Florida Tested Sociology. The ASA Failed.

This spring,  I argued in  RealClearEducation  that Florida had not killed sociology when its Board of Governors  struck the introductory course from the general education core . It had tested it.   The course survives as an elective, and the real question was whether the discipline would do what it asks of every institution it studies: look inward and reform. On June 2, the American Sociological Association  answered and failed .  The issue was never one introductory course. It was whether a discipline that has spent decades questioning claims of neutrality could still persuade the public that its authority rests on neutral expertise.  The ASA’s statement protests the removal as an effort to influence course content “through political means” and insists the course be taught by “professional disciplinary standards rather than political preference.” Read quickly, it sounds like a defense of scholarly independence. Read closely, it is a confession. Both phrases rest on a premise its own leaders have spent years disowning: that sociology has standards genuinely separable from politics.  I do not say this as an outsider. My mentors include some of the discipline’s giants—Seymour Martin Lipset, Theda Skocpol, William Julius Wilson, Robert Sampson, and Doug McAdam—hardly a roster of conservatives, but the mainstream of American sociology itself. My disagreement is a family quarrel, not an outsider’s attack. And because I have spent my career teaching and defending the field, the statement dispirits me: it is the defensive reflex I warned about in April, now dressed in the language of principle.  Consider the ASA’s recent annual meeting themes: “Feeling Race” in 2018, “Engaging Social Justice for a Better World” in 2019, “Emancipatory Sociology” in 2021, “Intersectional Solidarities” in 2024. This upcoming August—the same summer it accused Florida of politicizing curriculum—the association will gather in New York under the banner  “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.”  These are not stray slogans. The 2024  theme statement  defined sociology, without irony, as “an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles.” This is the field describing itself. An association that bills its purpose as disrupting the status quo cannot then tell a state board that curriculum is a neutral matter best left to experts. That authority has already been spent.  None of this means every sociologist is an activist, or that rigorous research has dried up; much of the field’s best work remains indispensable. The problem is narrower: the discipline’s public-facing institutions increasingly speak the language of advocacy while demanding to be treated as neutral arbiters.  Yet the discipline’s own canon supplies the standard those institutions can no longer invoke. Max Weber, a foundational sociologist, warned that the  lecture hall is not the prophet’s pulpit , that the teacher’s task is not to brand students with his own commitments. Value-neutrality is precisely the ideal a generation of its leadership has openly repudiated. You cannot retire a standard at your conference and then reach for it at the statehouse.  Sociology’s defining strength is reflexivity—studying how institutions produce their outcomes, how professions guard or squander legitimacy, how trust is earned and lost. Point that apparatus at the ASA itself: when a profession trades authority for advocacy, it forfeits the deference that lets it say  leave this to us.  Florida is a predictable move within a system the discipline helped build. The question was never “how dare they,” but “what did we do to make this both possible and popular?” The association could not bring itself to ask it.  Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said the field had become  “social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy,”  and called it “ideologically captured.” Sociologists will bristle, as I do at hearing the discipline I love described that way. But the statement issued in reply is the best evidence that he was onto something. A field confident in its rigor answers criticism with its work; a field that has confused inquiry with advocacy answers with a press release.  Sociology is not beyond saving, as I said in April. The elective seats remain to be filled, and nothing stops Florida’s sociologists from teaching the course so rigorously and openly that the board revises its judgment. That is the only argument that will move the people who hold power here.  The most sociological act available to the association is also the hardest: to turn its lens on itself as unsparingly as on everyone else. Instead, it met a challenge to its seriousness by reenacting the problem. Florida set a test, and this was the wrong answer. But the reckoning is not sociology’s alone. After years of confusing expertise with advocacy, one American institution after another now faces the same question: can it recover the trust that expertise once commanded? I really hope so. The post Florida Tested Sociology. The ASA Failed. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .