“This employee will eventually sue you for discrimination”
The president of the major sociology association, Shelley Correll, had just taken the stage at the discipline’s big annual conference in New York City on Sunday when a few dozen sociologists began chanting “Free Palestine” and unfurled a banner.
The short disruption was partly drowned out by turning up Dr. Correll’s entrance music, Dolly Parton’s “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.”
Tuning out the broader cacophony around sociology is not so easy, however.
Republicans in some states have singled out sociology as a poster child of everything that is wrong with academia, saying that it has become a hotbed of leftist activism. And rifts have formed within the discipline over whether to take political stances on issues like the war in Gaza.
At the same time, fewer students are signing up for sociology classes, making the debates feel all the more urgent.
Sociologists study human society and behavior. The field has long included a mix of science and activism. But sociology’s difficulties are driving arguments about whether the discipline should rein in its advocacy wing to gain public confidence, or stand its ground against outside attack.
“We lost something through this pursuit of partisanship,” said Fabio Rojas, a professor at Indiana University who writes about schisms in sociology, adding, “There are a lot of people who are just like, ‘I want to go to work and not hear about Palestine.’”
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