In 2026, left wingers no longer pretend that truth exists.
Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology? - WSJ
Sociology has long been tasked with investigating society’s most pressing challenges. But these days, sociologists’ greatest obstacle may be themselves.
Why are some people richer than others? What drives societal ills or ignites a social movement? Why aren’t people having more kids?
These are some of the most important questions facing the country today. The answers shape our lives, polarize our politics and supercharge our culture wars.
Sociology, the discipline tasked with pursuing the answers, would seem well poised to take these issues on. For decades, its analyses informed policy on issues ranging from criminal justice to immigration to urban development. It introduced groundbreaking concepts like “white-collar crime,” “gentrification,” “unintended consequences” and “cultural capital.” At various points, sociologists proposed and critiqued affirmative action, inspired and lambasted welfare reform, diagnosed and dismissed the breakdown of the nuclear family.
Yet today, sociologists are embroiled in an ideological and existential battle of their own—one that is increasingly public and at least in part of their own making. The study of people, in other words, has a people problem.
In 2023, Florida’s then-commissioner of education Manny Diaz, Jr., homed in on sociology as culture war enemy No. 1. It had been “hijacked by left-wing activists,” he said, leading the state to remove introduction to sociology from its general education curriculum at all public colleges and universities across the state.
The American Sociological Association promptly denounced the move as a blatant mischaracterization of the field and an effort to needlessly politicize a bastion of social science. Yet that same year, the ASA’s president described sociology to its members as “a form of liberatory praxis” that is “currently undergoing a renaissance as antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and transnational theorizing lead us to more inclusive insights.”
Meanwhile, one contingent, Sociologists for Palestine, is boycotting the ASA’s annual conference (theme: “Disrupting the Status Quo”) next month. The reason? The ASA refused to authorize a vote on their own proposed boycott—of Israeli academic institutions. This has drawn a counterpetition and a backlash so fierce, the Chronicle of Higher Education called it a “War for Sociology.”
Already, ASA membership is in steep decline, with membership at 9,400 down from 14,900 at its peak in 1972.
Now, sociology, long derided by many academics in humanities and the “harder” social sciences for its perceived squishiness, is being criticized from within.
An increasingly vocal group of sociologists say the discipline’s cratering reputation is especially vivid when compared with economics, psychology and political science, all of which can seem more serious and pragmatic—gateways to law school or business school or an advanced degree in healthcare. Whereas those disciplines often use cutting-edge methodologies, sociology seems dusty and theory-laden. Even sociologists acknowledge that students are often drawn to the major because they’re afraid of math or are sold on sociology as a means to activism.
Starting in 2013, the number of students majoring in sociology dropped from 31,000 to 21,000 in 2024. One ZipRecruiter poll found sociology among college grads’ most regretted majors.
It’s tempting to write all this off as another sorry example of academia gone off the rails. But the implications of sociology’s implosion extend well beyond the confines of higher education, driving everything from what kids learn in secondary school, to how workplaces and cultural institutions function (or become dysfunctional), to which ideas inform legislation.
“I Believe in Sociology as a Weapon”
Sociology is in many ways the mother of all social sciences, she who hath birthed dozens of disciplines ranging from criminology to postcolonial studies to ethnic studies.
Unlike psychology, which operates on an individual level, sociology considers human phenomena in the aggregate and often over the long run. By examining trends in educational attainment, labor force shifts and the effects of social media and AI, it can offer a grand-scale picture of societal health.
With roots dating to 19th century European theorists like Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, sociology coalesced professionally in America during the Progressive Era. Many consider W.E.B. Du Bois the father of American sociology. Though trained as a historian, Du Bois, later a founder of the NAACP, used sociological methods to document the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on Black Americans.
Du Bois’s dual role as both a social scientist and an activist also inspired some of the fiercest debates over sociologists’ role. In 1896, Du Bois defined sociology as “the discovery of truth” and warned that if scholars “dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day” they “hurt the cause of scientific truth the world over.” Traditionally, sociologists interpreted his words as drawing a hard line between studying the truth and acting on it. But sociologists in the scholar-activist mold note that Du Bois also believed in using sociological truth in the pursuit of activism, promising in 1906 to “never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”
Sociology is fundamentally shaped by who is doing the work, many sociologists argue. Didn’t early sociologists claim to prove white peoples’ supremacy over other races based on supposed empirical evidence? Later research by conservative and neocon sociologists informed policies like broken-window policing, racial profiling, welfare reform and colorblindness. For many contemporary sociologists, steeped in postmodern theory, the insistence that a single truth exists is a fallacy and objectivity itself, a tool of oppression.
Social phenomena are always shaped by power politics and competing interests, according to Lisa Hajjar, who studies law and conflict with a focus on Israel/Palestine and chairs the department of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, one of the biggest sociology departments in the country. “What I always tell students is that when it comes to the complex world that people live in and make and change, there is no single Archimedean point of truth,” she says. “There are just better and worse ways of presenting information and making arguments.”
According to an increasingly dominant contingent of sociologists, sociologists also need to engage with the public more forcefully.
“As bodies, we need to speak to the public when we need to interrupt public harm or advocate for the public good,” Saida Grundy, a professor of sociology and African-American and Black diasporic studies at Boston University. She compares the ASA to the American Heart Association, which uses its research and authority to advance messages intended to improve public health, providing guidelines and issuing warnings. Shouldn’t the ASA and its individual members similarly deploy their research to inveigh against injustice and advance social change?
In her view, sociology has an obligation to engage with the world. Sociologists who study immigration, for example, should speak out against ICE.
“I believe in sociology as a weapon,” Grundy says.
“What if We Just Liquidate the Discipline?”
Other sociologists say the impulse toward activism is compromising not only the aim and use of sociological research, but the quality of the research itself. In lieu of engaging in objective analysis, the discipline is shaping, even bending, the truth.
Critics of the activist-scholar model frequently cite Christian Smith’s 2014 book, “The Sacred Project of American Sociology,” as persuasively diagnosing a discipline increasingly corrupted by what amounts to a quasi-religious activist impulse.
“Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism,” Smith wrote. “In the end that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.”
Smith quit the ASA around the same time, demoralized by what he saw as a lack of self-awareness among his colleagues, whose work focused on the world’s wrongs while failing to recognize their own. Professors teach from textbooks he describes as “thinly veiled political progressivism watered down to pathetic mush.” This past January, he resigned from University of Notre Dame, where he was a professor of sociology for 20 years.
“From my point of view, sociology should be producing intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world,” he says. Instead, he says, it’s producing technicians and activists. “The painfulness of all this is that I believe sociology really matters and makes a contribution. But sociology is heading down the wrong road. Over time, I’ve thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’”
During her campaign for the presidency of the ASA this year, Melissa Wilde, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, signed a petition objecting to an ASA vote on Sociologists for Palestine’s proposed boycott. She believes that sociologists, as a body, should remain neutral.
“While the activists will not be constrained in their activism if the ASA becomes politically neutral, the sociologists who do not want politics mixed into their research would be deeply constrained in their research and its impact if the ASA becomes activist,” she says. (She lost the election.)
To Ilana Redstone, a sociologist who specializes in political polarization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sociology’s troubles gained traction through the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power Co., which deemed that practices with a disparate impact on employees are illegal. According to her analysis, the moral equation of disparate outcomes with discrimination soon became enshrined within institutions like academia and the media. Underrepresentation or unequal pay among groups served as evidence of bias, she argues, leading to a proliferation of D.E.I. practices, including concepts around unconscious bias, harm and intent.
Within sociology, it meant that any inequality among groups was de facto the result of discrimination, rendering moot other possible theories, Redstone says: “We’re treating questions around causation as settled.” Even suggesting research into alternative sociological explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming at best.
The consequences are playing out across society. “Once a claim is made that suggests, ‘We are on the right side of history, we are doing the work of good people who care about justice,’ that creates a lot of social pressure,” she says. It forecloses disagreement, she says, “And that has an enormous destructive effect on democracy.”
Redstone’s critique builds on others circulating within the profession. In interviews and on panels convened by organizations like Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan organization devoted to academic reform, critics say that overt politicization—of research, of teaching, of practice—is killing the discipline. They refer to a discipline in disarray, write papers with titles like “How Sociology Can Save Itself” and blog about “Sociology’s Pervasively Dubious Assumptions.”
They describe an atmosphere in which to get ahead, you must consistently submit to political litmus tests, publish accordingly and pray that you make it to tenure without getting excommunicated. Specializing in a stodgy subject like religion, the military or law enforcement—especially if one has anything positive to say—is as unfashionable as flaunting a fur coat.
In their view, contemporary sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty, decreasing the value of sociological research, reducing its impact and undermining public trust. (According to one analysis, 80% of articles published in today’s flagship sociology journals touch on inequality.)
This Is What the Field of Sociology Is About.”
This spring, a damning report by Vanderbilt and Washington University called out the social sciences for “a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”
“Activist logics are taking over scientific logics,” says Ashley Rubin, the sociologist who worked on the Vanderbilt/Washington University report.
“If you look at the data on so much of the current research on capitalism, sexism, racism, you’ll see that sociology is misrepresenting the evidence, concealing the evidence or distorting it outright,” says Kevin McCaffree, a sociologist at the University of North Texas. He points to numerous studies purporting to show the pervasiveness of poverty in America, rampant sexism in the hiring of women and the harms inflicted by “microaggressions.”
“Every day, the goal in my work is to not do politics,” McCaffree says. “My job is to imagine someone in my mind who has the opposite assumptions and go back and forth with them to test my ideas. I don’t think most sociologists realize the magnitude of their own bias and the weakness of the evidence supporting their claims.”
McCaffree and other empiricists accuse scholars of engaging in “asymmetrical analysis,” depending on whether groups are considered “minoritized,” which skews the results. And an emphasis on systems denies groups or individuals within groups any form of agency. He believes sociologists owe it to students and the public to be transparent about these failures, including years of compromised research.
McCaffree is also the editor of the journal, Theory & Society, a position he took on in 2023 after the publisher fired its previous editor. McCaffree decided to reorient the publication in a more open and rigorous direction. The entire staff promptly resigned.
“The enforcement of ideological conformity within sociology is so intense it’s impossible to ignore,” he says. “Meanwhile, trust in higher education is collapsing. That’s being driven in part by politicized degrees in social science, and in that respect, sociology is the belly of the beast.”
Jukka Savolainen, a professor of criminology and sociology at Wayne State University, says too much sociological research is a “waste of resources” and a missed opportunity. “Don’t we want to learn about the causes of crime? Do we want to know whether we have Venezuelan gangs in Colorado? Or do we just say, ‘Policing is bad, parole is bad, they destroy communities, cops are bigots and the real problem is police violence.’”
Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, tells the story of a professor at Columbia University who assigned the children’s board book, “Anti-Racist Baby,” in an introductory sociology class. She opened up the first class by holding up the book and declaring, “This is what the field of sociology is about.”
What al-Gharbi calls “normie beliefs,” ones that are often true and well-founded, are relentlessly undermined within the discipline: You think religion is good? You think men and women are different? Believe that marriage is stabilizing or that police are necessary? Wrong. In this way and others, he says, professors may unwittingly discourage or alienate students.
In many sociology classes, he says, society is relentlessly depicted as “bad, bad, bad,” and in ways that offer a less accurate understanding of America.
“Based on the narrative in sociology, you’d think America is some kind of racist hellscape and that white people are uniquely depraved,” al-Gharbi explains. “In reality, people get along across difference in America better than any other country on the planet.”
