Preface to the Public Version of the Report
The following report is a slightly updated version of the internal report on sociology I submitted as part of the 17c起草视频-WashU Commission on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.1 The bulk of the research for this report was compiled between September 2025 and February 2026. Following submission of the general report in April, I invited several trusted colleagues to read and provide feedback on my internal report. I have also lightly updated my report with additional information that has been published since submitting my original internal report in February.
The commission was charged with investigating the state of scholarly standards across our respective fields. I was charged with studying sociology. My research question was: To what extent, and in what ways, are political considerations affecting the production and reception of sociological research? This question requires identifying to what extent and in what ways sociology as a field is politicized, what evidence we have that the resulting research is politicized, and the apparent causal effect linking the two. Beyond those points, my report does not provide a larger account of the cause for the current state of the field (or academia), nor does it provide policy recommendations for improvement. Those questions are beyond the scope of the commission. This report is only intended to provide a state of the field based on available data.
1 Funding and Conflict of Interest Statement. I received financial compensation for serving on the Commission on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences. My compensation was fixed in advance and was not conditioned on the report鈥檚 findings, conclusions, or recommendations. I retained responsibility for the research, analysis, and conclusions presented in my initial internal field-specific report, the coauthored general report, and this public version of my field-specific report. I revised and published this version of my report after my contractual work for the commission had ended; it was my own decision to revise and publicly release my findings. I am grateful to 17c起草视频 and WashU for publishing it on their website alongside the general report.
In addition, I have previously published work expressing concerns about the relationship between activism and scholarship in my own specialty area of interdisciplinary punishment studies. Readers should therefore be aware that I entered this project with preexisting views on these issues, although the analyses and conclusions presented here are based on the evidence reviewed in this report
Executive Summary of Findings
Sociology, or the systematic study of society, is a vitally important field. However, the field has been compromised, to varying degrees, by the ongoing institutionalization (semi-permanent embedding)聽of a commitment to political goals that override the search for knowledge. By 鈥渃ompromised,鈥� I mean these institutionalized political commitments now influence the field鈥檚 norms, priorities, and evaluation of scholarship.
Sociology contains, and has always contained, a broad range of views about the discipline鈥檚 purpose and about the relationship between scholarship and politics. While it appears that many researchers across the field continue to uphold strong research practices and produce high-quality research, field-level norms鈥攅specially those visible in the field鈥檚 professional associations (such as the American Sociological Association or ASA), broad survey data, and even in a growing portion of published research (including in the field鈥檚 top journals)鈥攄o not, especially when those practices or research are seen to conflict with political goals, values, and assumptions.
This report documents three major ways in which political commitments within the field have compromised research production and reception:
- There is deep contestation over the discipline鈥檚 mission as a knowledge-generating endeavor, with a sizable plurality who believe encouraging political change is fundamental to the discipline
- The coverage of relevant topics and research questions is uneven, with a wealth of research on inequality, power, and identity, but leaving other topics, questions, and theories underexplored
- There are both hidden (and thus poorly measured) and high-profile (and plausibly rare) cases of social sanctioning and censorship of scholars exploring taboo topics, theories, and research questions or whose findings are politically unpopular (given the political preferences that dominate in the field)
Each of these trends is to some degree long-standing. However, they have become more significant and visible in recent years.
It is important to emphasize that evidence for these themes appears across different types of data and with varying degrees of strength (see Table 1). The most superficial, easily visible metrics tend to show the strongest evidence of scholars鈥� politicization compromising the scholarly project, while we lack systematic data on less superficial, less visible metrics. As the superficial metrics are highly visible, however, they can convey a stronger impression of the field as overly politicized, hiding some of its important heterogeneity from external observers and from members of the field.2
Most importantly, evidence for some norms that prioritize political commitments is stronger than evidence for their downstream effects on the rigor of research produced, which (to my knowledge) has not been systematically analyzed.
| Theme | Types of Evidence |
|---|---|
| The growing role of activism- or advocacy-oriented sociology, including one version of 鈥減ublic sociology,鈥� at times displacing scientific or 鈥減rofessional sociology.鈥� | ASA developments, surveys, published sociological research |
| The field is narrowing its focus on topics to prioritize inequality studies (鈥渕onocropping鈥�) and suffers from blind spots and taboos. | Published sociological research and documented reception thereof (case studies), surveys, ASA section membership data |
| The field has witnessed specific, high-profile cases of censorship of and hostility toward published research and its authors. | Published sociological research and documented reception thereof (case studies) |
| Table 1: Summary of Key Findings and Associated Evidence | |
Finally, it is important to note that this report evaluates sociology according to criteria and assumptions about scholarship that are themselves contested within the discipline. The commission operated with the epistemological assumption that it is possible, however imperfectly, to pursue reasonably trustworthy knowledge through careful, systematic inquiry and the normative assumption that academics should primarily evaluate scholarship according to its contribution to knowledge, not its social or political consequences. Undoubtedly, scholars operating with different assumptions will come to different conclusions about the field.
2 Here, I am distinguishing between two understandings of norms: norms derived from actual behavior and norms based on what members of the field perceive the norms to be. The two are not necessarily the same, but they can influence one another..