Sociology Is Starting to Answer the Challenge | American Enterprise Institute
I recently wrote about Florida’s decision to remove introductory sociology from the general education core, in both April and June. Neither piece drew much response.
That surprised me because the story was never about Florida itself. Boards of governors do not like stepping into curricular debates, and they shouldn’t without real concerns. Faculty are supposed to decide what gets taught, and charges of political interference are not easily dismissed.
The deeper problem, however, was that sociology as a discipline had drifted, becoming more political than was ever appropriate for a general education course. Florida was willing to say so, and it acted narrowly and properly by removing the course from the general education core while leaving departments and majors untouched. Still, many critics missed an important point—students can still major in sociology and take introductory sociology. The course simply no longer satisfies a general education requirement.
I called this story a challenge rather than a killing of the discipline and wondered whether sociology would answer. For a while, I wasn’t sure that it had. The American Sociological Association issued statements, a handful of professors objected, but relatively few people engaged the underlying criticism directly.
That’s why Pamela Paul’s Wall Street Journal essay caught my attention. It wasn’t another argument between politicians and professors. It was an account of sociologists questioning the direction of their own discipline. That’s a healthier place for this conversation to be. Disciplines are usually strongest when they’re willing to examine themselves.
As Paul describes, sociologists like Christian Smith, Ilana Redstone, Kevin McCaffree, Melissa Wilde, and Musa al-Gharbi disagree about many things. They do, however, share a common concern: that parts of sociology have become less open to challenges of prevailing assumptions and less willing to follow evidence that points in an unexpected direction.
I don’t think there was any grand conspiracy. My own view is that, over time, sociology became more intellectually homogeneous. As more people began from similar assumptions, it became easier to stop noticing those assumptions altogether. Research works best when the evidence is allowed to change your mind. That’s harder to do when almost everyone starts in roughly the same place. After a while, the shared assumptions of a field stop looking like assumptions. They simply become part of how everyone thinks.
Florida responded to what it saw as that problem, but there were obvious limits to what a state could accomplish. A board can change general education requirements, but it can’t rewrite syllabi, reshape a discipline, or decide what questions scholars pursue. That work ultimately belongs to sociologists themselves. Paul’s essay suggests that conversation is finally beginning. No discipline is entitled to a permanent place in the curriculum. Every field must earn that place, and sociology is no exception.
The American Sociological Association (ASA), however, has been slower to engage in that kind of self-examination. It criticized Florida’s decision, but it has devoted less attention to the concerns that some of its own members have raised about the direction of the field.
I should also say where I stand. My bachelor’s degree is in sociology, and I took graduate seminars in the field. I studied with extraordinary scholars, and sociology still shapes how I think; I still teach it, I still read it, and I still rely on its tools. I used to be far more active in the profession than I am today. I’m not anymore, largely because I watched it become steadily more political.
I keep thinking about one of my mentors, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. I first met him as a Stanford undergraduate and Marty was a scholar at AEI. He began as a socialist kid from the Bronx and spent a career following the evidence wherever it led. I remember him telling stories about his work on Jewish immigrant incorporation and how the evidence kept taking him in directions he hadn’t anticipated; it was thrilling to hear. The ASA elected him president, not because everyone agreed with him, but because so many of his peers believed that intellectual seriousness mattered more than ideological agreement.
That’s the sociology I learned and fell in love with. It wasn’t afraid of evidence that complicated the story, and scholars weren’t afraid to discover they’d been wrong. Disagreement led to more writing, more debate, and ultimately more discovery.
For a few months, sociology wasn’t really answering the criticism. Now a group of sociologists—not politicians, trustees, or governors—are leading the charge to reform and reinvigorate sociology into the discipline that it can and should be. Lasting reform in any profession usually comes from people who care enough about it to make it better. They’re the ones who should be leading this conversation.
Given the state of higher education these days, this is very good news. And I’ll keep teaching sociology.
