Agency, Institutional Neutrality, and Disciplinary Crisis

• In Event: 40406 - Debating the Place for Value-Commitments in Sociology

Abstract

The discipline of sociology, having contributed brilliantly to a deeper understanding of modernity, now finds itself in crisis, caught between harsh external pressures and deep internal conflicts over the relationship among values, academic freedom, and political advocacy. This paper explores an important theoretical and historical parallel with implications for these present-day struggles. First is Max Weber’s appeal in his 1917 speech “Science as a Vocation” for academic clarity with respect to the fundamental values that animate scientific scholarship and teaching, including systematic social analysis, and the simultaneous refusal of “practical political stands” in the classroom. Second are more recent arguments for institutional neutrality in the U.S. academy, crystallized in the 1967 Kalven Report at the University of Chicago. A position of institutional neutrality is aimed at the defense of the academic freedom of faculty and students and the restriction of administrative position-taking on political and social issues unrelated to the core mission of the college or university. Today, both of these historic positions are generally misunderstood as advocating a disavowal of politics rather than a systematic and enabling distinction among institutional roles, and a further distinction between that and personal-political speech and action. This paper clarifies, resituates, and elaborates these arguments in order to equip us to better understand and more forcefully address the current disciplinary condition.

Author

• Julia Potter Adams, Yale University