Sociologists are Scared to Study Asian-Americans

From Heterodox Academy, a podcast from a Professor of Sociology was studies Asian-Americans. That’s not a great career choice for an aspiring young sociologist, since that subject is a matter of intense embarrassment to the leftists in the profession. Some excerpts.

I’ve heard of debates about why sociology is so liberal and there’s some say it’s selectivity—liberals are the people interested in going into sociology…. My perception has been that within the field of sociology, the rewards for people who don’t conform to the conventional wisdom are slim, and I’ve known good sociologists doing good research who did not get tenure because their work didn’t fit into the paradigm very well.

I’ll be frank with you—I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough for the ASR [American Sociological Review]to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to Whites. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom, the methodological standards are raised. But when you argue that there’s discrimination against Asians, the methodological standards are relaxed.

A lot of courses don’t seriously talk about Asian Americans systematically so you’re not provided with evidence or consistent data to test this paradigm for Asians. For example, Erik Olin Wright, former president of the American Sociological Association, has an intro textbook “How America Really Works.” And in the whole chapter on race there’s not a single datum on Asian Americans. And that’s “How America Works” is the name. It’s not uncommon for these data to be deleted, and they’ll talk about this or that particular instance of racism…. They’ll talk about instances of discrimination but they won’t go over systematic statistics which suggest that Asians are actually less likely to be murdered than other groups.

The reason for this is rather obvious, and is bluntly stated by a commenter:

I live in a community that is plurality Asian. I have worked alongside Asians all of my life and have many Asian friends, including my business partner. In my experience, they get married, stay married, and have children in wedlock. The ones I know are excellent parents and grandparents. Their work ethic is off the wall. Asian-Americans I know endorse “bourgeois values” more strongly than nearly every other ethnic group. Their endorsement of bourgeois values also threatens those who call those values racist.

Asian-American success is proof that the Melting Pot works. The hard left can’t stand that.

Even the “heterodox” people at Heterodox Academy shy away from bluntly saying why this is: the contrast between the success of Asians and the failure of blacks is stunning. And if we leave aside a fringe who attribute this to black racial inferiority, we have to face the ugly truth that culture matters. The culture of the inner city ghetto, with the vast majority of kids born out of wedlock, and absurdly high crime rates, condemns black people to inferior status.

Culture matters.

But the leftist hostility to “bourgeois values” goes beyond that. Bourgeois values create strong institutions (family, church, voluntary associations) that are a source of social capital and which rival the state. Leftists (the New Class) have a class interest in the expansion of state power, since the expansion of state power is the expansion of New Class power.

Thus, for the New Class, the role of “marginalized groups” in society is to fail, to articulate grievances, and to demand government benefits. To behave otherwise is to commit treason.

Sociology: A Corrupt Discipline

From the John William Pope Center:

“Diversity” is the new slogan under which academics and their institutions march. But what is it? What does it mean? How will we know when we have achieved a sufficient amount?

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.

The author, one James D. Wright, goes on to give two examples of ideological bias and intolerance.

I edited the scholarly journal Social Science Research for 36 years. A pair of papers we published in the last few years shows how badly sociology has fallen into a one-party mindset.

In 2010, I published a paper by Darren Sherkat, “Religion and Verbal Ability,” arguing, with a mass of supporting data, that Christian Fundamentalists scored more poorly than others on verbal ability testing. Since verbal ability is often taken as a marker for intelligence, the implication of Sherkat’s finding was that Christian Fundamentalists are relatively stupid.

Not one word of protest over this scurrilous conclusion was ever voiced, at least not to me, even though there are a lot of Christians and Fundamentalists “out there” who might well have taken offense. Christian Fundamentalists simply do not comprise a legitimate identity grouping in the minds of the American professoriate, so you can say pretty much anything you want about them and no sociologist will bother to question your research.

Two years later, I also published a paper, “How Different are the Adult Children of Parents who have Same-Sex Relationships?” by Mark Regnerus. It argued, again with supporting evidence, that children raised by same-sex couples suffer various penalties later in life.

At the time, there was a firmly held consensus of opinion within sociology that there were no differences of significance between same-sex and conventional marriages—a consensus that hung by a very thin empirical thread. Here was a paper whose findings challenged that consensus. Vicious ad hominem excoriation was the result.

The Regnerus paper ignited a year-long howl of protestation, enraged emails by the hundreds, demands that the paper be retracted, FOIA demands that I release all the (confidential) email correspondences between me and the paper’s referees, demands that the identities of the referees be made public, petitions denouncing my duplicity in publishing the paper (signed, incidentally, by the then-current and immediate past Presidents of the American Sociological Association), and ultimately a series of court appearances where I had to defend the importance of anonymous and confidential peer review in the overall scientific process.

Why the difference? Christian Fundamentalists, who by some accounts make up a third of the U.S. population, do not possess a legitimated identity—they lay no claim to victimhood—so they can be derogated without reprisal. Gay people, in contrast, are probably today’s most legitimated victims within sociology. As legitimated victims, they can only by referred to by sociologists in politically correct ways.

Here is another illustration of the way sociology has blinded itself.

Within sociology, there is a minor industry based on the proposition that violence against women is unique, entirely different than violence against men, and that domestic or intimate partner violence is all about men’s “power and control” over women. So unique, so different, is violence against women that my department now awards a Ph.D. in domestic violence studies.

In 2002, the criminologist Richard Felson published a massive review of the research literature on violence and gender. It systematically dismantled virtually the entire violence against women narrative. Felson found that violence against women is rarely the result of sexism or misogyny. The motives for violence against women—to control, to achieve retribution, to defend self-image—are the same as the motives for violence against men.

I was so taken with the breadth and analytic depth of Felson’s arguments that I assigned the book as required reading in a course on Social Research and Social Policy.

My feminist colleagues were aghast—they were unsure that students should even be allowed to read this heresy, much less be required to do so.

Much the same reaction ensued when I also assigned Linda Waite’s The Case for Marriage. I was assured that both volumes had been thoroughly discredited, although I have yet to come across a negative review of either that, in my opinion, rises above diatribe.

Two things are at work here: self selection and group think. Sociology tends to attract leftists who want to change society in radical ways. Once such people come to dominate academic departments, they reproduce themselves. They also increasingly drive out of the discipline people who think differently. Graduate student who are right-leaning or even centrist find themselves in a hostile environment. It’s difficult to get articles published and thus difficult to get tenure — in addition to the fact that other people in your department don’t want you to have tenure.

It’s a recipe for stifling and intolerant conformity. And this in a discipline which could provide a lot of insight into social behavior.

Indoctrination at Marquette: Professor Louise Cainkar

From an e-mail that a Marquette student sent to talk show host Vicki McKenna:

I am a Junior at Marquette University . . . To receive my minor, I have to take a sociology course so I choose to take the Arab and Muslim Americans class.
At first I had high hopes for the class but it steadily became worse. During her time teaching she has provided us with reading material that calls for abolishing the state of Israel, has openly criticized our governor, and repeatedly given us material that criticizes Republicans, “state tea party movements,” and “the right.” Here is an example of an article that she is making us read. It is from the Democratic Center for American Progress and she wanted us to read pages 1-12. Obviously this is not the only article like this she has made us read and I can provide you with more if you would like. When you read it, I would like you note how it refers to “state tea party movements,” “The religious right,” and “Fox News.”

In another e-mail to McKenna, the student provided more details:

Her name is Louise Cainkar, I’ll attach the link to her Marquette page for you. I thought you might be interest. The professor is very frustrating. Two Wednesdays ago we went on a field trip and the guide was explaining how great it was that the state is proving school vouchers because now the school that we were in would be able accept more students. Prof. Cainkar interrupted her and argued trying to get the guide to agree with her that Scott Walker and the Republicans were awful, it was completely unnecessary and unrelated to the your guide’s point. Frankly, it’s shameful what she is able to say and call “teaching.”

It would be too much to expect that any professor should be so good at concealing their political biases that students could not figure out whether the professor leans left or right.

A lot of our students, for example, figure out that we lean to the right, although some others feel the need to ask. In general, when we lecture on something that makes the left look bad, we discuss an analogous case that makes the right look bad. Yesterday, when we talked about arrogant bureaucrats who overstep their authority, we picked on OSHA and the EEOC, and then discussed J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to discredit Martin Luther King. When we discuss media bias, we tell students that there is no unbiased media, and that they should look at outlets on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

 Further, there is a difference between letting some ideological bias show and creating a hostile learning environment for students who disagree with the professor. The latter is an abuse.

 A related issue is whether the professor feels free to offer all sorts of political opinions unrelated to the subject matter. The classic canons of academic freedom protect the right of a professor to say what he or she wants in the classroom only when discussing the course material, and expressing scholarly opinions. Stray irrelevant political observations are not protected.

Of course, this distinction is largely unenforceable, but it’s still the case that spewing stray political opinions is an abuse. It’s difficult to see how attacking the tea party and Gov. Walker is relevant in a course in Arab-American politics.

But this is the Sociology Department (technically, Social and Cultural Sciences), and it, along with humanities departments is a center of political correctness at Marquette.