political

Inside Higher Education reports on new work from Neil Gross, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, whose research explores today’s faculty politics. This new study engages the contentious and ongoing debate over professors politics. Inside Higher Ed notes, “Right-wing critics make much of the fact that many surveys have found professors — especially in the humanities — to be well to the left of the American public. This political incongruence is frequently used as a jumping off point to suggest that professors are indoctrinating students with leftist ideas.” 

The analysis, Neil Gross explains, indicates that “conservative critics are correct about humanities professors’ leanings, but incorrect about their views of what classroom responsibility entails.”

In fact, Gross finds — in a study based on detailed interviews of professors’ in various disciplines — that faculty members take seriously the idea that they should not try to force their views upon students, or to in any way reward or punish students based on their opinions. And this view is shared by professors who see their politics playing a legitimate role in their research agendas, not just those who view their research agendas as neutral.

The aim of this new research is, in part, Gross writes, to shift the discussion of professorial politics away from the unsurprising (many professors are liberal) to “a more systematic” study of how “academicians in various fields and at various points in time understand the relationship between their political views, values, and engagements and their activities of knowledge creation and dissemination, and to how such understandings inform and shape academic work and political practice.” It’s not enough to simply document professors’ politics, Gross writes. What is needed is more attention to how professors handle the “knowledge-politics problem” in their work.

Specifically, the findings in the interviews Gross conducted raise questions about the assumptions of some critics of academe that one can draw conclusions about what goes on in classrooms based on the political and research writings of professors.

Read more…

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story about how undercover sheriff’s operatives from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office, along with an FBI informer, worked to infiltrate the ‘RNC Welcoming Committee,’ a group that was planning blockades for the Republican National Convention this past September.

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune… For a year Deputy Hedstrom led a double life as Norma Jean Johnson, filing her recollections, often daily, with the Special Investigations Unit, as did the other operatives. The covert operation was not without drama. When one informant was accused of being a cop, he broke into tears, convincing his accusers that they were mistaken, according to a report.

As the result of information collected by Hedstrom and the other operatives, these undercover operations led to the arrest of eight members of the Welcoming Committee…

A sociologist expressed concern over these developments:

…But David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says that while authorities may have had probable cause to infiltrate anarchist groups, he is concerned about a potential chill on civil liberties. Cunningham, author of “There’s Something Happening Here,” a history of covert FBI activities in the 1960s and ’70s, said there needs to be more oversight of undercover work from Congress. He also believes local law enforcement agencies should be required to obtain court approval for undercover operations.

Read more.

Adam Liptak’s ‘Sidebar‘ column in the New York Times ran the following opening line yesterday: “Two years after Exxon was hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award for the Exxon Valdez disaster, Prof. William R. Freudenburg’s phone rang. The call propelled him, the professor said the other day, into ‘an ethical quagmire of the bottomless pit variety.'”

Freudenburg, a sociologist, explains how the phone call was from an engineer at Exxon who wanted to fund him to carry out a study with a ‘dim view of punitive damages.’ The engineer said the study was imperative as the case would eventually reach the Supreme Court and empirical evidence establishing a negative stance on punitive damages would prove useful… especially if published in an academic journal.

Professor Freudenburg, who now teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, took Exxon’s money and conducted preliminary research. Exxon stopped supporting the study when the early findings did not point in a direction helpful to the company. But Exxon did help pay for several studies critical of punitive damages that appeared in places like The Yale Law Journal and The Columbia Law Review.

The evidence ended up in the Supreme Court proceedings…

As the engineer predicted, the case did reach the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-3 decision in June, the court said the appropriate punishment for dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 was no more than about $500 million, a tenth of what the jury had awarded. But the court also addressed the aggressive effort to reshape the academic debate over punitive damages. “Because this research was funded in part by Exxon,” Justice David H. Souter wrote in a footnote that has rocked the legal academy, “we decline to rely on it.”

Read on… what do you think? What are a sociologist’s ethical obligations in this situation?

The Chicago Tribune ran a story yesterday about the potential effects of Tuesday’s election results titled, “Transformed by Obama’s Win — Has the election of an African-American to the White House shattered stereotypes and changed the way Americans – black or white – view each other?” In addition to interviews with locals in Chicago, the Tribune calls in the sociologists to sort this out in greater detail…

One sociologist points out the remaining ‘structural issues’…

To be sure, few people said they believe Obama’s victory will be enough to transform race relations in the United States radically or instantly.

“There are structural issues that need to be addressed,” said Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, a professor of sociology at the University of California– Berkeley. He said it is much more difficult for people to transfer their attitude toward Obama to the people of color they encounter every day.

“That is not something that any single election will be able to make a major difference in,” Sanchez-Jankowski said.

But on a more optimistic note, sociologist Omar Roberts focuses on how Obama’s victory may be a starting point for future change…

Omar McRoberts, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said he thinks the election has provided a forum for the kinds of discussion needed to effect change.

“This election doesn’t represent the erasure of race as an obstacle or as a point of tension,” McRoberts said. “What it marks is the opening of a new space for serious dialogue and hard work.”

Read the full story.

The American is now running a story titled, “The Long March of Racial Progress,” a piece that examines the story of race relations in America and the extraordinary changes that have come about. Sociological commentary is featured prominently in this story, specifically the work of sociologist Reynolds Farley.

The American reports: 

As University of Michigan sociologist Reynolds Farley points out in a new paper, there are now 41 African Americans serving in the House of Representatives, compared to only six when the Kerner Commission issued its famous report on race and poverty in 1968. During the years following the Kerner Report, “The slowly rising incomes of black men and the more rapidly rising incomes of black women produced an important economic change for African Americans,” Farley writes. “In 1996, for the first time, the majority of blacks were in the economic middle class or above, if that means living in a household with an income at least twice the poverty line.”

According to Farley, “Only three percent of African Americans could be described as economically comfortable in 1968. That has increased to 17 percent at present. This is an unambiguous sign of racial progress: one black household in six could be labeled financially comfortable.” He notes that the black-white poverty gap “is much smaller now” than it was in the late 1960s.

The story continues, as Reynolds notes, with a point of caution:

Of course, we should not be overly sanguine about black progress, which has been hindered in recent decades by social pathologies and family disintegration. Since the 1968 Kerner Report, “adult black men have fallen further and further behind similar white men in terms of being employed,” says Farley, emphasizing that “the white-black gap in personal income is not closing, nor is the white-black gap in household income getting any smaller.” Indeed, both the white-black income gap and the white-black gap in educational attainment remain “persistent and substantial.”

Read the full story.

The Boston Globe ran a story this morning about whether or not American racism is dead after the nation chose an African-American as the next president of the United States on Tuesday. The Globe reports, “The answer, coming as people began to digest the fact that a majority of Americans had chosen a black man, Barack Obama, to be the 44th president, was not nearly as straightforward. No, but sort of. Maybe, but probably not. While Obama’s achievement was profound, its psychological lift enormous for many, the impact on the rhythms of people’s everyday lives was revealing itself in subtler ways.”

The article includes commentary from researchers, lawyers and Boston residents. Sociologist Dan Monti weighs in…

“Are there racist people out there? Absolutely. Is our society racist? No,” said Dan Monti, a professor of sociology at Boston University whose specialty is race and ethnic relations in the United States. “I know there are people who will think that’s just wrong. But I think Barack Obama winning the presidency of the United States is the single clearest example that we are not. Because if we were, it wouldn’t have happened – period” …

In his sociology classes yesterday at BU, Monti told his students that everything – and nothing – changed on Tuesday night and that a series of changes, small and large, over the last century had laid the platform for Obama’s victory stage.

“With that said, what this represents, both domestically and internationally, is a coming of age of the American people,” Monti said.

Full story.

Yesterday LiveScience.com highlighted the work of sociologist Andrew Perrin on “the irrational side of voting”, which also can be found in the latest issue of Contexts Magazine.

Live Science senior writer Jeanna Bryner reports:

…When it comes to the underlying reason why citizens vote in general, little has changed philosophically. Our propensity to vote has always been a complex mix of feelings and strategy, writes sociologist Andrew Perrin of the University of North Carolina in the fall issue of Contexts magazine, published by the American Sociological Association.

Voting is both rational and emotional, Perrin says. “It is a ritual in which lone citizens express personal beliefs that reflect the core of who they are and what they want for their countrymen, balancing strategic behavior with the opportunity to express their inner selves to the world.”

That’s why reason alone can’t explain say why a significant group of citizens voted for Ralph Nader, who ran as an independent candidate for U.S. president in 2004. “A significant, obviously small, group of people thought they were best able to express themselves by voting for Nader even though there was never any possibility h
e was actually going to win the presidency.”

Read the full story.

Don’t forget to exercise your right to vote today! Find your polling location and cast your ballot.

The New Pittsburgh Courier ran a story about sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s recent lecture in which he discussed how presidential candidate Barack Obama is “not the symbol many perceive him to be.” The story ran under the headline “Sociologist Says Obama is Raceless.”

The Courier reports:

“Symbols work in many directions,” said Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University. “(Obama’s) going to be a truncated symbol; both segments happy, but for totally different reasons—we have to understand what does it mean for Black communities and White communities.”
…
He discussed “new-racism,” meaning “the post-civil rights racial system of subtle, institutionalized, and apparently non-racial practices that maintains White supremacy and its accompanying racial ideology of color-blind racism.” Instead of seeing Obama as the end of this racism, Bonilla-Silva said his campaign success has been based largely on his ability to appear raceless. Although he admitted Obama could be a good role model, Bonilla-Silva said it is more important for him to create “real change.” — Read more. 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva was also a contributing writer to Contexts Magazine‘s feature on the “Social Significance of Barack Obama.” Take a look at Bonilla-Silva’s commentary, here.

The latest installment from the video podcast ‘Meet the Bloggers‘ (from Friday, October 24th), examines the role of race in the presidential election and features commentary from sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield. Watch the podcast below.

Also take a look at Wingfield’s recent post on the Racism Review blog, ‘How White Privilege Works.’

Salon Magazine interviewed Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson about Barack Obama and race in America. Salon writes, “According to sociologist and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, Barack Obama has already won the election. But if he were white, ‘he’d be up by 15 to 20 points in the polls.'”

An excerpt from the interview: 

Does it not surprise you that two-thirds of black Americans say race relations are poor?

Not at all. Regardless of whether or not they make $100,000, they still see barriers imposed that white brothers and sisters don’t see. If you were stopped by a policeman, as a black person you think: Will they make up some story that I tried to run and shoot me in the back? I use that example because I have been pulled over by the police several times despite the fact that I have a Ph.D. from Princeton and some notoriety. It makes no difference. You are still afraid. That is the great equalizer among black people, regardless of how rich or well-known they are.

It would obviously be an enormous achievement if Barack Obama were to be elected president. What would he be able to change for black Americans?

Well, let’s start with what he can’t change. Given the investment of black people in Mr. Obama’s success, you would think that he was a kind of political Santa Claus, that the day after he was elected, black people wouldn’t have to pay taxes or would get a get-out-of-jail-free card. But social inequalities will still be real. Ironically enough, he has imposed upon himself certain restrictions when it comes to showing a willingness to be susceptible to the demands of black people.

Read Cordula Meyer’s interview with Dyson here.