Sketches

Flickr Photo by Frank Kovalchek
Flickr Photo by Frank Kovalchek

When universities invite me to visit, I often do a second talk for graduate students on “safe and risky research agendas.” Many students around the country seem stuck between the jobs crisis of the recent past and an uncertain future of disruptive technology, tenure battles, and mounting student debt. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that many of our best and brightest seem to oscillate between a full-on “strategic” concern for maximizing their employability and a full-on utopian disregard for their market prospects. When they ask for advice, I first advise them that not all advice is good advice. But I do suggest they invest a bit more in teaching and that they consciously pursue both a safe and a risky research agenda. Such advice, I hope, will be good for them as individuals and good for the collective sociological enterprise.

By safe agenda, I’m referring to a line of research in which the student builds up specific authority and expertise in an established topic or area. This can arise from long-term interest in a subject or intensive interest stemming from dissertation or research assistant work. Once one has written a paper or two in an area, the start-up costs of publishing an additional piece diminish – it isn’t as though they have to master a completely new field with every article. They are also likely to find an established and active research literature surrounding their safe agenda, with obvious next steps to pursue. This means that it is pretty easy to identify which journals will be interested in a study, the editors can readily identify knowledgeable experts to review it, and the reviews will be relatively consistent and predictable. Pursuing a safe agenda in a series of book or article publications is likely the single best way to establish a reputation as an expert and authority in a field or subfield – and that can lead to jobs and promotions. In short, “safe” in this context represents the foundational work of good social science, rather than, say, boring or easy research.

Risky agendas, in contrast, tend to be messier. The field might be new to the researcher and her advisors, so the start-up costs are higher. There may be few good studies to draw upon, or perhaps a lot of the action on the topic is taking place in other fields or disciplines. This means she will likely need to frame her research in ways that convince people in the field they should be interested in the topic. This isn’t an easy process. When a reviewer told Jason Houle that his research on debt was not sociology, for example, he suggested creating a new journal: The American Journal of Not Sociology. Even when successful in framing the article for sociology, such work tends to elicit polarized reviews and evaluations. Moreover, there is little agreement on the “next logical steps” to be taken and there is no consensus that even the very best work on the topic merits publication or funding. Still, if and when such research is published, the author tends to develop a reputation as a “mover and a shaker” with fresh ideas and energy.

Research time is scarce for social scientists, but I try to reserve at least 10 percent of my research energies for my risky agenda. This includes new ideas with a high probability of immediate failure and/or quixotic ideas that will not pay off for years or even decades. This is because I most admire the sociologists (and artists, for that matter) who somehow manage to sustain a safe and a risky agenda throughout their careers. Over time, they’ve developed well-earned reputations and careers as both productive “finishers” and creative wild-cards. Perhaps fields and disciplines also prosper when they simultaneously create space for safe and risky agendas. As Wayne Coyne once said, “It’s probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.” I’d wager that the same holds true for individual sociologists and for sociology as a collective enterprise.

rwandabootsIf there’s one idea that seems to unite professors, it’s that our critics get us wrong. Turn on the radio, pick up a paper, or check your social media feed to hear all manner of wild generalizations and harsh political, economic, and cultural critiques of higher education. Many suggest that if we only ran universities like businesses, we could simultaneously cut costs, rein in tuition and student debt, make better use of our infrastructure, and squeeze more productivity out of pampered professors. Most of us toiling in the brain mill recoil at such suggestions, envisioning dystopian campuses where research and teaching excellence no longer offer any resistance against the crude imperative to put “butts in seats” (perhaps in a cost-efficient pole barn, rather than a gorgeous Romanesque classroom building that now seems too spendy to maintain). Yes! Much would be lost if we really ran universities like businesses. After all, only about half of the Fortune 500 companies of 2000 seems to have survived to 2016.

Our aversion to these critics stems in part from self-interest and in part from our desire to protect the sacred — the unfettered pursuit of truth and the real enduring bond between the best teachers and their students. It sounds hokey, I know, but didn’t your favorite teachers and professors approach their work in this way? Still, while many of us are struggling mightily to nurture and defend something important, I am increasingly convinced that we’re not mounting our defense from very firm ground. As a professor and administrator, I’d like to see a stronger collective commitment among the faculty on a few no-brainers.

We take teaching seriously and work to improve it. Most college professors invest greatly in teaching and their students, spending our nights, weekends, and holidays reading their work and writing on their behalf. That said, there’s a small minority who really don’t seem to care – and, too often, the rest of us look the other way. During a faculty senate discussion of student teaching evaluations, for example, I witnessed a tenured professor step to the mic to say that he simply tossed the big envelope of evaluations he gets each semester in the garbage – and hadn’t looked at them in 20 years. There was a little nervous laughter, but no response from the faculty or administrators in attendance. My silence in that moment felt like complicity. Though nobody wanted a long argument about the merits and known biases of such ratings, shouldn’t we all care about whether students find us well-prepared, clear, and responsive? Or that we deliver a course experience that is both challenging and rewarding? We’d be on firmer ground if we spoke up for teaching and learning in such moments.

We actually produce research and creative activity. With so much public and university attention on teaching and tuition reduction, carving out time and resources for research will likely get more challenging. Some of us can sustain our research through external grants and fellowships, but I suspect that most research is “funded” by requiring faculty to teach 1 or 2 courses per semester rather than, say, 3 or 4 or 6 courses per semester. This is particularly the case in the arts and humanities, where grants are especially scarce, but holds more generally across the university. For those of us fortunate enough to be paid a portion of our salaries for our research efforts, we are only on firm ground if we actually produce research. Ideally, this research is meaningful to both our peers and some broader community, but here I am referring to the simple obligation to produce some kind of scholarly work, such as books, articles, performances, and exhibitions. Many of us believe our intellectual work transcends the crude production of scholarly products or deliverables. But our claim to resources for research rests on the responsible use of these resources. If our appointment is designed to be 50 percent research and 50 percent teaching, we simply cannot check out of the research game – or look the other way when colleagues who are paid to do research seem to “pre-tire” from the activity.

We participate knowledgeably and responsibly in faculty governance.  Much has been written about the adjunctification of higher education, but I see an equal threat in vicepresidentialization – the proliferation of administrators governing our work. As much as we complain about them, my sense is that faculty today are increasingly abdicating to these administrators – we leave it to them to tell our colleagues, “no, a heli-pad on the social science tower is just a dumb idea” or, “15 years without a publication or presentation does seem like a long time.” If we don’t want patronizing or dismissive responses from administrators, we need to engage them with concrete, thoughtful, and realistic proposals. And, frankly, we would be on much firmer ground, in discussions of post-tenure review and other matters if we did a bit more self-policing. Each time tenure and academic freedom are invoked as a sort of “diplomatic immunity” by professors gone wild — the dangerous bullies, the serial harassers, and the radically disengaged and irresponsible — the power of these commitments is correspondingly diminished. If our colleagues are behaving badly (or simply withdrawing) due to mental health or addiction issues, it is far better to humanely address these as mental health or addiction issues rather than simply giving such faculty a wide berth and avoiding the underlying problem.

Finally, we must be good stewards of the resources we have, as our expenditures are increasingly scrutinized. In this area, some universities are already running like a business: Scrooge and Marley, to be precise (at least when it comes to expensing our faculty recruitment dinners). Still, a colleague on the coast was recently astonished that I shopped for a $219 fare on a li’l commuter airline on my visit to his campus, saying, “that’s a very ‘public school’ consideration.”

I suspect that professors might be more unified in opposing our critics than in advancing a particular vision of change or resistance. If these aren’t no-brainers to you, that’s fine. My point here is only to suggest that we can put up a stronger and more unified fight for the things we care about if we do so from firmer ground.

Perhaps envisioning Chris Uggen as a Sociological Spiderman last week got me going, but over the past few days, I have found myself thinking about all kinds of super-hero analogies and metaphors for sociologists and the sociological enterprise. The one that has stuck with me is the idea of sociologists as “Society’s Super Egos.” more...

Hedgehog Spider FoxA few months ago, one of our bloggers, the “backstage sociologist” Monte Bute offered up a post that referenced political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between foxes and hedgehogs.  In the world of ideas, according to Berlin (borrowing from ancient Greek poet Archilochus), there are those who know many, many things (foxes), and those who know one big thing (hedgehogs). Berlin’s categories have been widely referenced in both the social sciences and the humanities to identify styles of thought, the contributions of various scholars, and lines of research and writing. In reflecting on Berlin’s categories back in the long, lazy days of summer, Chris and I had a little fun putting our favorite sociologists and works in one box or the other. And as we played with the categories and thought about sociology as a discipline, we began to realize anew—much as I think Berlin meant to suggest (this appeared in an essay about Tolstoy)—that real insight and understanding in any field requires both foxes and hedgehogs. more...

hagan_foster13I was surprised to receive an invitation to speak at the White House this August, as part of a parental incarceration workshop sponsored by the American Bar Foundation and National Science Foundation. Though I’d written a bit on the subject and had followed the research closely for a decade, I could not claim any great expertise. Fortunately, they didn’t need me for that. They’d already assembled an impressive roster of experts to speak on topics such as demography and family dynamics, behavioral and health problems, education and exclusion, justice policy, and caring for children. My job, according to the draft agenda, was to offer “concluding comments” in the final half-hour session. Or, as John Hagan put it, “Just do what you do.”

Riiiiight. Do what I do.

Well, I couldn’t just come out and ask what I do, so I decided to do TSP. more...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what sociologists have to gain from doing “public sociology,” from engaging broader, non-ivory tower audiences more self-consciously and systematically.  In my last post, “Ears to the Ground,” in fact, I gave the example of how, in my own experience with journalists and reporters, I often learn a great deal about current events, institutional dynamics, and emerging social trends that I wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. These are concrete facts, the kind of empircal social realities I talk a lot about but often don’t have the time or access to collect. But there is so much more to be gained from going public as a sociologist.

One of those potential benefits is the understanding and perspective that comes from actually conversing with regular, ordinary folks out there in the real world about our big ideas, social findings, and critical interpretations of social life. These conversations are not always the easiest to have–in fact, non-specialists not only often misunderstand our findings and claims, but adamantly disagree with them. But engaging these disagreements and addressing these misunderstandings–engaging in real, genuine public dialogue and debate–can really help sharpen and shape our own understandings of things as well as make us much more effective participants in public dialogue and public policy debates. more...

This photo does not depict either Doug Hartmann or Chris Uggen, but it comes courtesy Tommy Japan via flickr.com.
This photo does not depict either Doug Hartmann or Chris Uggen (nor any of the reporters they work with), but does come courtesy of Tommy Japan via flickr.com.

When scholars think about doing interviews with the media, we often imagine ourselves to be doing some kind of great public service–wherein we deign to come down from the ivory tower and share our wisdom and knowledge with naive, uninformed journalists and their massive, mostly ignorant, and fundamentally distracted masses. There is some truth to this conceit. Writers and producers often approach a story or a topic with a limited, fairly narrow frame of reference, and sometimes don’t even know the most basic facts or more general trends that are involved.  I average maybe an interview a week, and find myself spending much of my time in these exchanges trying to get the writer or producer on the other end of the line to expand their scope, attend to some of the broader social forces or issues, or reframe their pieces in one way or the other. Sometimes this effort to frame and/or reorient stories works, sometimes it doesn’t (and rarely do we get credit either way).

But none of that is really the point of this post. The point of this post is that journalists often know a lot more than we give them credit for, and that we scholars–especially us sociologists–have got a lot more to gain from working with them than we usually realize. more...

Photo courtesy Letta Page
Photo courtesy Letta Page

New years bring new goals and often bigger ambitions. One of our TSP goals, over the next year or two, is to better represent the field of sociology as a whole. Don’t get us wrong: we think we’ve got a great site with tremendous (and tremendously provocative) content. But there are some areas of specialization we don’t cover as well as others, and our suite of blogs probably leans more toward the op-ed, commentary-and-critique side than the more basic, empirical data and explanation of concrete social processes that dominates much of our journal research and scholarly publishing.

We are working with our graduate student board on some new features and initiatives to make our site even bigger and broader, and we’re hoping to begin rolling some of those out in the weeks to come. But in thinking through and working on all of this, Chris and I have also begun to believe that we’ve got some ideas about sociology itself—what it is, how it can be better understood and practiced, and what its role in society should and can be—that aren’t nearly as well represented or articulated as they should be. So what we are going to do is start laying out some of those observations and ideas as part of the Editors’ Desk. We’re not sure exactly how much we’ve got to say or how it will cohere, but for the next few weeks, under the heading of “Sketches,” that’s what we’re going to try to do. Here goes…

Sketch 1: Just Don’t Call It That more...