So, I am in the middle of my second Sociology class (the first one I dropped out of due to burning out mid-semester), and it occurs to me that both professors have been liberal to varying degrees (the current one far more than the first), and I was wondering if anybody knows of any sociology profs who tend to swing more in the other direction, ie: being more pro-consumerism or pro-coproration, and less about the downtrodden everyman or abused factory worker or whatever.
Don’t get me wrong, I swing somewhat to the left myself, but when I get a thoughts like “Are there right-wing sociology professors?” and “What would a female tentacle monster look like?”, it’s hard to get the idea out of my head until I voice it.
So, Dopers, any right-wing sociology profs that you know of?
I had one in school, but she was also a tentacled monster, so may not be representative of the academic population as a whole.
John Shelton Reed was a sociology professor at a North Carolina University, and wrote a book called Whistling Dixie, a compliation of columns he’d written for various Southern magazines. He was generally libertarian, but tends to come across as very conservative.
I find nearly all Sociology professors to be deceptively conservative.
Yeah, they talk about stratification and class as the structural reasons why people are in the situations they are in, as opposed to meritocracy (i.e., “they deserve it” / “self-made success”, etc).
But most of them also believe stratification of power is inevitable, that the structures that they say are responsible for inegalitarian outcomes are necessary structures, and, in particular, that if by revolution or chance the individual people occupying the top of the socio-economic status pyramid were to all either abandon their assets or keel over and die along with all living descendants, all you’d see would be an influx of new people into those same stratified positions.
They teach about social conflict, oppression, and how various social institutions maintain social inequalities as part and parcel of maintaining social order, and there’s certainly a critical component, at least in attitude.
But the content of the theories that they teach is fundamentally conservative: power inequity is deeply entrenched, isn’t going away, has massive roots in the very foundations of our social structure, is reinforced at every turn by every institution we’ve got, and so on.
And there’s no contrasting vision for how any of it could be different.