regarding the purported glory days of public sociology

For whatever reason, after a couple different exchanges with the proprietors in which we believed the problem to be fixed, I am still not able to comment at Orgtheory (boys, eventually I'll start to take this personally). Fabio has a post about a speech that Orlando Patterson gave on the occasion of Malcolm Gladwell receiving the ASA award for "Excellence in Reporting of Social Issues." Says Fabio:

Patterson noted that until the 1970s or so, you had quite a few sociologists who captured the public’s imagination such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills. After that time, prominent sociologists decreased in the public imagination.

Fabio raises several hypotheses for why you might believe Patterson or not. On the negative side, I would like to raise another, which is just that ideas of the existence of "quite a few sociologists who captured the public's imagination" then as opposed to now is wildly overblown. Evidence? If Fabio had just included blanks instead of the names of Riesman and Mills, experienced sociologists would have guessed exactly which two names to fill in. If there was such a public sociology efflorescence back then, why wouldn't there be a larger pool of salient examples? (Especially since The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950 and The Power Elite in 1956, and apparently Patterson was talking about a 20-30 year period.)

Not even to mention that Tuesdays with Morrie probably outsold The Power Elite and The Lonely Crowd combined. Why doesn't sociology do more with its Tuesdays with Morrie legacy. I say, Every Day With Morrie!*

BTW, Dan has written an enthusiastic post about Gladwell's acceptance of the award. Meanwhile, I seem to remember being on a panel at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings this spring in which another panelist, a sociologist of some prominence, alleged with considerable irritation that Gladwell interviewed the sociologist Duncan Watts for three days for the Tipping Point and then wildly undercredited his contribution in the book.

* OK, so I don't actually say that. However, I do have a friend who has talked about getting an EDWM tattoo.

Update: Thanks to Brayden, the commenting problem appears resolved.

reminder: asa blogger extravaganza

The ASA NYC blogger get-together, a.k.a. YearlyRojas, is Saturday at 6PM, with the present plan to proceed from the Hilton Lobby. I have misgivings about this plan, as I don't quite get how people who are a little later are going to figure out where we are, but I am passive-aggressive in these misgivings, choosing just to state them publicly rather than act toward any kind of alternative. Anyway, you're invited. You? You. Fabio is offering to buy a drink to people who have pre-ordered his book. Dan is offering to buy a drink to anyone who can name a Kiss song that is not on his iPod. I am offering to thank anyone who pre-orders my drinks.

Also, Tuesday 8:30 am, at an as yet undisclosed location in the Hilton, "Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology," including Hargittai, Healy, Uggen, Freese, and two people I don't know. Somebody should bring bagels.

who's got the funk?

Answer: Dan Myers. Unfortunately, it's a blog funk. He was able to overcome the splayer-haters who didn't appreciate his stylish way of crushing a can, but now he's been laid low by some combination of a bothersome commenter and the cyclical character of blogthusiasm. Keep the faith, Dan!

Meanwhile, I cannot tell if Kieran is serious about having his own secret blog or not. I won't even speculate about what the content of it might be. He should leave clues for its location like Masquerade, which I accidentally purchased today using my Harvard purchasing card and now have to fill out a form and write a check to reimburse them for it.

My own solution to blog malaise, which has been an open secret for some time now but perhaps you are one of the people not in the know, has been to keep a pseudonymous second blog under the name "Gwen." Part of my gimmick with "Gwen" is that every time I write a post having to do with the Animals and Society ASA section on this blog, I have her adopt another pet on her blog.

with or without you

Okay, so keep in mind that the NRC ranking survey I posted about a few days ago not only doesn't allow you to include faculty size as a criterion for department quality, but also presumably the measures of faculty quality used will be based on averages. Averages are only fair, right? Otherwise, small departments would be at a disadvantage, and that's unfair because, well, it's, well, um, unfair.

The trouble with averages in a measure of department quality is simple: to use averages is to imply that half the members of a department do not merely contribute less to the quality of a department than their more productive/cited/grants-getting colleagues, but that they actively harm it. Take any department, fire the lesser half according to whatever the quality measure is, and you've instantly created a better department. You can even repeat the step and create an still better department, until you have a one-faculty member graduate program.*

I'm not sure how many faculty members are actively bad for the programs that employ them, in the sense that the program would better if they immediately disappeared and took their hiring line with them.** I feel confident, though, in my sense that this number is quite a bit less than half at most places. If you are in academia, think about your own department, and don't just single out the worst person, but think of somebody you think would probably be a little below the dividing line. Do you really think your department would be better if that person just vanished? They really hurt more than they help? Maybe so: but, if that's really true for half your department, I hope you aren't surprised by my response that your department must suck.

Average measures also imply that if you take a department and add to it by hiring everyone's structural equivalent, you haven't improved the department at all. Think graduate students are better off having four people in their specialty area rather than two? Average-based measures of quality imply no. In sociology, faculty size has always seemed to me especially an issue to attend to insofar as the discipline is sparsely populated even at the largest departments and many graduate students change their mind about the area they want to work in after they begin (or come in not knowing what they want to study). The smaller the department, the more likely a graduate student is to suffer from a change of interest, a falling out with their advisor, or their advisor leaving.

Not that I think faculty size should be the be-all-end-all, especially as one would expect it to be correlated with what Fabio calls programs of "benign neglect". I would rather program ratings try to measure benign neglect more directly, however. Anyway, if faculty size ends up having no weight or very little weight in the way NRC ultimately does the "objective" part of its rankings, that's just not credible.

* Half per se assumes either we are talking average in terms of the median or a measure that is symmetrically distributed. You know what I mean. My guess is there are ~40 sociologists who would be have the highest "faculty quality" of any department in the country if only they could get themselves into a department with no colleagues.

** Not that they left and someone else was rehired; there is a difference between someone being not the best use of a faculty line and being actively bad, and averages treat half the department as actively bad.

Addendum: I actually wrote this post a couple days ago, and in the interim Dan has written his own reaction to my earlier post. Incidentally, I suppose one could think it convenient that I have this strong opinion about faculty size while being a member of one of the largest sociology departments in the US. Maybe so. But it just seems intellectually galling to me that you'd have a rating system based on the idea that if there were two great small departments out there and you could somehow merge them, the result would be no better. It's one thing to say a whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and another to say the sum is no better than the average of its parts.

dan myers has 279 kiss songs on his iPod.

I was all ready to post something, but then I decided to check out some other blogs first. I promptly learned that Dan Myers has 279 Kiss songs on his iPod, more than twice as many as any artist other than the Beatles and Pink Floyd. My brain is now dominated by this fact. I can't even remember what I was going to post.

I know someone in sociology who once bought his girlfriend a scale for a present and now whenever I see him whatever else I think, "You bought your girlfriend a scale and presented it to her as a gift." Likewise, whenever I see Dan Myers, I will now think, "This man has 10,000 songs on his iPod, and still fully 2.79% of them are by Kiss." Not to draw any parallels between those two examples other than their being facts about people that, once learned by me, cannot be unlearned or even temporarily forgotten. 279 songs! By Kiss!

I had this roommate in college whose last name was spelled the same as mine but was not related and pronounced it so it rhymed with "crazy." His favorite bands were Kiss and the Beach Boys. I like two Beach Boys songs total, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows", and two Kiss songs total, "Detroit Rock City" and, um, "Detroit Rock City."* Once I put up a couple posters in our dorm with his name and phone number advertising for members for a band that would play Beach Boys covers while wearing Kiss makeup and dressing in superheroes Underoos. I remember it included the line "Must be able to gyrate, but do so only when the situation warrants and is tasteful." My recollection is that he was angry when he saw the poster, but then also sort of sad when it hadn't prompted any calls.

* "Detroit Rock City" is by Kiss, right?