The Chicago Tribune noted that sociology students from Northern Illinois University are headed to Florida for spring break, but…
they won’t be relaxing in the sunshine.
They plan to build two Habitat for Humanity homes in four days.
Jack King of NIU’s Department of Sociology leads the annual outing. NIU crews have helped the nonprofit build about 25 homes in the Pensacola, Fla., area over the years.
Sociology graduate and undergraduate students come back, some year after year, to lend a hand.
BBC News recently reported on the concept of “parental determinism,” as discussed by Kent University (England) sociology professor Frank Furedi:
There was a pervading prejudice that virtually all of society’s problems were caused by poor parenting. There was an attempt to “weed out” unfit parents and intervene before they even had children, he said. In an article for Spiked online, he likened “parental determinism” to Hitler’s eugenics and Stalinism.
He said: “The idea of a one-dimensional causal relationship between parenting and socioeconomic outcomes, dreamt up by the British think-tanks and policy makers, threatens to take public discourse to a new low.
He points to the roots of “parental determinism” in Britain:
The idea of early intervention was conceived by Tony Blair’s regime which “promoted the fantasy that the government could fix society’s problems by getting its hands on the nation’s toddlers before their parents had chance to ruin them”.
“He believed it was possible to spot tomorrow’s ‘problem people’ even before they were born,” he added. This notion of parental determinism allowed politicians to promote the “most absurd prejudices…Over the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith the former Tory leader, argued that children from broken homes and dysfunctional families have underdeveloped brains and start school with the mental capacity of one-year-olds,” he said.
Furedi argues that “parental determinism” is particularly damaging in the realm of education:
This was because of the way it could erode adult responsibility and authority, he said. If adults were reluctant or confused about giving guidance to the younger generation, then the challenge facing the teacher in the classroom could be “overwhelming”, he said. “It is hard to be the last bastion of authority in a society where adult authority seems to be crumbling,” he added.
He called for adult authority to be affirmed both in and out of the classroom and for the relationship between parents and teachers to be re-drawn. “There is a difference between raising children and educating them, and this distinction must be re-established to allow for a clearer and more constructive relationship between parents and teachers,” he concluded.
Click here to read Furedi’s full article in Spiked.
The New York Times recently featured an op-ed by David Brooks on the role of sports in American society. Commenting on the teachings of sociologist Eugen Rosenstock Huessy:
He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.
“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”
Brooks summarizes Michael Allen Gillespie’s take on how American sports are organized:
Throughout Western history, Gillespie argues, there have been three major athletic traditions. First, there was the Greek tradition. Greek sports were highly individualistic. There was little interest in teamwork. Instead sports were supposed to inculcate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individuals a way to achieve eternal glory.
Then, there was the Roman tradition. In ancient Rome, free men did not fight in the arena. Roman sports were a spectacle organized by the government. The free Romans watched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertainment emphasized the awesome power of the state.
Finally, there was the British tradition. In the Victorian era, elite schools used sports to form a hardened ruling class. Unlike the Greeks, the British placed tremendous emphasis on team play and sportsmanship. If a soccer team committed a foul, it would withdraw its goalie to permit the other team to score. The object was to inculcate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits that were important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.
Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.
Brooks also makes the case for the role of collective effervescence that college sports provide:
Several years ago, I arrived in Madison, Wis., for a conference. It was Saturday morning, and as my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walking in the same direction. At first it was a trickle, then thousands. It looked like the gathering of a happy Midwestern cult, though, of course, it was the procession to a football game.
In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.
The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.
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.
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.
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.
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece this week in their ‘Community College’ section from sociologist Chad M. Hanson, who “Fled a Humorless University for a Sanctuary of the Liberal Arts.”
Hanson writes about finding a fulfilling career beyond the University of Texas system, where he worked as a research associate:
A successful career at a community college depends on shifting one’s perception. Students — even the snarling ones with baseball caps pulled down over their eyes and baggy pants hanging off their posteriors — must become the focus of one’s work life and the source of one’s job satisfaction. Regardless of whether they want or feel as if they need to take your courses, ill-prepared and unmotivated students show up in your classroom, and that fact often presents a challenge to new teachers. Even so, the good ones eventually realize that making ill-prepared and unmotivated students a priority is a luxury of sorts. At universities, educators take pride and pleasure in the challenge of securing grants to pay for new lines of research, but I have the freedom to make the surly, often-ill-prepared kid in the back row the challenge of my professional life, and that suits me.
Hanson provides a thoughtful reflection about what pushed him to pursue this type of career in sociology…
Community-college teaching can be lucrative. I received a pay increase when I left the university and took up teaching at a two-year college. But that’s not why I left my job conducting research. I left because, though the work was meaningful, it was humorless. Near the end, as I sat in front of the computer in my office, I could feel the hours and days slipping by without the kind of uninhibited laughter that makes your eyes water and your cheeks ache. I longed for that. I was surrounded by brilliant people who took themselves far more seriously than anybody should, no matter how many ways you prove yourself or your intelligence. Once on a coffee break, I caught a look at myself in a mirror — short-sleeve shirt, bold-striped necktie, and a pocket protector lined with upscale pens and mechanical pencils. I looked like a ball of rubber bands wound too tight to be useful to anyone. I knew I needed a change.
Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent publication from the American Sociological Association about the job market for new Ph.D.s.
“New Ph.D.’s in sociology appear to have a healthy job market in which to land positions, based purely on the numbers. But an analysis released by the American Sociological Association also points to a potential mismatch in specialties, as hiring committees appear to be much more enamored of criminology than are sociology graduate students.”
The up-side…
“The overall picture is quite positive. The association had listings in 2006 for 1,086 unique positions, 610 of them for assistant professors. During that same year, 562 Ph.D.’s were awarded in sociology. The report notes that not all of the posted positions in any year are filled by new Ph.D.’s or at all, but given that there are also postdoctoral positions, positions for which no rank is specified, and positions not included in the ASA job listings, the outlook is encouraging for new Ph.D. recipients.”
The down-side…
“Where things are slightly less certain is in the area of specialties. More than one third of the assistant professor positions did not specify a subfield. But the top subfield specified (nearly three times more than the runner up) was criminology/delinquency, and the sixth most popular subfield was a related one, law and society. The concern of those who prepared the report is that evidence suggests grad students are focused elsewhere.”
Charles Tilly, legendary sociologist and Columbia University professor has passed away at age 78. The New York Times obituary cited Tilly’s unique combination of historical and quantitative methods in his work. A prolific scholar, Tilly published 51 books and more than 600 scholarly articles.
Excerpts from the Times obituary:
“In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly ‘the founding father of 21st-century sociology.’ He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa. Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.”
“’It was exhausting keeping up with him,’ Dr. Ashforth said. ‘We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.’”
“On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, ‘One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.’”
What makes students happier than watching movies during class time? — A new blog post provides some beneficial guidance in selecting films for specific sociological topics.
A recent update to the blog titled ‘Thinking at the Interface‘ provides a thorough and exemplary list of films to use in sociology classes. The list is organized around common themes of introductory sociology courses including the sociological imagination, research methods, race, ethnicity, and gender, just to name a few!
© 2010 Contexts Crawler
