Ashley Rubin
Subject: How Politics Undermines Scholarship
Bio: Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Author of The Vanderbilt and WashU Report: The Status of Scholarly Standards in Sociology
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is How Politics Undermines Scholarship.
Our speaker is Ashley Rubin, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of the Vanderbilt and WashU Report The Status of Scholarly Standards in Sociology.
I want to find out how the politicization of sociology has impacted what topics can be researched and what content can be taught.
Ashley, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Ashley Rubin:
I’m Ashley Rubin. I’m a sociologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I was one of the 10 members of the Vanderbilt - WashU Commission hired to investigate the scholarly standards of the humanities. I was charged with writing the sociology report.
My findings were that the field is incredibly heterogeneous, so it’s hard to make generalizable statements. I was specifically looking at the role of political considerations shaping the production of research. I found that while good research is produced, we do see political considerations coming into play.
I found that there is deep and long-standing contestation over the mission of the field and ideas about scholarly standards. I found significant blind spots in what we study, including the topics but also the theories that we use, making us less than the systematic study of society. There were both hidden and high-profile episodes of social control of scholarly production based on political considerations. If scholars produce certain work that was not politically kosher, that could lead to backlash.
The findings of my report surprised me. I expected that there were going to be pockets of the field that were politicized and compromising their research standards, and I thought it was mostly going to be coming from marginal scholars. I thought that the top programs, the top journals, were mostly going to be safe. That wasn’t what I found.
The major professional association for my field, the American Sociological Association, its commitment to activism that’s been on display for longer than I realized, going back to statements about the Iraq War and presidential addresses from the early 2000s. We’d seen activism using sociology to promote social or political change happening for a lot longer.
I found that the top journal, the American Journal of Sociology, is not immune to these pressures. We see political drift in the articles from the early 2000s, which is when I started my research sample.
Horowitz et al in 2017 had done a fieldwide survey. The responses were particularly surprising to me, including what’s acceptable behavior conducting and analyzing research and the lack of data on necessary questions.
Larry Bernstein:
What are typical topics that sociology historically covered, and how has it drifted since 2000?
Ashley Rubin:
Sociology is a broad field. We study everything. I tell students, sociology is a great major because you don’t have to decide ahead of time what you’re going to study. You want to study video games, crime, families and poverty, you can do it all.
Some classics would be things like social order, how does society cohere and keep going. We used to look a lot at norms and what’s considered deviant, and we don’t really study that anymore. Now we study crime and punishment, but we don’t study softer forms of deviance.
Right now, sociology studies inequality, especially racial, gendered, and class inequality, looking at every aspect of life from health, education, jobs to happiness.
Larry Bernstein:
Sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s covered a broad range of topics. For example, Erving Goffman studied asylums, the interactions of everyday life, rituals, and how we speak to each other, and he wrote in a way the public could read. How did sociology change its focus to inequality, and does that relate to your thesis that the field has become more political?
Ashley Rubin:
I’m not sure anybody made the decision so much as at some point it became known that if you want to speak to other sociologists is to talk about inequality.
I study prisons. When I was in grad school, it was clear that if you wanted to write an article and get it in the top journal about criminal justice, it always had to start the same way. Here’s mass incarceration. It has a consequence for poverty, life outcomes, stratification in jobs, democracy, the economy, families and neighbors of incarcerated people.
Then you pivot yourself to the thing that you’re actually interested in related to criminal justice. Even if the topic of my paper is on something adjacent to inequality, I still wrap it around inequality. At the micro level, that’s the decision that we’re making as scholars — I want to get the study published.
Another way this decision comes up is the market for academic jobs. There are usually jobs available for people who want to study inequality. If you can frame yourself as looking at inequality, then you’re more likely to get the job. There are incentives to push you in that direction. But I don’t think there was ever a group-wide discussion of, instead of being the study of society, we’re the study of inequality. It’s just known that you study inequality.
Larry Bernstein:
One of my favorite television programs is The Wire that was debuted in 2002 about the time when you noticed the drift in sociology away from interpreting society to its focus on inequality and its politicization. Previously, prison scholars could have asked varied questions like what goes on in a prison yard? What is it like to be a guard, and does he bring his work home with him? Does the public seek punishment or a reduction in recidivism? Why has the study of criminal justice changed from those topics to the narrow question about inequality?
Ashley Rubin:
We can distinguish structural factors like incentives — what’s the easiest way to get a publication? How are you going to get a job?
Historically, sociology was interested in the downtrodden and vulnerable, what does the world look like from their vantage point and how do we help these groups? Whom we decide is the downtrodden is also a choice. There are also cultural shifts.
How do people navigate the yard? What are the norms of behavior? That was a fascinating question that scholars were looking at in the 1930s through the 1960s, and we’ve moved away, we’re not really interested in those questions.
People feel uncomfortable. It’s considered gross because norms and deviance go hand in hand. Think back to the 1950s and what was considered deviant behavior — anything that’s not straight, white, Christian, normative approach to life gets considered deviant. If that’s the case, then deviant studies are illegitimate because it replicates the norms of a dominant society. The older questions became stigmatized because they’re associated with traditional values.
I would add another possibility, which is inequality is so clearly related to policy recommendations. Some people want to have relevance to the broader world. There’s a lot of funding for those sorts of questions, whereas there’s less funding for the Goffman-esque questions of how do people make sense of the world and how do they navigate it? It’s harder to make policy recommendations based on a Goffman-esque study.
Larry Bernstein:
In preparation for today’s discussion, I started reading a book by Christian Smith called The Sacred Project of American Sociology. He’s going to be on the podcast later in the year. Here is a quote from his book.
“American sociology’s sacred project is a secular salvation story developed out of …reformist progressivism … sexual liberation, civil rights, and feminism.”
“American sociologists felt compelled to fill in the sacred void left in Christianity and Judaism’s absence by … proselytizing the world with a secular salvation gospel of its own making.”
“Sociology’s project is ultimately spiritual and sacred and not simply political or ideological.”
I think Christian Smith is onto something. There is a religious aspect to the sociology project -- feminism, civil rights, and gender that needs to be researched and taught.
Ashley Rubin:
I really like the argument that he makes in the book. I wish the evidence was more systematic, but I think he’s onto something. A specific type of politics has taken on religious fervor that helps us to understand the outrage people feel when it comes to political disagreements and how people can get to this point where they can exile people.
He identifies a rotating crop of political concerns that are especially dominant. If you don’t tout the party line, that’s seen as problematic. It’s a lot harder to get your research published, to get tenure and promotion and get hired to begin with.
Larry Bernstein:
Jon Shields spoke on my podcast. Many scholars have shown that sociology departments have no conservatives on staff and barely anyone from the center-left.
Sociologists say that’s not important because they are neutral teachers who are happy to teach any idea. But Shields shows from the syllabi that one of the most common texts that is taught is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and the only criticism that sociology faculty assign comes from someone even further to her left.
What do you make of Shields’s work as an indication of the trouble that you’re reporting?
Ashley Rubin:
Jon Shields is interested in teaching and I’m interested in research, but what he finds maps on to my own experience. I have colleagues across the country who moved to a red state specifically because they thought they could do the most good because they could change the most minds there.
Our job is not to change students’ minds — it’s not our job to make their opinions match our opinions. Critical thinking skills, sure. Exposing them to facts that they might not have been exposed to, sure. But we’re not supposed to do it in a partisan way. We’re not supposed to make fun of their family members who voted for Trump because we don’t like him.
Shields is looking at what texts are assigned, but it’s also what do you say in the classroom about that text. I can dismiss it and say, this isn’t very good, but at least you’re reading it — but even that’s not good teaching.
Larry Bernstein:
Your report was commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University. What were they trying to accomplish?
Ashley Rubin:
They’re trying to support faculty-led academic reform.
Larry Bernstein:
Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, has been on the podcast twice here and here, and he is encouraging institutional neutrality. He argues that the university itself shouldn’t take positions on issues like abortion or Gaza. It is the faculty’s job to do first-class research with no topic taboo. Students should feel free to argue with either side without fear of judgment. Diermeier says most American universities fail that test.
Ashley Rubin:
These are separate but related efforts. Are the critics right that we’re letting politics seep into our research compromising it? We find it happening in some spaces.
We can’t say for individual departments at any university how bad that problem is, but at the field level, we’re seeing evidence of politicization compromising the research and its standards.
The university should not be a political space other than the idea that we should be able to have free speech and open discussion. We can’t have those conversations if we insist that you must have this view on abortion, Gaza or the current president to be part of this conversation, and if you disagree with me I’m going to chase you out of the classroom. That can’t happen.
Larry Bernstein:
When your report came out, there was severe backlash from your sociology community. This podcast is meant to be provocative, so let’s take it head on. What were the chief criticisms you received?
Ashley Rubin:
There’s been a mix of personal, procedural, and substantive critiques. A lot of people misunderstood what I found. I start off the report by saying that sociology has been compromised, and people took that to mean, despite all of my caveats, that the field is completely gone, that there’s no good research, or alternatively that the field is just too liberal and that’s the problem.
I did not talk about the 50:1 liberal to Republican or in some cases no Republicans on the faculty. It’s well known, but that wasn’t what I was trying to do. I’m trying to figure out, within our research field, what are the pressures and how is that playing out? What are the norms that people believe in?
I think people read it as sociology is just too liberal and that’s the problem. And it’s no, if people are saying the purpose of research is to make a very specific version of social change, that’s a problem. Our research is supposed to be about answering questions and following the data wherever it goes.
If we say, I’m doing my research because I want to make sure that this policy passes to help poor people, that’s problematic even for the poor people, because if I’m committed to this policy, but the evidence says that the policy is not good, I’m not helping the poor people.
It doesn’t matter, even if it turns out that 90% of the research in sociology is good. If I can’t trust that research to be neutral or to be rigorous, I can’t trust any of that research. If I’m a policymaker reading this research because I want to know what the top sociologists say about this policy about reducing poverty, but I don’t know which of these articles I can trust, that’s a problem.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s change topics to Sociology’s professional organizations. To show the trend in its topics, you listed the annual presidential addresses of the American Sociological Association. These are the field’s leading scholars. You found that for 20 years those speeches have been very political in their orientation.
Ashley Rubin:
The presidential addresses I collected, going back to 2000, and yeah, I was surprised. There’s a famous presidential address from 2004 by Michael Burawoy, where he calls for public sociology, which is in the activist direction of how we promote social change.
His article is tame by today’s standards. It’s still surprising that somebody would say we’re going to use this scientific discipline for essentially political purposes and isn’t it great that most of us are to the left of the public. I knew about that one, but I thought it was an outlier.
When I look at the other reports, you can imagine what it would be like to be a conservative or moderate in the association and go to these presidential addresses year after year. Is there anything there for you? It was mostly topics about inequality, how social structure policies screw people over, especially women, people of color and poor people.
Larry Bernstein:
By contrast, Erving Goffman was president of the American Sociological Association. His 1982 presidential address was titled “The Interaction Order.” It was about speech and communication in ordinary life. That’s where sociology was 44 years ago.
Ashley Rubin:
There are two things that you can identify as different. One is the shift from generalizable topics that matter for everybody, fundamental human experience topics, to more identitarian topics, things that are specific to certain groups. It narrows our focus to certain populations rather than something that should be relevant and experienced by everybody.
The other is the more moralizing frame. In terms of speech mechanics, most people don’t have a stance on what’s the morally right way to do that, whereas a lot of the topics that we’re looking at now tend to be things that political parties do have stances on, and we end up seeing those political stances come through in the addresses themselves.
Larry Bernstein:
Erving Goffman died of stomach cancer in 2002 when he was the President of the American Sociological Association, leaving an infant daughter, Alice, who grew up to become a sociologist.
Ashley, in your report you did a case study on Alice Goffman and the sociology field’s response to her provocative book On the Run which was about young black men running from the law because of outstanding arrest warrants.
Alice went to UPenn as an undergraduate where she did fieldwork, living in a poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. After receiving her PhD at Princeton, she published her book with much fanfare and high sales. She joined the University of Wisconsin on a tenure track. Tell us about Alice Goffman and how her story relates to your thesis.
Ashley Rubin:
This was an interesting case. She gave a TED talk, got an article published in our top journal, had this book come out, got a job at one of the top sociology departments in the country. She seemed set.
Perhaps because of the fame, she was the subject of intense scrutiny. There was some methodological misconduct that was alleged. The part of the conversation that I was especially interested in was the pushback she got for being a white woman studying a Black community. Her subjects were young men who had outstanding warrants in Philly.
Commentators thought that she lacked the right demographic features to do this. She is an upper-middle-class, highly educated, white woman going into this community of underprivileged, undereducated, low-resource people of color, and that it was unseemly for her to do that.
People also pushed back that she was revealing the secrets of men on the run, which is naive because it assumes that police officers don’t already know about these things.
Larry Bernstein:
She leaves the University of Wisconsin to take a visiting professorship at Pomona College in California, and she is under assault even before she arrives.
Ashley Rubin:
There’s an open letter from the students at Pomona criticizing her book and her appointment and the fact that she as a white woman was being interviewed for this job and that the job wasn’t going to a woman of color. It was surprising for people to say in writing. That was part of the ordeal. She ultimately left academia and public life.
Larry Bernstein:
Here you have a rising star whose work sits somewhere between left of center and progressive. She is a white woman getting a lot of publicity. The idea is that African American studies can only be done by African Americans, and not by a white Jewish girl from Philly who cares deeply about this issue.
Ashley Rubin:
It was a crazy case. She did a TED talk on the importance of helping people in these communities. This was very progressive, but that wasn’t good enough. That was really striking.
The Goffman example was one of the things I was criticized for including. I identified the methodological and the legal problems. This was about positionality.
Larry Bernstein:
Your point was that the treatment Alice Goffman received at Pomona was beyond the pale because it was about intersectionality of sociology professionals and not about the content of her work. How did the field’s silence to her attacks strike you when it happened?
Ashley Rubin:
At the time I was a junior professor, that terrified me — the idea that you would get students essentially dogpile on you and then no one from the field to say this isn’t appropriate. We shouldn’t rely on people’s demographics to decide whether they have the right to do research. The idea that you just don’t have the right to do it strikes me as very illiberal, and we didn’t have that discussion.
Larry Bernstein:
The most recent election for President of the American Sociological Association happened concurrently with a fight over whether the organization should take a stand on Justice for Palestine. How did Gaza become central to the sociology project?
Ashley Rubin:
This is part of an ongoing trend in sociology and in the professional association to make public statements about political issues. This goes back to 2024, where the membership voted to make a statement to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza. That was controversial and it lost several members. About two years later, the Sociologists for Palestine put on the next ballot a policy to exclude Israeli academics from participating in the ASA.
The presidential election was eagerly anticipated because we had what became a reform candidate, Melissa Wilde. She talked to sociologists, and much to her surprise, people were tired of politics and wanted to move back to conventional sociology. The theme for the annual meeting under her reign, if she were elected, was going to be theory and methods, something we can all get behind. She had publicly said that she supported to not exclude Israeli academics.
In the end, the other candidate won. For me, this was interesting because this is the first time a woman has lost to a white man in 10 or 15 years. In recent history, if a woman ran against a man, it’s going to be the woman. If a person of color runs against a white person, it’s going to be the person of color.
Larry Bernstein:
So, intersectionality determines leadership appointments in sociology organizations.
Ashley Rubin:
Yes, exactly. I thought she was going to win simply because she was a white woman running against a white man, and that didn’t happen. This is an especial rebuke for her views, either as a reform candidate or as somebody who is against the Palestine petition.
Larry Bernstein:
Yossi Sheffi spoke on my podcast a few weeks ago. He is an MIT professor of Israeli descent and a top expert in supply chain management. He did an ethnographic study showing how badly Jews were treated at MIT with no support from senior leadership. Israeli scholars found it impossible to get visiting positions at MIT.
Are you telling me that the same anti-Semitic, anti-Israel behavior now runs nationally through sociology’s professional organizations. How bad is it?
Ashley Rubin:
It almost sounds conspiratorial to say this, but there’s this group called Sociologists for Palestine, and they’re part of this much larger interdisciplinary group. This group comes up with letters, statements, ballots, and then they disseminate them through different professional associations.
Multiple organizations have passed the effort that failed in sociology. There is an organized effort to exclude Israeli scholars, to penalize them to boycott them. It’s terrifying because this seems very antithetical to academic freedom. The fact that this is not just tolerated, but it’s being platformed and encouraged is not good.
Larry Bernstein:
This goes to the core of your report’s thesis. Sociology has moved away from theory and methods toward political topics like Gaza that have nothing to do with sociology. How did this happen, and how widespread is it?
Ashley Rubin:
What we’re seeing is what I call politicization, imposing politics where they don’t belong. We’re seeing this in terms of how we evaluate our methods, our theories, our findings, what we’re willing to publish, how we review each other’s research at the level of publication or hiring for tenure and promotion committees. This is supposed to be fundamental that we leave our politics at the door. They might shape what we want to study, what theories we’re interested in, but they’re not supposed to corrupt the research process or how we evaluate other people’s research.
Larry Bernstein:
Ashley, I end each episode on a note of optimism. How is your report going to help?
Ashley Rubin:
We have a problem in academia, and the optimistic take is we’re talking about it, investigating it, trying to learn more about it, so we can fix it. We’re seeing sociology narrow from this broad, beautiful discipline that studies all social life to only studying narrow snippets, especially inequality. We’re seeing a refusal to look at certain theories or findings, and when people do study these things, we’re seeing them get backlash at the level of tenure and promotion. This is making it hard to do good systematic analyses of society.
The field has serious problems, and we have work to do.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Ashley for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was How High-Stakes Chinese College Exams Can Change Your Life.
Our speaker was Stanford Economics Professor Hongbin Li who discussed his new book The Highest Exam: How Gaokao Shapes China.
He explained why this high-stakes exam is critical for the Chinese in their college admission process as well as getting a job. Hongbin explained why this exam is believed to be the one thing in Chinese society that cannot be corrupted.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, How High-Stakes Chinese College Exams Can Change Your Life, here.
