“Diversity” is a common academic buzz word. In the latest Pope Center for Higher Education Policy commentary, sociologist James D. Wright explores the need for more diversity in his own field.
In my discipline, sociology, “diversity” can refer to almost anything other than white males, and may even include white males if they can lay claim to some form of victim status (e.g., are LGBT, “differently abled,” vegan, or depart from the mainstream in some other identifiable way).
Significantly, however, “diversity” does not seem to include political diversity.
Sociology departments would actively recruit an LGBT candidate for an opening, with something close to 100 percent consensus that this would fill a departmental need. But actively recruit a Republican, a conservative, or a born-again Christian Fundamentalist? Not a chance.
A proposal to do so would be laughed out the door because, for the most part, sociologists have decided that such people have no ideas worth serious consideration.
It comes as no surprise that most sociologists (indeed, most social scientists) are well left of center in their political thinking. Certainly, I am. Indeed, the political center of gravity in the discipline is now found somewhere in the ideological space between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and stretches out to the left as far as Karl Marx.
Indeed, Marx is still taught in graduate theory courses as a classical social theorist, but Herbert Spencer or William Graham Sumner or E.A. Ross and other critics of state power are largely forgotten. These days, students have never even heard of Roberto Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy because it denies the very possibility of grass roots, democratic, progressive social movements.
