Public Forum

Sociologists to the Barricades
A Response from (Past) President Feagin
A Response from the Organizer of the Session in which Nader Appeared
The Dangerous Theory of "You Have to Be One"
Protection of Human Subjects
Matilda White Riley Returns to Maine

Sociologists to the Barricades

“Sociologists to the Barricades” was the headline of Walter Goodman’s account of the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in The New York Times (August 19). He was much impressed with the theme of the 2000 meeting: “Oppression, Domination, and Liberation: Challenges for the 21st Century,” one devoted to condemnation of racism, sexism, “other manifestations of social inequality,” homophobia, exploitation, domination, resource inequality, environmental degradation,” and other sins.” Three and four decades ago people confused sociology with social work, now they may confuse it with a revolutionary political party.

The single most disturbing sentence in Goodman’s account is a question: “What was a presidential candidate [Ralph Nader] doing making a campaign address under the auspices of a group purportedly given to scientific independence of a sort?” Yes. What was Nader doing there?

Organized sociology—the ASA—and many sociologists have lost their way. They no longer see sociology as “the branch of science concerned with the study of human societies” (Lenski’s definition). Rather, the field has become largely an ameliorative endeavor. Sociology has always had tendencies in this direction, but never in its American history has the emphasis on amelioration been so pervasive, so established as the conventional mode.

The ASA and sociology are ripe for revolution, or perhaps I should avoid such a political word and say “fundamental change.” Many sociologists are estranged from the ASA. Many have quit the association. Many are oblivious to its activities. Less than a third of its membership voted in recent elections. What is to be done?

Restore the emphasis on sociology as an objective social science. Like economics and political science. This means restraint on the part of the officers of the ASA, in their official roles, from making political judgments in public and in print; it means no advocacy research published in the name of the ASA; it means the formal presentation of research results without ideological trappings; and it means inhibiting personal claims to being on the side of the angels, exemplified by one presenter in Washington who “kept announcing himself” as “a pro-feminist gay Chicano.”

It also means a cessation of celebrating and being obsessed with selected “minorities.” The silliest recent example is the article in the May/June Footnotes on the location of the 2000 annual meeting: “A Vibrant Latino Presence in Washington, DC” It is past time for the ASA to phase out the office of Director of Minority Affairs, the Minority Fellowship Program, MOST and the other racialist programs. Sociology is the first social science minorities of all sorts have entered and where they have made their presence felt. They do not need to be an obsession of the ASA. It is time for the ASA to be singularly an association of sociologists, not black sociologists, Latino sociologists, gay sociologists; an association devoted to the intellectual and scientific concerns of the discipline.

In the forty years I have been a close observer of sociology, the substance and intellectual reputation of the discipline have never been at such a low ebb. Sociologists to the barricades!

Richard Tomasson, University of New Mexico

A Response from (Past) President Feagin

I would like to congratulate the thousands of ASA members and other social scientists who helped make the 2000 ASA meetings in Washington, DC, so successful and fruitful for many areas of social science research and analysis. I think the substance and character of the 2000 meetings can make us proud of being sociologists.

There were indeed many important research papers and excellent sessions, which the New York Times article on the ASA meetings fails even to acknowledge. That article repeats the negative reaction the Times has sometimes had to the discipline of sociology in the past, such as the similar reaction to the meetings when Herb Gans was president. One has to wonder what the Times editors fear about sociology.

To my knowledge, no letters from sociologists critical of the one-sided article have been published. Here is my August 20 letter to the Times in response to that article—which has also not been published there.

August 20, 2000
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Walter Goodman’s article (August 19) on the American Sociological Association’s successful 2000 annual meeting was a distorted but predictable neoconservative attack on those who research such issues as gender, race, class, and anti-gay bias and discrimination. His account brims with pre-conceived biases. He does little examination of the many fruitful data analyses presented by sociologists there, focusing instead on the titles and tone of a few presentations that were evidently too probing of the status quo. Conspicuously, he reports not one interview with presenters, organizers, officers, or the 4,800 participants. Apparently attending only a few of the record 577 sessions during two of five meeting days, Goodman presumes to characterize sociology today. Was his mind made up about the state of sociology before arrival? What sort of journalism is this? Odd too is Goodman’s complaining about sessions dealing with social injustice. Social justice is a bedrock ideal of U.S. society—yet, as much data presented at the meetings show, in many areas it remains far from being attained.

Dr. Joe R. Feagin
Graduate Research Professor
University of Florida
and 1999-2000 President
American Sociological Association

A Response from the Organizer of the Session in which Nader Appeared

R. Tomasson, like New York Times columnist Walter Goodman, completely misrepresented the ASA special session, “After Seattle: The WTO and the New World Order,” which Charles Derber and I co-organized. He similarly misrepresented the 2000 ASA Annual Meeting, and the entire character—both past and present—of the discipline of Sociology.

That special session featured two contrasting critical analyses of globalization and the anti-globalization movement. Panelists Ralph Nader and Charles Derber presented critiques of corporate globalization and called for reform of U.S. and international economic institutions. Panelists Dave Schop, a Boeing machinist, and I presented critiques of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism and called for international workers’ solidarity. The session, which attracted over 350 people, was decidedly not a campaign rally for Ralph Nader. How often is a campaign rally organized so that the presidential candidate shares a platform with two Marxist critics of his views? How often is a campaign rally organized so that the candidate is challenged by members of the audience who criticize him for not emphasizing anti-racism, for not explicitly dissociating himself from Buchanan’s xenophobic supporters, and for asserting that capitalism can be reformed to protect the working class?

New York Times columnist Walter Goodman complained that sociologists “see social injustice wherever they turn.” Tomasson sees an “obsession” with “racialist” programs for “minorities.” Yet Goodman’s view that contemporary sociologists are at “the barricades” fighting racism, sexism, and class exploitation is as much a myth as is Tomasson’s view that, once upon a time, sociology was an “objective social science.” In 1996, did the hundreds of sociologists who welcomed HHS Secretary Donna Shalala to an ASA “town meeting,” just as Pres. Clinton was signing draconian “welfare reform” legislation, “see social injustice wherever they turn?” In 1945, in a Jim Crow USA, did Parsonian functionalists offer us “objective social science” when they interpreted social stratification as a device to insure that society selects its most talented and best-trained people as leaders? One of Marxism’s contributions to sociology is the insight that all social commentary has political implications. Joe Feagin should be commended for organizing an annual meeting at which all varieties of social commentary could be heard. The New York Times, which refused to print a single reply to Goodman’s snide slurs, clearly disapproved.

The New York Times and R. Tomasson are upset that the ASA has allegedly adopted a socially “ameliorative” stance. Would that it were true! In fact, the ASA has worked closely with a Clinton Administration whose socially regressive policies have put almost a million more people in prison, have driven five million from welfare, and have killed over a million civilians in Iraq. Yet ASA rules make it difficult for ASA members to broaden the orientation of their flagship journal, much less to get their discipline to articulate sociological criticisms of such government policies. It is thus not enough to defend our discipline against racist criticisms from the likes of cranky conservatives such as Goodman and R. Tomasson. We must also uproot the racist ideologies and practices that remain pervasive throughout our discipline under a cover of liberalism and progressivism.

Steven J. Rosenthal, Hampton University

The Dangerous Theory of “You Have to Be One”

Rosalyn Benjamin Darling should not feel obligated to justify her teaching and writing against the wildly unscholarly charge that disability studies in a subject for disabled people, and that attempts to work in this area by not-disabled people are doomed to failure.

This you-have-to-be-one-to-understand-one mentality would dismiss some of the best work in the social science—and the humanities. Ernest Burgess was a bachelor; Robert Winch was childless. Edwin Sutherland was, I believe, not indicted, much less convicted. Stephen Crane was not born until after the Civil War, but wrote quite convincingly in The Red Badge of Courage. Herman Melville was never either a sea captain or a white whale.

Enough already. You-have-to-be-one is a dangerous theory of scholarly work.

Raymond W. Mack, Northwestern University (Emeritus)

Protection of Human Subjects

As sociologists have long known, legislation may bear small relation to the incidence of actual events or their consequences. Not only may the incidence be unknown, but also unknown will be the real effects and true costs of the effort to regulate conduct deemed undesirable. This characterizes the present situation of the federally mandated system to protect the human subjects of research.

The complex protective system is justified by appeals to the practices of Nazi physicians within the concentration camps, and to the Tuskegee case where African Americans infected with syphilis were not treated. Biomedical practices continue to be the center point of the regulatory endeavor and to constitute its justification.

While historical evil continues to be the rationale for the regulatory effort, what now triggers the review process is a far different configuration: patients and families seeking miraculous cures, eager investigators seeking glory, research Institutions seeking reputation without hazard, and drug companies seeking profit. Lives are at stake. But as in all human enterprises, error, miscalculation and misjudgment are inevitable. To devise a regulatory system, the federal government recruited physicians, theologians, ethicists (philosophers). For justifying their rules in principle, the commissioners had recourse to utilitarianism and Kantianism, systems of moral philosophy that emerged in the 19th century. These abstracted philosophical systems reflect the atomism of modern society; neither give true weight to human relations and the ties of primary groups: family, kin, work, community. Worse, the regulatory commissions had neither interest nor financing to inquire about the incidence of problematic behaviors or the processes which might guide investigators or inhibit or control them. Nor were the commissioners impelled to take seriously the Bill of Rights. Constitutional protections were subverted by the neat device of forbidding behavior that had not undergone a priori approval, while using the immense power of federal funding as a club over research institutions. The punishment is imposed not specifically—upon the persons labeled as culprits—but upon the institutions as a whole. Within a research university, much is at stake, some investigations being so timely as to be irreplaceable. The club wielded by the government is clumsy, indiscriminate, and massive. In consequence, as in an authoritarian society, the populace can be recruited to patrol each other.

Meanwhile, the research institutions have found the system legally convenient, since it undercut lawsuits by the subjects of research who may have felt aggrieved.

In response to the regulatory system, sociologists and social researchers have discussed and argued, balancing the restrictions on gaining knowledge against the protections to their “subjects” (respondents, hosts). The discussions have been continuing for several decades and some contributions have been of high quality and focussed upon problematic cases, where the gathering of valuable information might be precluded although the hazards were small. There is no evidence that these discussions have had significant effect. Survey research has been slightly liberated, but on the whole social research remains confined because the faculty populace has been persuaded that without the controls, researchers would go astray, as federal funding would be imperiled. The recent review in Lingua Franca (September 2000) outlines—again—some of the unfortunate consequences.

Murray L. Wax, Professor Emeritus

Matilda White Riley Returns to Maine

Matilda White Riley, NIH Scientist Emeritus and founder of the National Institute on Aging’s Behavioral and Social Research Program, is returning to her home in Maine. Riley, 89 will become Research Professor in Sociology (honorary) at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where she was teaching prior to joining NIA in 1979. “The National Institutes of Health deeply appreciates the contribution that Dr. Riley has made during her tenure at the National Institute on Aging,” said Ruth Kirschstein, acting director of NIH. “She is a scientist of courage and vision and sill be greatly missed. Women entering the fields of sociology and aging have fewer professional barriers to surmount, in part, because of her pioneering.”

Dr. Robert Butler, NIA’s founding Director, recruited her to set up and direct a program in the social and behavioral aspects of age and aging. Riley served as Associate Director of NIA for Behavioral and Social Research from 1979-1991 and Senior Social Scientist at NIA from 1991-1997. She was honored in 1998 with the title of Scientist Emeritus at the National Institutes of Health (NIA).