In recent weeks, the Florida Board of Governors voted to remove introductory sociology from the state’s general education core, setting off predictable outrage across higher education. Critics have framed the decision as political overreach, even an attack on the social sciences themselves. Supporters see something else: a long-overdue response to a discipline that, in too many classrooms, has drifted from inquiry toward advocacy. The debate is not trivial. At stake is not only sociology’s place in the curriculum, but what it means for any field to deserve a place at all.
I write this not as an outsider to the discipline, but as someone trained in it. I have a degree in sociology. I teach it. I use it. I rely on it. And I value it deeply. At its best, sociology offers powerful tools for understanding institutions, culture, inequality, and social change and the contributions many of its scholars have made to the understanding the social relations are profound. Sociology sharpens our ability to see the world clearly and to ask better questions about how it works.
It is a field worth defending.
But it is also a field that, in many quarters, has lost its balance.
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