ASA Forum for public discussion and debate
That’s in a Name:
Concerning
the ASA Career Award
Not Lester Ward, Albion Small, Franklin H.
Giddings, Charles Horton Cooley, William Graham
Sumner, Robert Park, Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin,
William Thomas, Dorothy Thomas, Everett Hughes,
Robert K. Merton, Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills,
Peter Blau, or Lewis Coser. There is a long list of names
not chosen; instead the ASA career award now carries
the name W.E.B. DuBois, the noted racial activist
and Pan-Africanist. Another, albeit it less comfortable
act of publicity on behalf of a professional association,
the name change reveals more than it is purported to
denote. How else could one account for the appropriation
of the name of a person who, even by admission
of the advocates of adding the name to the ASA career award, did not make a contribution to the development
of the profession and discipline of American
sociology that would be singularly more noteworthy
than those of many others whose names remain
unspoken.
Yet, despite a longstanding ASA policy that awards should be identified by the reason of the award alone, the name change of the career award was voted by a majority of the membership (see November 2006 Footnotes, "Names Change for Two ASA Awards"). I therefore wholeheartedly support the idea that the addition of the name of DuBois to the ASA career award be observed with all due ceremonial grandeur at the ASA Annual Meeting (see January 2008 Footnotes, ASA Forum). Such a celebration would serve to mark and honor, plainly and clearly, the very essence of the standing of contemporary sociology and its practitioners. It is a tragic and sad irony, of course, that the many significant contributions DuBois made, intellectual and otherwise, could not be done greater injustice than by having his legacy reduced to the self-serving needs of the ASA’s voting majority.
Mathieu Deflem, University of South Carolina 
