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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Via Ann Althouse… …a sociologist laments the continued transformation of the discipline into a series of seminars where everyone sits around agreeing with one another and wondering why the rest of the world refuses to be so enlightened, where people are made to feel like they should be secretive and apologetic about the extent to which they hold beliefs that stray even-teensy-baby-steps from the orthodoxy. Sociology is “a pie that shrinks… the more sociology is perceived as just ideology-in-increasingly-casual-empirical-disguise…” It's like sociology is engaged in this campaign to purge the air in its hallways from heterodox thought as much as possible, and then it simultaneously wonders why students trained in this sterile environment have trouble articulating their ideas to the general public. I've thought about starting to pretend to be more politically conservative than I am in seminars just to feel less complicit in all this. Mr. UD began graduate student life at the University of Chicago in sociology, but quickly switched to political science. “They took Talcott Parsons seriously,” he said, rather enigmatically, when UD inquired about this. Then, as today, he agreed, sociology has never had room for non-left political thought. |