In two hard-hitting pieces, Alexander Riley, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), describes today’s sociology as a sullied political swamp. The faculty do little valuable work, Dr. Riley observes, and students are blatantly propagandized. A professor of sociology at Bucknell University, he published his broadsides this month at the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind and on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal website.
When he began his graduate study 30-plus years ago, Dr. Riley recalls in “Sociology’s Descent into Woke Satire” at The American Mind, the discipline still retained some of its older spirit, allowing “idealistic souls like myself” to imagine it was still about uncovering social realities. It had always included radical approaches—but many, at least on the surface, showed an “intellectual seriousness” and it took real thinking to challenge them effectively.
“However much one disagreed with Marx … one could not reasonably call him a fool and a charlatan, at least if one had read him. He was wrong, but not obviously ignorant of basic things and oblivious to the requirements of argument and evidence.” In contrast, Dr. Riley laments, sociology is now so “devoid of any intellectual rigor that most of it evokes only contemptuous laughter” because of the remarkably weak arguments and evidence for its politicized contentions. In all their years of education, the sociologists who advance these “partisan claims” seem to have acquired “either no understanding of or an utter contempt for careful and rigorous argument.”
He points to a series of brief videos called “Sociological Insights,” presented by the American Sociological Association, which offer research summaries in “visually engaging morsels … intended to provide an introduction to sociological reasoning and analysis.” Unfortunately, they seem like “a wickedly humorous satire of the discipline” and are “a startling testimony” to its intellectual collapse.
Among them is “The Gospel of the Flag,” where Andrew Whitehead tries to show that, in Dr. Riley’s description, “Christian nationalism skews beliefs about policy in factually distorted ways.” It asserts, for example, that so-called Christian nationalists are especially likely to believe there’s little evidence of bias against blacks in policing. “Whitehead’s unspoken assumption … is that this is self-evidently false. Yet meticulous research has shown that there is no evidence of racial bias in police shootings of suspects.” In “Learning to Hate” Peter Simi considers how people come to adopt hateful ideologies. “Predictably, the only images … are of racist white nationalist groups … groups such as the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party are absent in his treatment.”
The embarrassing “Insights” videos are sociology “advertising itself to the public … The discipline’s [main] professional organization selected this work specifically to show … what it sees as the strengths of the sociological perspective.” The featured scholars hold “tenured faculty positions at high-ranking universities … publishing in the discipline’s top journals.”
“Teaching Sociology Is an Ideological Nightmare,” posted by The James G. Martin Center, provides additional “bitter evidence” of the great distance between sociology’s promising early era and what students learn in its courses today. Teaching Sociology, an American Sociological Association journal, has the stated purpose of advancing the quality of instruction in the field. But after poring through its pages, Dr. Riley finds that it regards the teaching of sociology as an openly “political” enterprise.
A lot of its content favorably describes “how much activism is going on in the sociology classroom.” Many of its articles “positively discuss class assignments that are straightforward ideological training and exercises in naked partisanship.” The field’s pedagogical journal shows little interest in evaluating “the efficacy of knowledge-production in class” or in expanding students’ expertise—but much interest “in tracking and enhancing the way in which courses push students to ‘the … motivation to ease suffering.’”
“Sociology,” Dr. Riley writes, “has gone from an academic discipline to just another means for the delivery of radical opinions.”
Dr. Riley is the author of Toward a Biosocial Science: Evolutionary Theory, Human Nature, and Social Life (Routledge, 2021) and The Social Thought of Émile Durkheim (Sage, 2014), a Fulbright Scholar award recipient, and a member of the board of the National Association of Scholars.
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