Dear Commons Community,
Philip N. Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park, had a fine piece yesterday analyzing the current attacks on sociology in Florida. Entitled, “How Sociology Can Save Itself”, he challenges his colleagues to examine where sociology is as a discipline. Here is an excerpt.
“They are coming for sociology. “They” is the amorphous campaign against what they call “wokeism,” diversity initiatives, and critical race theory, led by a coalition of Republican activists, conservative foundations, and elected officials. Their current strategy is to manipulate political polarization to undermine the essential role of higher education, but conservatives have been beating the same drum against antiracism since they mobilized white backlash to block affirmative action in the 1970s. American sociology, whose annual conference theme this year is “Intersectional Solidarities,” with a promise on its website to “dismantle ongoing legacies of settler colonialism,” clearly makes an appealing target. The Florida Board of Governors has now propelled this effort by removing a general sociology course from the core-curriculum requirements of its massive state university system.
These are not good-faith actors, but they are good at what they do. If they succeed in lumping the label “sociology” into their basket of deplorable dog whistles, along with “CRT” and “gender ideology,” then our discipline may be in for a prolonged period of retrenchment, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of students who take our courses every year.
Although I join the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) condemnation of the Florida action, in this case I also agree with a conservative critic of sociology, the sociologist Jukka Savolainen, who recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Florida’s action should be a
The Florida situation is a little like wrestling with a pig: We all get dirty, and the pig likes it. These anti-education activists are not interested in reasonable debate. They are culture warriors against the very idea of social progress. But that doesn’t mean our predicament is not real. It is not true, as the Florida commissioner of education Manny Diaz said, that, “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.” But we do have work to do if we hope to build and maintain public trust.”
I love Cohen’s analogy of wrestling with a pig. So true.
Tony
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