sociology

Paste Magazine reports that students at Harvard will soon be able to register for a class based on the HBO series, “The Wire”.

The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, an outspoken, long-time fan of the show. “It has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication,” Wilson told the audience at a panel discussion on campus.

That’s high praise from a renowned sociologist, who is not alone in his enthusiasm for the show as a vehicle for teaching.

Harvard is not the only university to offer a course about The Wire. UC-Berkeley teaches a film studies course about it, and so does Middlebury College. Duke offers a literature course that uses it to examine phenomenology and 21st century visual media.

The New Mexico Business Weekly ran a story about a new study from the National Association of Colleges and employers about new employment statistics for college graduates. The bottom line… sociology majors aren’t doing so hot.

The paper reports:

College graduates from the class of 2009 who have been able to find jobs are landing starting salaries comparable to those offered a year ago, a new report has found.

This year’s graduating class held its ground with average starting salary offers, demonstrating that employers are reluctant to significantly tinker with starting pay despite the recession, a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found.

The average starting salary offer for new college graduates is $49,307, which is less than 1 percent lower than the average of $49,693 that 2008 graduates posted last year at this time, according to a news release Wednesday.

Although engineering majors seem to be doing quite well, liberal arts majors appear to fall slightly behind.

Liberal arts grads experienced a decline of less than 1 percent from $36,419 last year to $36,175, the study found.

Among the liberal arts disciplines, English majors posted a 1.1 percent increase in their average salary offer to $34,704. The salary offers for history majors rose 1.7 percent to $37,861. Psychology majors’ average salary offers grew 2.1 percent to $34,284. Sociology majors, on the other hand, saw their average offers fall 4.4 percent to $33,280.

Read more.

Inside Higher Education reports this week on the rapidly disappearing rural sociology programs at universities around the country. They report that rural sociologists are now combined with other social science departments in many land grant universities. Inside Higher Education notes, “many professors in the field say that they have seen a slow erosion in support and expertise as retiring professors in these departments are replaced with sociologists who focus on other areas.”

Sociologists have been up in arms about the disappearing field in recent weeks…

These concerns [about putting rural sociology programs in other departments] are nothing compared to the anger that has spread through the rural sociology world in the last few weeks, however, as word spread that Washington State University wasn’t planning to merge its rural sociology program with another unit, but to simply eliminate it.

That a land grant university would simply abolish the discipline — and in particular a rare freestanding program that is well respected nationally — stunned rural sociologists. Many have come to expect that sociology departments (general ones) will be more occupied with issues of criminology and sexuality and suburban youth than with aging populations in rural towns or the new immigration that is changing those communities.

The Rural Sociological Society issued a statement on Washington State’s plan:

“We are deeply concerned for the personal welfare of the department’s faculty members and staff, but we also believe that this action sends a powerful negative message to the land grant university system that applied research and outreach focused on problems and opportunities experienced by rural people and communities is expendable,” says an advertisement published in two newspapers in Washington State Friday and signed by the president, president-elect and 19 past presidents of the Rural Sociological Society.

Rural sociologist Kenneth Pigg comments:

“There aren’t very many rural sociology programs around. There’s a general perception that rural doesn’t matter anymore. Whenever financial problems arise and administrators get a little touchy about how they are going to manage budgets, this is the sort of thing that happens,” said Kenneth Pigg, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, one institution that still has a freestanding program.

Pigg said that social sciences were once viewed as central to the land grant mission — that departments of rural sociology (or agriculture economics) were applying research to help rural communities. “Now, with the emphasis on life sciences generally, you don’t see that at a lot of universities,” he said. Pigg’s work currently focuses on the impact of technological change in rural areas. While many have said that the Internet is “a savior” for rural life, Pigg said that there’s not nearly enough attention paid to the impact it has and the lack of real access to technology of many people outside of urban areas.

He said that there is nothing theoretically wrong with having rural sociology as part of other departments, but that the discipline in its entirety doesn’t pay much attention. A list of sections of the American Sociological Association includes on on urban sociology, but nothing specifically on rural areas. And while there is a section on animals and society, paper and book topics there appear more focused on pets than on farms.

Read more from Inside Higher Ed.

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…

This past weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how humanities and social science PhD students are experiencing high levels of anxiety in the midst of a shrinking academic job market and grim prospects for the future.

The article opened with the story of Chris Pieper.

Chris Pieper began looking for an academic job in sociology about six months ago, sending off about two dozen application packets. The results so far? Two telephone interviews, and no employment offers.

“About half of all the rejection letters I’ve received mentioned the poor economy as contributing to their decision,” said Mr. Pieper, 34, who is getting his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin. “Some simply canceled the search because they found the funding for the position didn’t come through. Others changed their tenure-track jobs to adjunct or instructor positions.”

“Many of the universities I applied to received more than 300 applications,” he added.

Mr. Pieper is not alone. Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

 

Read more about Pieper and other struggling PhDs…

Share your own stories of the difficult academic job market, comment below:

According to the Wall Street Journal, a new report based on the study of more than 200 professions puts sociologists firmly in the #8 position of the ‘best jobs’ list.

About the study:

The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.

The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac,” and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.

And the article devotes significant time to how well sociologists are doing…

Mark Nord is a sociologist working for the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C. He studies hunger in American households and writes research reports about his findings. “The best part of the job is the sense that I’m making some contribution to good policy making,” he says. “The kind of stuff that I crank out gets picked up by advocacy organizations, media and policy officials.”

The study estimates sociologists earn $63,195, though Mr. Nord, 62, says his income is about double that amount. He says he isn’t surprised by the findings because his job generates little stress and he works a steady 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule. “It’s all done at the computer at my desk,” he says. “The main occupational hazard is carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Others who made the list…

Read the full story.

The Boston Globe reported this weekend on a study from University of Chicago sociologist James Evans about the booming number of readily accessible journal articles online. The Globe notes that this has enabled academics and other researchers to find materials they might not otherwise have access to, but that there may be downsides to this trend as well.

A recent study suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet’s influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost – the opposite of the Internet’s promise.

“Winners are inadvertently picked,” says Evans. “It drives out diversity.”

Evans’ study contributes to a growning concern over the neutrality of web-based search tools, which most often privilege the popular and new. But these conclusions have been controversial, even in the academic community.

Yet there is vigorous debate over the Internet’s effects, and the Evans research has proved controversial. A University of Quebec researcher, Vincent Lariviere, has coauthored a forthcoming paper that challenges some of its conclusions. (Evans plans to publish a rebuttal.) Another researcher, Carol Tenopir at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, says that she has not studied citations, but that her surveys of reading patterns show the reverse of a narrowing effect.

“Electronic journals, I can say with confidence, have broadened reading,” says Tenopir.

Delve into the fray, here.

Inside Higher Education reported this week on a new national survey from the American Sociological Association, which found that sociology departments across the country have been able to expand their programs by attracting new students, but that growth in faculty lines has lagged behind. 

The survey — conducted in 2007 and updating a study from 2001 — came before the recent economic downturn that has crunched budgets at many colleges and is probably adding to the pressures documented in “What Is Happening in Your Department?,” written by Roberta Spalter-Roth, director of research for the association. Further adding to the concern is that graduate programs are reducing the percentage of applicants they admit, who would eventually add to the faculty base. While such an increase in selectivity could be considered a healthy sign, the two reasons given for it in the survey don’t suggest strength. The reasons are lack of funds for stipends and the declining quality of applicants.

The study included feedback from faculty members and chairs who voiced concerns surrounding expected retirements without replacements, rising numbers of undergraduate with too few resources, and the implications of the rising number of undergraduates who ‘double-major’ in sociology. 

Read the full story, here. Check the numbers.

Today the New Republic published a review of the new book, “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings from C. Wright Mills,” edited by John Summers. 

An exerpt from the New Republic article:

C.Wright Mills published his sociological trilogy during the 1950s: White Collar in 1951,The Power Elite in 1956, The Sociological Imagination in 1959. Those were years of Republican ascendancy, and while the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a moderate, the vice president, Richard Nixon, and a number of key senators, including Joe McCarthy, belonged to the conservative wing of the party. By decade’s end, the country was tiring of Republican rule and its accompanying scandals and foreign policy failures, and was harkening to the appeals of a young, ambitious, brash, Catholic politician who called for change. The times were perfect for a radical such as Mills to make his mark.

Almost a half-century later, the United States once again faces a choice between an incumbent conservative party with little public appeal and a young, dynamic politician whose race, rather than his religion, sets him apart from the usual run of presidential contenders. This time, though, there is no single social critic publishing books documenting the hold that powerful military and economic forces have over the country’s destiny, and lamenting the decline of a vibrant public sphere, and urging intellectuals to dissent as loudly as they can from the prevailing complacency. Lacking a Mills of our own, we may turn back to the original. Oxford University Press has recently re-published Mills’s trilogy, and The New Men of Power, Mills’s book on labor leaders, which appeared in 1948, has been reissued by the University of Illinois Press. And now John Summers, an intellectual historian who has written widely on Mills–including a devastating essay in theMinnesota Review documenting the extent to which another sociologist, Irving Louis Horowitz, now something of a neoconservative but then more radical, mistakenly recounted the facts of Mills’s life and prevented others from gaining access to the Mills papers that Horowitz kept over the objections of Mills’s widow–has brought together a collection of Mills’s essays, which he calls The Politics of Truth.

Fascinating… Read the full review here.

In my readings for the Crawler I often come across articles that use the term ‘sociological’ to express an ambiguous set of influences or circumstances related to a given news item. This week I was struck by an especially poignant example as the pundits and journalists swarmed around the Bristol Palin controversy, a teen pregnancy in the political spotlight. 

New York Times columnist Adam Nagourney writes: 

In many ways, how the country will react to the pregnancy of Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is more a sociological question than a political one. Yes, many officials in both parties — including Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, Mr. McCain’s Democratic opponent — were quick on Monday to say that the private lives of candidates should be strictly off limits.

But this clearly stands as a challenge to the traditional image of a potential first family, and could well provide fodder for provocative conversations around kitchen tables or sly references in the late-night television comic-sphere. It will test again what voters deem private, at a time when the Web has pulled down so many curtains, and what in these times is considered a normal family life.

Full story.

What should we as sociologists make of these vague references to the forces at play in our social world? Does the use of the term sociological become diluted when it remains unexplained?

What do you think?