“Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students. Higher education must return to its essential foundations of academic integrity and the pursuit of knowledge instead of being corrupted by destructive ideologies. These actions today ensure that we will not spend taxpayers’ money supporting DEI and radical indoctrination that promotes division in our society.”

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

“Today’s sociology is so patently devoid of any intellectual rigor that most of it evokes only contemptuous laughter. The arguments advanced, the “evidence” mustered to support its partisan claims, are so weak that it is genuinely amazing to realize that the people making these cases have spent many years in educational institutions and yet have come away from all that with either no understanding of or an utter contempt for careful and rigorous argument.”

“I haven't read a sociology article in 20 years. I could not take the subject seriously and was fortunate enough to have sufficient training in mathematics and statistics that I could move to a statistics department. There are interesting applied problems in statistics to work on that touch on the social sciences and that are of interest to economists and political scientists, who are far more serious than sociologists. There seemed to be little point to writing for sociologists---most would not understand. Although there are many good questions to be asked in sociology, by and large these are addressed with ideology and/or sloppy empirical work. The rest of the world seems to realize this, therefore pays no serious attention to sociology.”

“Only a sociologist would believe that 70 percent of kids being born out of wedlock in a community is not a bad thing in terms of development. Only an academic sociologist”.

“I left sociology about three decades ago and cannot provide a current account of what is going on. But I was there in the late 1960s when the gatekeepers by and large caved to the social justice activists. Sociology started down the slippery path to nowhere. Soon the gatekeepers recognized their errors, but it was too late. I have nothing to say about sociology also because sociology is just a special case of the general destruction of the social sciences and humanities at major universities. University administrators too often are major enablers.”

"Sociology has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology.... Any notion of a common democratic culture or a universal scientific base has become suspect. Sociology has become so enmeshed in the politics of advocacy and the ideology of self-righteousness that it is simply unaware of, much less able to respond to, new conditions in the scientific and social environment in which it finds itself.”

“In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was starting my career in social psychology, sociology was a highly relevant discipline. I had friends and colleagues in sociology (and did a postdoc in sociology at Berkeley myself). It provided a really valuable alternate perspective to complement the psychological approach. Psychology starts with the single mind and slowly and vaguely works up to larger groups. Sociology starts at the top, with the biggest groups (e.g., society, country) and then works down to the individual. This has informed my thinking ever since. But I also always sensed, even back then, that sociology was divided. There were the serious scientists testing basic ideas (these people were the ones I mainly interacted with), but there was also a big segment of the field that seemed more akin to the humanities, using qualitative methods and focusing more on political activism than following the data wherever they led. (Activists mainly follow the data when findings support their political goals.) In the ensuing decades, my impression is that the less rigorous and more activist scholars came to dominate the field. The connections between social psychology and sociology gradually disappeared. Whereas we used to attend each other’s conferences and publish in each other’s journals, that has become far less common. I am sad about this development and see it as a lost opportunity for mutually beneficial interdisciplinary collaboration and enrichment. I hope sociology can rediscover its place in the social sciences, but my impression is that once activists wrest control of a field away from the pure scientists, they are not likely to give it back.”

“I have decided to terminate my affiliation with ASA. Justice Warriors have won the battle, but with many casualties. Activism is driven more by ideology than science. Since science is now marginalized in ASA, it is time to say goodbye. Indeed, sociology has self-destructed; and yet, something like sociology will have to be rebuilt again, by another name, to achieve the goal of having a true science of human societies.”

“This sorry state of theoretical affairs in sociology is probably the clearest evidence of the discipline’s intellectual bankruptcy. But intellectual bankruptcy never spelled the end of an academic discipline. Those within it are professionally deformed not to recognize it, and those outside of it could care less. Sociology is safe for at least a few more decades.”

“My first intellectual passion was applying mathematics to understand society, bypassing sterile ideological debates. I studied under Harrison White at Harvard, but found the field being hollowed out by Marxists and later other researchers who used bad statistics and faith-based assertions to support preconceptions rather than search for truth. I love good mathematical sociology, and I respect qualitative researchers who go out and listen to people and who are open to learning from their investigations; but that's a small minority of the field. I am also disappointed at how much sociology is stuck in 19th and early-20th century dogma. The biggest driver of social change in my lifetime, by far, is technology, and I meet few sociologists who keep up with technology.”

The famous San Francisco Police Inspector was not enthused upon meeting his new partner. "Just what I need, a college boy. What's your degree in? Sociology. You'll go far with that. That is if you live"

“The problem with sociology is that it does not take personal agency seriously. Sociology remains highly suspicious of all notions of personal initiative and responsibility. Indeed, it is routine to castigate anyone foolish enough to take agency seriously as a reactionary bent on blaming the victim.”

“Having participated in social inquiry for more than 30 years, I tend to concur with Dr. Smith’s assessment of sociology, criminology and most other fields of social science as ‘ideological projects masked as science’. I have watched my discipline morph into academic advocacy for left-wing causes.”

“My colleagues cannot see the world clearly. Some view all findings through a lens of racial grievance. Others bend every single discussion to the topic of gender. They look at the world through a straw and miss a lot of what is going on”

 "Sociology is thoroughly corrupted. It is infused with left-wing politics through and through. Sociologists scoff at the ideas of truth and objectivity. They see themselves as scholar activists, and want to reshape the world according to their leftist vision. On the other hand, the moment you criticize them, they often use science as a shield to legitimize their research in the language of the science that they just got done telling you they reject. I think we should start anew with sociology. I don't really see a way you can reform what's been done or what exists now. So I would start with something different, a different organization. Demand a high level of rigor. Demand heterodox points of view and viewpoint diversity. Have some guardrails like taking another look at the peer review process"   

“I was a tenure-track sociology professor. I got out and started a whole new career. Less than 10% of sociology would qualify as scientific research. In most sociology the process is this: (1) a priori selection of a claim; (2) find evidence to support the claim; (3) ignore or dismiss (often offhandedly) contrary evidence; (4) publish as “science”. Sociologists justify this approach (when they bother) by viewing the knowledge they create as a means to an end, usually some utopian end. Moreover, sociology professors frequently view their students as instruments for achieving some desired social outcome. Although I took many sociology classes, I never read a conservative writer. The negative impact of decades of inculcation via sociology departments and their ilk on society (one of fairest, most tolerate, and prosperous) cannot be understated. We live in a much worse world because of sociology.”

“It would be career suicide to say anything besides a far-left opinion out loud in front of other faculty members in our college.”

“It's as if the only 'true' critical view of society can come from the Left. So, so, so wrong. I've spent my career (so far, 28 years) teaching sociology and it is upsetting that my colleagues cannot see the fundamental problem of nearly exclusively only viewing society through a left leaning perspective. Ultimately sociologists both misunderstand right wing views and are scared of them. They do not even meaningfully engage with such views. It is therefore no wonder that no right leaning students will take this at undergraduate level and certainly not do any postgrad work. Why can these smart and well educated people not see that this is fundamentally disastrous for the discipline that we love?”

“In the main media and politicians ignore sociological assumptions and results. The hidden characteristics of sociologists include their lack of interest in other disciplines and ‘totalitarian assertions”

“Bad sociological thinking is dominating social justice discourse. People aren’t trying to understand the world first before they are changing it. If you act on things that are not true you are not likely to change the world for the better. As these things get implemented into policy they have negative effects and harm the people they were intended to help”.

"Statistical analysis -- a useful, but limited, tool -- dominates most sociological research. This 'methodological fetishism' has resulted in many sociologists using increasingly sophisticated methods to study increasingly trivial topics. Even more devastating is sociology’s transformation into an instrument of agitation and propaganda for leftist causes. Here and there one can still find sociologists doing excellent work. But the contributions of these sociologists, none of whom have created anything resembling a school of thought, only serve to underline the overall depressing condition of this discipline.”

“There is no such thing as sociological theory if you mean empirical relationships that are comfortably predictable and general enough to turn up across more than one topic. Instead we find a goopy mess of (deceptive) intellectual history, a healthy dollop of ideology, and a Chinese menu of ‘schools’, ‘approaches’ and ‘buzzwords”

“Entrance into the profession of sociology has moved back from achievement to ascription as an ever-growing group of politicized sociologists and activists has taken over the ranks of the profession”.

“If, after getting perspective, you decide you are passionate about doing advanced work on something having to do with organizations, or social class, or urban inequality, etc., then go to graduate school in sociology. I have 14 (step) grandkids now. If any of them said they were thinking of majoring in sociology, I'd try to convince them otherwise.”

“Grounds for fearing that the intellectual disintegration of sociology may presage its institutional decline cannot be dismissed as implausible. The present state of the discipline may not be sustainable and the future of sociology, both intellectually and institutionally, is indeed problematic”.

“If I dared to say any of the things I’m saying in this survey [of sociologists] in any non-anonymous situation it would be the end of my career. I just bite my lip and say all the politically correct things or I try to just keep my mouth shut”.

“Sociologists’ sustained attention to the harmful consequences of social stratification expresses precisely their shared moral sentiments to protect vulnerable groups. Yet in "sacralizing" vulnerable groups, the field undercuts its scientific credibility. Sociology can be understood as an emotive community where people of left/liberal politics produce, perform and ultimately police their underlying sensibilities”.

“Another offensive strategy [sociologists use] is to accuse those who assign any causal role to the protected group of being racist, sexist or reactionary. Ad hominem attacks also discourage many causal analysts from tackling these controversial issues”

“The overwhelming majority of scientific investigations should have trying to achieve causality in some form as their end. But to say, ‘here is a causal model; I have fitted a causal model to this data, therefore I have established causality’, seems to me both extremely naive, and also very dangerous. Establishing causality needs a lot of care, as well as different kinds of investigations, and different sorts of evidence all assembled together”.

“Only sociologists force-fed as graduate students will not choke on Erik Olin-Wright's book, 'Real Utopias'. That many of them have come to adore this stuff is only striking proof of the discipline’s collapse. With Wright as elected president of the sociological profession, the conservative nightmare of radicals taking over the university has in part come to pass.”

“There is an all-pervasive leftist bias. On controversial issues sociologists repeatedly write as if no non-leftist views deserve consideration. When the conservative enemy are given any hearing at all they are presented weakly or misrepresented - to ensure their immediate dismissal.”

“In the current state of knowledge in the social sciences, regression models are seldom if ever reliable for causal inference. It is the beginning of scientific wisdom to recognize that not all questions have answers.”

“American sociology has consistently leaned toward the political Left. The scope of research projects is constrained; sociologists are discouraged from touching on taboo topics and ideologically unpalatable facts. Sociologists neglect data that portrays conservatives positively and liberals negatively. The empathic understanding of non-liberal ideologies is inhibited.”

“Diversity does not include political diversity. Sociology departments would actively recruit an LGBT candidate for an opening, with close to 100 percent consensus that this would fill a departmental need. But actively recruit a conservative? Not a chance. A proposal to do so would be laughed out the door because sociologists have decided that such people have no ideas worth serious consideration.”

“It is harder to publish research if the results could be considered ‘harmful’ to marginalized groups (for example, studies that do not find evidence of bias/unfair treatment, but instead find differences in risks/behaviors). Similarly, it is always a risk to talk about such information in class.”

“There isn’t a certain body of knowledge that everyone would swear is of central importance. We are teaching the same sort of things that we taught in the 60’s and 70’s, but we aren’t as convinced as we were that it is worth teaching and not quite sure what it should be replaced with.”

“It has long been observed that sociology ranges from the center to far left. To say that classical liberalism is underrepresented in sociology would be a vast understatement. Forbidden might be more fitting.”

“My department is very liberal, and often mixes social causes into how we run the department. I doubt my administration or department would support pursuing research that challenges (or even has the potential to challenge) their moral/political views.”

“The apparent lack of concern among sociologists has left us somewhat in the dark—we simply do not know how often the results of sociological investigations can be replicated. Indirect evidence about the replicability of sociological work is worrisome. At the very least, sociology needs significantly more replication attempts to know where the field stands “

“I have been wondering for a long time just when and how my academic discipline of sociology was going to hit bottom, to cross over from being merely deeply troubled and cognitively impaired to enter fully into a state of true madness. The cancer of fact-averse leftist indoctrination, radicalism and activism has metastasized throughout the body of academic sociology… Like most predominantly progressive academics, sociologists claim to be obsessed with ‘safe spaces’. But not ‘safe’ for conservatives. Not ‘safe’ for Christians with traditional religious convictions. And now, apparently, not ‘safe’ for Jews.”

“As a former sociologist, I can only applaud the Florida Legislature for this decision. If it were the case that sociology actually utilized knowledge and reason to inform and inspire fight for a just future then I would absolutely support it. Sociologists’ actual concern appears to be job security for a group of craven intellectuals who waste their lives publishing nonsensical, theoretical articles which nobody reads. I'm a leftist and I say cut the department.”

“Professional sociologists may well view the public sociologists’ emphasis on moral and political values as a potential motive, and ready-made pretense for disregarding professional standards of scholarship and persecuting researchers who have dared come up with politically incorrect findings”

“Liberal University professor here. Republicans tactics are wrong and scary, but their concern is spot on. 99% of faculty at the more elite institutions are liberal, most are far left wing. Whole disciplines such as sociology are dominated by left wing ideology. How can we accurately teach social studies subjects when there is virtually no viewpoint diversity to reflect our society? We the University faculty need to recognize this problem and fix it ourselves, for example by actively recruiting more moderates and conservatives through DEI measures … or else”.

“Most American sociologists will likely continue to favor ‘political correctness’ over statistical correctness in order to obsequiously gain favor with established elites in the field whose academic capital is heavily invested in the value of outdated theories such as ‘white privilege’. The serious study of Asian Americans will likely continue to be marginalized even as so many sociologists ironically claim to be dedicated to promoting an inclusive and enlightened dialogue about ‘race in America’ sans Asian Americans. Unlike Don Quixote, however, tenured sociologists in the field of racial relations will also likely continue to receive attractive salaries, lifetime employment, and other professional rewards for engaging in their fantasies.”

“Sociology is becoming so politicized it is hard to bring sober people into it. It is interesting that all over the world student revolutionists have been led by sociologists; sociologists have been the vanguard”.

“Sociology, in its present form, teaches nothing that social workers, in the conventional sense - that is, therapists - would not learn better from well-taught courses in psychology or politics. The only ‘social work professionals’ who base their careers on what they learned in sociology are professional social activists, uniformly of a leftist bent”

“I frequently (maybe once every other week per class) do not say things that are true for fear of career assassination from colleagues who are much further left than I am.”

“It’s basic social science (outside of American sociology) that if you can’t provide data, code, and other research materials, you offer an explanation of why that is. Not even having an explanation here is a bad look for ASR and the American Sociological Association. This is the flagship journal of the association. People get tenure for these papers. If the journal required it, people would do it, and we would all benefit.”

“It took sociologists a long time to come around to the view that two-parent families were good for children on average. One reason is that they thought that social institutions are inherently oppressive: Traditional marriage is necessarily coercive, and it stymied our liberty and freedom and it was an institution that promoted gender inequality. .”

“American sociology’s sacred project stands in the modern liberal-Enlightenment-Marxist-social-reformist-pragmatist-therapeutic-sexually liberated civil rights-feminist-GLBTQ-social constructionist-poststructuralist-postmodernist tradition”.

“A friend at another university got a negative tenure vote despite a strong record for having unpopular opinions (and research findings). Fortunately the provost overruled.”

“Gender sociology insulates its sacred beliefs from ideas that challenge those beliefs, even when the challenging ideas are very well grounded. The challenges come from psychology, the neurosciences, genetics, biology and many other fields. When I raise ideas that would challenge the sacred beliefs, I do so only at the edges. I perceive a deep and widespread taboo and insularity among gender sociology. It saddens me.”

“The politically one-sided culture in much of American higher education has created a well-documented trail of wreckage. While many factors have brought campuses to this point, my home discipline of sociology bears some responsibility”.

“The notion of public sociology assumes that sociologists actually have good knowledge that can be applied to human problems. In fact, however, our supposed knowledge is quite shaky… Our claim to credibility must rest on the reliable body of knowledge that we may accumulate. At the moment, though, sociologists do not have that body of reliable knowledge”

“I became a sociologist because I believed the theoretical and methodological tool of the discipline have the potential to provide enormous insight into how social systems work. However, the increasingly hegemonic social justice orientation of the discipline is rendering such insights increasingly hard to come by. Peer reviewers provide more positive reviews of articles that support their beliefs, theoretical orientations and political views. Those with different ideological views are evaluated more negatively.”

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black. But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close. Recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.”

“Today sociology is a partisan field. It asks ‘Whose side are we on?’ rather than ‘Is this the most truthful account we can give.’ Many sociologists are less devoted to scholarship than to righting wrongs like racism and sex discrimination.”

I am still a liberal Democrat and I intensely detest everything about today’s Republican Party. Still, I think that sociology has become such a left-dominated field that we exhibit ‘groupthink’ to the point that we have become intellectually soft”.

“Sociology departments often are struggling to get enough majors to justify the size of the faculty and they often offer “sexy” – and often not very demanding – courses on issues vaguely related to what used to be the core concern of the discipline just to get enough enrollments.”

“As bad as the academic environment was in sociology in the 1990s, I’m afraid the rot has spread far and wide and deep in the intervening years. My advice today would be: run, child, run as fast as you can!”

“People forget that historically universities existed to impart the faith of Christian values. If one today seeks to learn the woke faith, departments of sociology are the place to study.”

“Sociology has become highly politicized – to its detriment. Sociologists can't proudly claim the mantle of left-wing activism and then complain when a right-leaning government rejects what they have to offer. Value judgments of all kinds undermine sociology’s credibility.”

“Sociology is gone. The field has for some time now been losing it’s substance, core and identity, rendering it hollow and shallow. It has become difficult to draw any lines between sociology and journalism. The field has also become a battleground of advocacy, shaped and usurped by the ideological politics of social movements. Like phrenology and Orientalism, sociology has reached its end.

“In 2020 I started teaching a course on the sociology of sports. I relied on a popular textbook. It didn’t take long to discover that the book provided few interesting findings or persuasive arguments. Instead it was peppered with tendentious grievances against capitalism, masculinity and white privilege.”

“The leaders of the American Sociological Association have denounced Florida Governor DeSantis for ‘politicizing education’. They do not seem able to perceive their own pronounced turn from scholarship to partisan advocacy.”

“Somehow it is controversial to say the ASA (and the field) have become ideological: making unnecessary political statements, adopting performative policies without clear supportive evidence, and generally rushing to do all of this with little discussion and debate, making it difficult for anyone not already convinced to get on board and overlooking many who have varied good reasons to oppose these actions. Ultimately, ASA has done a good job of alienating many sociologists. I am standing for election to see if I can help reverse that trend.”

“In sociology departments, you’re as likely to see a conservative Republican as you are to see a dog with wings fly. That’s not good. Why? Because if you’re a student there are certain topics of discussion where you would be enriched to hear both sides.”

"In complex areas of sociology, such as the study of racial inequality, a fundamentalism has taken hold that discourages sound methodology and the use of reliable evidence about the roots of social problems. Statistical malfeasance and evidence cherry-picking are rife in sociology. They frequently rig their methods in order to arrive at ideologically preferred conclusions".

"Activism and overt political bias have destroyed sociology's reputation and quality. It is inexcusable. I know there is hunger amongst other sociologists and the broader public for reform. This beleaguered field deserves better. It is a profound tragedy for a field with such promise to devolve into activist navel-gazing".

This Wellesley professor is a registered Republican which remains an astonishing confession to his colleagues. His colleagues, he explains, are “all sorts of pontificators most of whom have quite obviously never studied the principles or facts they denounce. They have opinions, even though many of them express them as if they were pious convictions guiding not only their own souls but meant to guide others’ souls as well”.

“The academic sociologist almost always writes unnecessarily badly. It is not that he has a legitimate special language, as mathematicians and chemists have. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to build an unnecessary jargon, partly perhaps as a protective shield against criticism (you can’t criticize what you don’t understand.”

“American sociology is, to me, willfully boring, and I have pretty much now lost interest in it.”

“Current sociology is ‘stagnant’, using false statistics. Their research studies are so bad they are not even wrong, and are certainly politically biased”.

“The political clout of the American Sociological Association on Capitol Hill is miniscule. Inside the Beltway, the sad reality is that few people pay any attention to the political stands collectively taken by sociologists”.

“Sociology’s public advocacy is a danger to the discipline because it creates ulterior motives. It kind of threatens the legitimacy of the discipline itself in terms of being a reliable source of objective, critical evaluations of what’s going on in empirical reality.”

“Normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates us all. If X is bad, and Y which is also bad can be tied to X via a plausible story, it is very hard to resist the conclusion that one causes the other. We want one bad thing to be caused by another… we happily leap to the conclusion that the second evil is caused by the first.”

“I've known prominent ‘capital-S-for-science-Sociologists’ who bemoan the ideological hegemony that increasingly pervades Sociology. There are pockets of sound sociological scholarship that remain, but I am now reluctant to self-label as a "sociologist" (increasingly synonymous with "social activist"), preferring instead the title of "social/behavioral scientist" or "social psychologist," because I have been finding increasingly little value in membership to mainstream sociology societies.”

“Sociologists are less concerned about where they probe than for whom they do the probing. They think sociologists should stay out of government projects because this seduces them into applying their knowledge to shoring up existing institutions. They even challenge the ‘objectivity’ of contemporary sociology in general and virtually accuse all nonradical sociologists of supporting the ‘power structure.”

"I decided to sit down and read the foundational texts of identity politics and see if there's anything there. It's the four texts that everybody mentions: Kimberle Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi. I concluded that there is nothing there. It's complete nonsense. It's gibberish. It's garbage. It's totally worthless. It has no academic, no scholarly, or intellectual content whatsoever. It's in large part completely illiterate and barely comprehensible."

“The African-American case is unique and exceptional both in terms of its anchor at the core of American national identity, e.g. the Civil War, and in terms of the socio-economic and political dynamic that has produced today’s exclusion and marginality. If you design your institutions of law and politics and culture around the moral imperative of the African American case, and then apply it to everyone who is not white you have made a huge monumental historical error”.