Sociology isn’t a real academic subject

It’s just Woke Studies. DeSantis did well to get it de-emphasised in Florida colleges

On January 26 the Board of Governors of Florida’s public universities voted to stop offering sociology as a core course. Students will still be able to study the subject, or even major in it. But the Board removed sociology as one of the introductory courses from which students must choose in order to satisfy core requirements. The decision followed a vote the previous week by the State Board of Education to do the same at the state’s 28 state colleges. Sociology will be replaced by an introductory course on US history prior to 1877. 
Unsurprisingly, the decisions were denounced by education “experts” in and out of the field. The president of the state teachers’ union charged that both votes exemplified “a state that does not want to listen to its communities or experts.” And the American Sociological Association issued a statement of “outrage.” In response, however, the Board called the replacement an “opportunity to take a factual history course” about “the forces that shaped America.” It stressed that the course “teaches students a historically accurate account of America’s founding, the horrors of slavery, the resulting Civil War, and the Reconstruction era.”
The Board’s decision was sound, and the objections to it unpersuasive. To understand why, one should recall the origins of sociology as a discipline. It was invented by the utopian French theorist Auguste Comte early in the 19th century. For Comte the term denoted the enterprise of transforming society under the rule of “scientists.” Over time, the discipline departed from Comte’s specific hopes, but retained its open-ended character as a field in which “intellectuals” could pursue projects of social transformation.
On occasion, members of sociology departments were individuals of great accomplishment (notably, in America, Harvard’s William Graham Sumner, who in the late 19th century coined the phrase “the forgotten man,” to refer to the individual taxpayer who was victimized when parties “A” and “B” decided how government should introduce policies of social improvement at his expense. There were prominent Continental sociologists including Max Weber and Emile Durkheim who were men of broad learning and who offered original, if flawed, analyses of social problems. 
In the United States, however, sociology decayed early in the twentieth century into a field dominated by two aspects:  gossipy but hardly scientific studies of social trends (such as the mass media, or people’s sexual habits), or programs of outright political propaganda, almost always from the Left (particularly Marxist ones). During the Progressive era, sociologists were among the leading advocates of eugenics. It also became the least demanding of all college majors in the social sciences, as I have observed from a lifetime spent in academia. 
The root defect of sociology lies in its absence of a distinct object of study – because there is no such thing as “society” in general. Before sociology’s invention, the elements of social life and its variations were amply analyzed by political philosophers, from Aristotle in antiquity to Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Nietzsche in modern times. Although some 18th-century British philosophers spoke of “civil society,” reflecting the modern, liberal endeavor to limit the scope of government, they did not try to make the study of “society” a discipline unto itself. And even economics, when it emerged as a distinct science in the 18th century, was originally called “political economy,” the counterpart to the management of the “oikos” (household) that Aristotle discusses in Politics Book I. 
Nowadays, important social phenomena are still covered by scholars in political science and history. While these subjects, too, have suffered from leftist bias, the ability of their instructors to focus on trivia or political propagandizing is partly limited by the need to cover some basic factual knowledge – the major events of world and American history; the structure of political institutions; developments in international relations. By contrast, there is no such identifiable core to sociology, other than (sometimes) studying the writings of its practitioners over the past two centuries. To a large extent, sociology is whatever you feel like making it. 
One last-ditch objection that was made to the Florida governors’ decision came from state representative Anna Eskamani, who had taken the introductory course in it and reported that her sister majored in the field. According to Eskamani, “the skills you learn in sociology are transferable to any field that you go into,” she said. “You have a better understanding of just how humans work, understanding of conflict resolution.” Eskamani cited the “huge demand for social work and social work professionals,” into which many sociology majors go.
But 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 courses are professional social activists, uniformly of a leftist bent. That is hardly what reasonable citizens should regard as the core of a liberal education, least of all a publicly financed one. 
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis merits applause for initiating a program of reform in higher education that other states would do well to emulate.
David Lewis Schaefer is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross