Go back 40 years or so and sociology was a serious field of inquiry. Alas, it gradually fell under the control of leftists who wanted to use it to promote their utopian visions. Nowadays, few sociologists do otherwise.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Alexander Riley of Bucknell University looks with disgust at his discipline.
He writes:
Teaching Sociology has existed since 1973 and advertises itself on the ASA website as “advanc[ing] the quality of sociology instruction.” I admit having never looked at it during the entirety of my quarter-century in the discipline until writing this essay. I came to graduate school under the influence of a pre-1960s generation of social scientists, and I shared their belief that rigorous scientific study of human behavior and social organization was possible. I learned early in my career that sociology is in intellectual decline. My walk-through of Teaching Sociology offers bitter evidence of just how great the distance is between the early scientific promise of sociology and what is taught to students in sociology courses today.
What has gone wrong? Sociology profs have become activists and want their students to be activists, too. Rather than trying to understand the world, they focus on ill-considered change that always means increased government control.
Riley provides numerous examples, such as:
Climate change is to be taught in sociology classes from a “doom and gloom” perspective (“In Defense of Doom and Gloom: Science, Sensitivity, and Mobilization in Teaching about Climate Change”). That is, “horrific . . . scenarios” must be privileged even if they cause “students . . . [to] fall into despair,” because “climate change is, in fact, an intractable existential crisis.”
Whether ideas are true or not doesn’t matter, but only their usefulness in radicalizing students. Lamentable.