Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published in the National Association of Scholars’s weekly CounterCurrent newsletter on July 27, 2026. My colleague, Kali Jerrard, does an excellent job each week analyzing the latest developments in higher education, and I’m happy to crosspost her work here. To subscribe to CounterCurrent or browse past editions, visit the National Association of Scholars’s CounterCurrent archive.

What should we make of the study of sociology within higher education? What about the field of sociology as a whole? Is sociology worth saving?

A recent Wall Street Journal article ponders whether it is time to “liquidate” the study of sociology, largely due to sociologists’ ideological conformity and scholar-activism within the field, undermining its credibility and public perception.

The problem is not the discipline itself—any serious academic discipline should be capable of saying something meaningful about reality—but rather its complete and total capture by campus radicals. Sociology has become so ideologically homogeneous that it consistently asks certain questions, while treating others as beyond the pale. The article notes that sociologists exclusively study topics like immigration enforcement or racial justice through a leftist lens. But rarely ask, as my colleague Jared Gould noted on X, how mass immigration affects social trust, civic cohesion, national identity, or the long-term stability of democratic institutions.

A discipline that approaches public questions from only one ideological direction is no longer pursuing truth wherever it leads; it is advancing a predetermined worldview.

So, suffice to say, sociology is currently receiving scrutiny and harsh criticism.

But first, what is sociology? A simple definition is the study of groups of people and how they interact. Or more broadly, it is “a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them.”

The decline of sociology has been unfolding for many years. Much like English and the sciences, sociology was easily infiltrated by identity politics and ideological conformity. Alexander Riley wrote of his own experience within the field of sociology in an article for the Summer 2024 issue of Academic Questions (AQ). Riley entered the field he viewed as best suited to “fruitfully engage with the big questions about the human condition,” endeavoring to study human nature objectively. But he noticed an alarming trend within sociological circles beginning in the 1990s:

The crazed and intellectually empty ideologues completely colonized the field. They have made it their own, and the consequence is that contemporary sociology is now a wasteland for any seeking the complex truths of human life.

Riley went on to give concrete examples from the American Sociological Association (ASA), which maintains an extensive website that includes short videos produced by academic sociologists about their research. One example he included,

In the first of these videos, Complaining While Black, sociologist Jacob Faber from NYU describes his examination of 10,000 citizen complaints against police in Chicago. He finds—consistent with his expectation—that ‘complaints by black . . . citizens and against white officers are less likely to be sustained.’ In addition, white complaints about interactions with police in predominantly black neighborhoods are disproportionately sustained. What might explain such findings? The video does not give a direct answer, but the conclusion Faber gives in the article on which the video is based is plainly intended as the only conceivable reading of the evidence: ‘[I]ndividual and institutional actors prioritize white victimhood.’ … The basic problem in Faber’s work—and in contemporary sociology—is that it assumes there are no baseline differences in attitudes and behaviors of different racial groups in terms of policing. Blacks and whites must, almost by definition, interact with and respond to police attention in exactly the same ways, with exactly the same statistical range of possibilities in behavior.

Another issue that plagues the field is that of reproducibility. Our 2018 report, The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science, chronicles how modern science suffers from a reproducibility crisis where scientific results cannot be reproduced due to “improper use of statistics, arbitrary research techniques, lack of accountability, political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results.”

Recent studies have found that this phenomenon of irreproducibility within sociological studies continues.

The Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, which began in 2019 and was published in April of this year, found that about half of previously published social science studies can be replicated. SCORE analyzed thousands of scientific studies published in 62 scientific journals between 2009 and 2018.

Within higher education, sociology’s popularity as an undergraduate major is declining. One study finds that since 2013 sociology undergraduate completions have fallen in absolute numbers by 25 percent. The Wall Street Journal puts it this way,

Starting in 2013, the number of students majoring in sociology dropped from 31,000 to 21,000 in 2024. One ZipRecruiter poll found sociology among college grads’ most regretted majors.

Students are instead flocking to majors like economics, health fields, and political science, which seem more pragmatic to college students because of the job market or for continuing education at graduate school. As for students who do major in sociology: “Even sociologists acknowledge that students are often drawn to the major because they’re afraid of math or are sold on sociology as a means to activism.”

However, some sources anticipate more students will major in sociology over the next few years. Whether that comes to pass remains to be seen, and I’d speculate it largely depends upon how the field reforms itself.

When activism takes over, it is only a matter of time before groupthink and ideological pressure force serious scholarship out the door and undermine the credibility of a field, even at a collegiate level. If the “strengths” of the discipline, as highlighted by the ASA, are best shown by the work of collegiate professors at high-ranking institutions, who publish in top-ranking journals, and are of the quality Riley expounded upon in his AQ article, then sociology is in serious need of reform at the very least.

Is sociology worth reforming? It depends on who you ask.

There is a camp of sociologists who believe they should engage more forcefully with the public on issues like race, immigration, and the like. Saida Grundy, a professor of sociology and African-American and Black diasporic studies at Boston University, is one such sociologist who believes the discipline has an obligation to engage with the world to “interrupt public harm or advocate for the public good.” Contemporary sociology’s intense focus on ideology about race, gender, and class does the public a disservice, but those of an activist bent see the current state of sociology as a way to right the injustices and inequalities of the world. On the other hand, Professor Jukka Savolainen, an occasional contributor to AQ and Minding the Campus, believes we should follow the Danes who in 1986 closed their publicly funded sociology departments after deciding they were too far down the rabbit hole of neo-Marxist activism. The discipline was later rebuilt with academic freedom and scientific integrity at the forefront.

Whichever way forward, colleges and universities must execute their duty to promote scholars who engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth and restore serious and excellent scholarship.