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I owe sociology a debt of gratitude, because by comparison it boosts the value of my psychology degree from mere scratchy toilet paper to plush two-ply toilet paper.

But seriously, I have never met a sociology professor who was not an angry, man-hating lesbian.

Sociology is in decline because at best it was never more than an approach to the study of society: the great sociologists, the founders of the discipline, were all trained in other fields, which the found limiting, and sociology developed as a way those great minds (one thinks of Weber, Durkheim, Veblen, as well as Rieff, Riesman and Lipset, who actually seem more epigoni to me) could develop their ideas about society without being limited by traditional disciplinary boundries -- which were becoming more rigid in the early 20th century as these men wrote.

Academic sociologists, as the article in the WSJ notes, usually fall into one of two equally dangerous camps: the reductionists -- the ones who think they're a real social science and try to come up with models, some mathematics and lots of jargon -- and the radicals, who use sociology as their vehicle for promotion of a radical political agenda. The reductions are useless because the only level at which their models have any power is so general as to be meaningless truism, and the radicals are useless because they're radicals.

I had a good friend who was a professor of sociology. She was something of a soft-core feminist, but not a lesbian man-hater. Of course, the fact that she was stunningly beautiful and spent enough time in the South to know how to deal with men, meant she did not have the problems relating to men that many women who become academics do.

But seriously, I have never met a sociology professor who was not an angry, man-hating lesbian.

My thesis advisor was an older, non-Christian, married male(to a woman) who was nevertheless a promoter of homosexuality. When I suggested that homosexuals would always be in a distinct minority, he was shocked, shocked, I tell you.

I owe sociology a debt of gratitude, because by comparison it boosts the value of my psychology degree from mere scratchy toilet paper to plush two-ply toilet paper.

LOL - This morning I was swimming at the YMCA and overheard the lifeguard talking to a swim instructor. She said she was going to be finishing her degree in April. The instructor asked what the degree was in. The lifeguard responded "Sociology". The instructor said, "Well, I guess you can still keep your job here at the 'Y' at least." I had to stop swimming in the middle of a lap to laugh.

The real flaw of sociology as it was understood in the 50's and 60's, pre-postmodernism and feminism and assorted other perversions of the intellectual process, was that it turned out to be a "discipline" in search of a subject matter. Even Lipset's work, which at least had some intellectual rigor, at best came up with more or less self-evident generalizations. And the statistics were very weak. Correlations in the range of .20-.30 and based on large samples were eminently publishable even though they meant in real terms that the researcher had explained perhaps 15% of the variance.

Because sociology in the end lacked content, its scientific efforts fell prey to the predators of the New Left, who saw a vacant house and moved in en masse. This is why there is no such thing today as "social science"-- only a politicized whore dressed up in tawdry imitation of a respectable lady, but whose trappings fool no one upon any sort of serious scrutiny.