- Durkheim, Emile. (1895) 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press.
- Etzkowitz, Henry, Andrew Webster, Christiane Gebhardt, & Branca Regina Cantisano Terra. 2000. The Future of the University and the University of the Future: Evolution of Ivory Tower to Entrepreneurial Paradigm. Research Policy, 29(2), 313-330.
- Foucault, Michel. (1975) 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books.
- Gans, Herbert J. 1989. Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public. American Sociological Association, 1988 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review, 54(1), 1-16.
- Gans, Herbert J. 2002. Most of Us Should Become Public Sociologists. Footnotes, July/August, 2002. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/julyaugust02/fn10.html
- Gans, Herbert J. 2011. How to Be a Public Intellectual: An Interview with Herbert Gans. The Public Intellectual, May 31, 2011. Available online: http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/05/31/how-to-be-a-public-intellectual-an-interview-with-herbert-gans/
- Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.
- Fosse, Ethan & Neil Gross. 2012. Why Are Professors Liberal? Theory & Society, 41, 127-168.
- Hohm, Charles F. 2008. Sociology in the Academy: How the Discipline is Viewed by Deans. Sociological Perspectives, 51(2), 235-258.
- Horowitz, Irving L. 1983. C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian. New York: The Free Press.
- Horowitz, Irving L. 1993. The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Huber, Jean. 2001. Institutional Perspectives on Sociology. In S. Cole (Ed.), What’s Wrong with Sociology (pp. 293-318). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- ISA (International Sociological Association). Website of the International Sociological Association. Executive Committee 2010-2014. Available online: http://www.isa-sociology.org/cv/cv_michael_burawoy.htm
- Kantrowitz, Barbara. 1992. Sociology’s Lonely Crowd. Newsweek, February 2, 1992. Available online: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1992/02/02/sociology-s-lonely-crowd.html
- Lemert, Charles. (1995) 2004. Sociology After the Crisis. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
- Lipset, Seymour Martin. 2001. The State of American Sociology. In S. Cole (Ed.), What’s Wrong with Sociology (pp. 247-270). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Manza, Jeff & Michael A. McCarthy. 2011. The Neo-Marxist Legacy in American Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 37, 155–83.
- Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Parsons, Talcott. 1965. The American Sociologist: Editorial Statement. The American Sociologist, 1(1), 2-3.
- Rhoades, Lawrence J. 1981. A History of the American Sociological Association, 1905-1980. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/about/Rhoades_History.cfm
- Rosich, Katherine J. 2005. A History of the American Sociological Association, 1981-2004. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/about/Centennial_History_Index.cfm
- Scelza, Janene, Roberta Spalter-Roth, & Olga Mayorova. 2010. A Decade of Change: ASA Membership from 2000-2010. ASA Research Brief. Available online: http://www.asanet.org/images/research/docs/pdf/2010_asa_membership_brief.pdf
- Science Codex. 2012. Sociologist Declares Republicans Bad for America, World. October 1, 2012. Available online: http://www.sciencecodex.com/republican_strength_in_congress_aids_superrich_presidents_affiliation_has_no_effect-99316
- Sica, Alan & Stephen Turner, eds. 2005. The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 2001. Disintegrated Disciplines and the Future of Sociology. In S. Cole (Ed.), What’s Wrong with Sociology (pp. 85-97). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Turner, Stephen P. & Jonathan H. Turner. 1990. The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
- USC Times. 2012. As Gamecocks, Our Stories Have No Limits. USC Times, Fall/Winter 2012. Available online: http://www.sc.edu/usctimes/PDFs/2012/12340_USC_times_Special.pdf
- Volschoa, Thomas W. & Nathan J. Kelly 2012. The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008. American Sociological Review, 77(5), 679–699.
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- Weber, Max. (1918) 1958. Science as a Vocation. In H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 129-156). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Weber, Max. (1904) 1949. Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy. In Edward Shils & Henry Finch (Eds.), The Methodology of Social Sciences (pp. 49-112). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
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- Yale Sociology Department website. Available online: http://www.yale.edu/sociology/.
Notes
[1] Article II of the ASA constitution reads: “The objectives of the Association shall be to stimulate and improve research, instruction, and discussion, and to encourage cooperative relations among persons engaged in the scientific study of society.” http://www.asanet.org/about/constitution.cfm
[1] Article II of the ASA constitution reads: “The objectives of the Association shall be to stimulate and improve research, instruction, and discussion, and to encourage cooperative relations among persons engaged in the scientific study of society.” http://www.asanet.org/about/constitution.cfm
[2] After
2004, several sociology departments spontaneously began to self-identify as
having a special interest or concentration in public sociology. Examples
include departments at George Mason University, Ithaca College, Florida Atlantic
University, American University, and UC-Berkeley (Deflem 2005). Based on an
online search, the number of departments explicitly espousing a public
sociology agenda has in recent years increased manifold and now also includes
Missouri State University, Syracuse University, Saint Louis University, the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Salem State University, Humboldt
State University, and Baker University, among others (Google search, October
30, 2012).
[3] When
my course “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame” at the University of South
Carolina was first announced late October 2010, it became the number-one Lady
Gaga news story in the world, with multiple thousands of news reports and
commentaries appearing on the internet, in print, and on radio and television.
Sadly indicative of the public perception of sociology but ironically also
confirming the societal relevance of fame and celebrity, the course objectives
were routinely misunderstood, not only by the sensationalist entertainment
media, but also by certain conservative outlets, where the course was
misinterpreted as part of a non-academic trend in higher education (e.g., Allen
2011) when the exact opposite was true (Deflem 2012). In organized
sociology, the situation was even more troublesome. The ASA newsletter Footnotes published two notices about
the course (mentioning only three media sources) despite the fact that I was no
longer a member of the Association and had not given permission for the notices
to be published. Public sociologists even claim what is not theirs.
[4] An
article in the American
Sociological Review (Volschoa
and Kelly 2012) was recently received on a blog to imply that sociologists
had declared that Republicans would be bad for America (Science Codex 2012).
Even more interestingly, in the comment section, somebody remarked that
“anthropologists” should not write such work, especially not just before a
national election, to which another commentator remarked: “If only they were anthropologists,
then it would just be 90% non-scientific. Since this was a sociologist and a
political scientist this was instead 100% made up.”
See related papers on university and academe.
