David John Ayers is a retired Professor of Sociology at Grove City College. He has over 16 years experience in college administration including as an Academic Dean (5 years) and as Interim Provost (1.5 years), involved in Christian college teaching since 1986 in four different institutions, numerous publications including 6 books (4 full length and two short ones), abundant experience in outside speaking and teaching as well. National reputation for publication and research in areas of marriage, family, sexuality. Successful recruiter, evaluator, and developer of college faculty. Now officially retired but still active in research, publishing, speaking, and some online college teaching. Current foci are in the areas of Christian higher education, marriage & family (with emphasis being on marriage and closely related issues).

1. Can you briefly thumbnail your background as it relates to Sociology?

Let me be clear at the outset that, while I have published “straight” sociology—including two brief workbooks/texts for Cengage, and test banks and instructor’s manuals for Rodney Stark’s excellent introductory text (now out of print), and a couple conference papers (one at the ASA the other at the Midwestern Sociological Conferences) I have worked in primarily teaching and administrative rolls in small, religious teaching colleges. This included heading Sociology in one way or another for many years, including launching a Sociology major in 1998 which I primarily designed, including Statistics and one full year each of Theory and Research Methodology (all classes I often taught). While I have done my own (mostly, big data) research in areas such as marriage and family studies, focusing on areas such as sex, marriage, fertility, and cohabitation including for the Institute for Family Studies, my focus and interest has been on evangelicals with the goal of helping them do better, in accordance with their avowed beliefs, in these areas. So, a lot of my career has been involved more as an educated consumer and communicator of sociological research than as someone publishing “straight” sociology in mainstream sociological journals and such. In the college world I inhabited, this is fairly typical.

I hold a BA in Psychology but an MA (American University, 1985) and PhD (New York University, 1996) in Sociology, doing all of my graduate work while employed full time from 1983 through 1996 (taking time off to focus on family and work, one research-only job, and spending 4 years on my dissertation project). I transferred to the Sociology Department at American in my first year of graduate school, from studying Social Psychology in the Psychology Department. The latter was heavily behavioristic, by which I was not very enamored. Then I discovered what Sociologists then often called “Sociological Social Psychology” (now Microsociology) fascinating, and it incorporated my “Psychological Social Psychology” to some extent. The professors in this area in the Sociology Program were excellent and not ideological, one having done her dissertation under Herbert Blumer at the University of Chicago, the other main one having done his doctoral work at Washington University when it was a top graduate program. My Research Methods professor was fantastic and extraordinarily demanding. Two European scholars who were both steeped in the classical tradition taught my first-year Theory courses. We started with figures such as Montesquieu and Vico and Rousseau moving from there into the main founding figures. I only had one heavily ideological professor, a vehement Communist who openly picked on “unbelievers.” The rest, however, were not like that (even the other Marxist in the program). My NYU training was all at more advanced levels, and likewise first-rate. It was pretty ideologically diverse too, at the time. Other than the Communist (who went after me, among others), I have no complaints about my graduate education, and it prepared me well to prepare undergraduates.

I taught Sociology at the college level from 1986 through two years ago, except for one brief break to foray into research and consulting (about three years). I retired in 2024, but continue to teach Sociology as a part-time adjunct online instructor, to “keep my hand in.” The program I teach in is solid; there are no ideological radicals imposing themselves on students, for which I am thankful.

2. What do you think is the current state of academic sociology as a scientific discipline?

When I went into Sociology, I certainly noted the leftish tilt to the field, more than what I had seen in Psychology. Conservatives and deeply Christian folk needed to be careful. But as I pointed out above, my professors only included one hard core activist who saw Sociology as essentially a means to advance radical change and punish “oppressors.” As I also mentioned above, my methodological and theoretical training was rigorous, and the core of the discipline seemed to be—whether the orientation was toward quantitative or qualitative research—discovering and communicating things that were true, creating and testing theories and hypotheses, regardless of our personal affinities or bias.

There were the typical nutty things at the American Sociological Association Annual and other Sociology conferences, but they did not dominate. There were egregious examples of biased reactions to studies with the “wrong” findings—such as the reaction of a large number of Sociologists to the 1965 Moynihan (yes, he was not a Sociologist) “Negro Family” Report or to James Coleman’s 1975 famous bussing report. But as yet, though such political bias and activism pushing out objective scholarly work was steadily worsening, it did not completely overshadow a great deal of excellent Sociology going on.

However, by the time I defended my dissertation in 1996 (which included documenting numerous disturbing antisemitic and antiwhite incidents involving Black Power advocates of black control of black schools in New York City in the late 1960’s, without many negative pushback from any of my professors or those before whom I defended my dissertation) things were clearly going sidewise and declining fast. Prominent Sociologists of the “old school” were noticing “political correctness” in the discipline.

Irving Louis Horowitz said the following in 1994, in his prophetic book The Decomposition of Sociology:

…in a period when the fields of social science—from the policy sciences to social planning, from public administration to demography—are expanding, one area, sociology, with a distinguished lineage and tradition, is suffering hard times. Indeed, sociology threatens to join phrenology as a pseudoscience and to share the fate of occult studies in being viewed more as a privileged language of dedicated elites than as a field of investigation broadly reflective of public needs… we are witnessing no general retreat to a prescientific approach to social issues. We are witnessing the decomposition of one field, sociology.

Here is highly regarded Sociologist Christian Smith’s oft-quoted take from his 2014 The Sacred Project of American Sociology: 

Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism,” … In the end, that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.

Smith, quoted in the same July 2026 WSJ article cited above, admitted: “Over time, I have thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’” Jonathan Turner, another highly regarded Sociologist, says something similar (not using those words) in his Q&A on this site. A lot of us think that now. (But then what? See below.)

In 2009, just ahead of penning a paper on the deterioration of Sociology for a small conference at my college, I had the opportunity to interact with a Sociologist who had made the mistake of writing his dissertation on the impact of affirmation action policies on white males, documenting harm using rigorous methodology. He told me that it had led to his “excommunication” from the field, which had he known what would happen he would have never picked that topic. He had to build his academic career by joining a Department of Government. He was fortunate.

That choice, using his Sociology training to move into a different academic discipline entirely because felt that he couldn’t do honest Sociology about issues he cared about in a Sociology department (at least, not any he had a prayer of being appointed to) is I think (impressionistically) becoming pretty common. In my very first lecture in my doctoral program, back in 1987, the professor pointed out that Sociology was splintering into academic specializations that were becoming the main allegiances of Sociologists working in that, undermining Sociology as a coherent, wholistic science of society. A good example of that are Sociologists detaching themselves into Departments of Criminology.

One more story, this from the late 1980’s, which I documented in the latter 2009 conference paper. At a large academic conference in Washington D.C., I listened to a women address the entire gathering. Hundreds. She told them that her organization needed to “prove” that the death penalty did not deter homicide and asked those gathered to do research to establish this fact. In other words, here are the “right” findings, now go out and get them. She got solid applause, and there were no audible objections, there was no pushback. So much for testing null hypotheses and letting the chips fall.

To describe the field of Sociology as dominated by left-wing activists who see the classroom and their writing and publication as a tool to advance their ideological programs is an understatement. The majority of academic practitioners today literally reject what used to be known as “value free” (in the Weberian sense) sociology. Research or theory that might be construed by Sociologists or policy makers as supporting conservative policies is frequently rejected on that basis alone. In texts, that assumption is often clear in criticisms, for example, of structural functionalism. Lord help you if you do even sound research with the wrong conclusions on a host of topics associated with racial and ethnic minorities, gender, sexual orientation, or identity. Much of the action has moved from simply attacking research with the “wrong” findings to ignoring them altogether, ghosting them; something we have seen with “heretical” same sex parenting research, as Paul Sullins has ruefully noted.

Is every Sociology Department like that? No. Some are solid, or at least redeemable. But this is what now characterizes the field, this is what it is known for among most of the general public that ever bothers to think about it.

In the most recent American Sociological Association elections, the “activist” wing clearly prevailed over those favoring the older stance of neutrality and value free sociology. And some Sociologists refused to vote because even the activist candidate running against the latter was not radical enough for them. As Stephanie Lee put it, the issue that embroiled that discipline in this election was “Should the production of knowledge be separated from the act of agitating for social change?”. The answer of a clear majority of ASA Sociologists who voted was a resounding “Heck, no.”

A recently quoted Boston University Sociologist said, simply, “I believe in sociology as a weapon.” Here is how the ASA President described Sociology in 2024: “a form of liberatory praxis…currently undergoing a renaissance as antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and transnational theorizing lead us to more inclusive insights.” This hard-core nonsense summarizes well the state of the majority of formal academic discipline today. The victim versus oppressor obsession, with whites and particularly straight males being the latter, is overwhelming.

Why would anyone trust research coming out of a discipline dominated by this kind of thinking? And frankly, it all is so predictable and so boring. Hearing the same tired moralizing repeated constantly. There is not much to excite students or the general public.

Sociology at its best consists of being supremely interested in all things human, of trying to find innovative and sound ways to discover and understand the structures and dynamics of social life wherever and among whomever they exist at every level from the smallest interactions to large scale social movements and beyond. Curiosity about what is going on behind those locked doors, as Peter Berger said. It illuminates the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. It celebrates verstehen, which at least includes trying to look at the world from the standpoint of those we study with empathetic understanding, no matter how alien or even objectionable we find them. It is not about repeating the same tired lists of carboard villains and oppressed victims, revealing no complex, multifaceted understanding of either. That is interesting, that is exciting.

I left the ASA a long time ago. So did Christian Smith. The ASA has been hemorrhaging members for years, just as Sociology departments nationally have been hemorrhaging students. It no longer adequately represents the Sociology I signed up for 43 years ago.

Let me also briefly note some other plagues afflicting today’s academic Sociology. First,the use of obscure, confusing language, and poor writing that I have jokingly referred to as “the hegemony of gobbledygook.” It makes Sociologists look insecure and arrogant, not more intelligent and learned. And it leads to unnecessary barriers between even good Sociological work and the general public. The post-modern and critical theorists are particularly notorious for “jargonized” and poorly written articles.

Next, there is the theoretical fragmentation of the field, something clearly laid out in my old professor and dissertation committee member James Jasper in decrying these phenomena in Sociological theories of social movements. This also leads to theoretical triviality and grossly limited application, which I jokingly referred to as the “Theory of the Month Club.” Allow me to quote from my afore-mentioned conference paper:

Looking at the field of social movements theories, James Jasper points out that new theories are often created for trivial reasons: “Every new concept or variable is inflated into an entire theory….” Moreover, there is the “tendency of young scholars to carve out niches by attacking established scholars and their paradigms.” Over time, the accomplishments of earlier thinkers are lost, and any sense of “cumulative” understanding and theory-building is destroyed. Aggravating all of this is an either-or approach to theoretical models; “only one model can be right.” Whole theories are inspired by limited cases, as when “…the Nazis inspired mass society theories; bureaucratized trade unions gave us rational-choice models….”  All of this is a prescription for fragmentation, not progress.

Then, there is too much narrow empiricism that dodges the big questions and the big picture. Understandably, given the pathologies of the field we have already noted here, it is not surprising that many sociologists have retreated into doing research on limited topics, often over-quantified, as a means of advancing academically through peer-reviewed journal publication. The giant of Sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, ridiculed this tendency to confuse hyper-quantified studies with true scientific insight as “quantophrenia,” in a 1956 book critical of Sociology. He was overstating the problem at the time, but no more. Let me add that he also criticized the overuse of obscure jargon to refer to everyday social realities that sensible Sociologists would have no problem clearly stating.

Finally, there is the tendency, almost legendary in academia, of Sociologists to engage in unprofessional attacks on one another. This has been an open secret for a long time and is on display online and elsewhere today in “reviews” of the work of orthodox- challenging Sociologists. The tendency to turn to ad hominem attacks like “racist” and “homophobic” and “fascist” rather than dispassionately debate the ideas with whom Sociologists disagree has made it all much worse. One of the first “inside” stories I heard from one of my professors was about his witnessing a famous Sociologist in his graduate department deck a newly minted Ph.D. in his department, the latter having been publicly insulting that faculty member using graffiti written in Latin without knowing that this faculty member could read Latin. Its university shut down that program years ago. Obviously, sharp elbows and wounded pride among academics is not exactly surprising. As a former Dean, believe me, I know. But Sociologists are known to exceed all.

All of this is a shame, given the incredible legacy of Sociology, including powerful and important works by public intellectuals such as Robert Bellah, James Davison Hunter, David Reisman, William Whyte, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Peter Berger, C. Wright Mills and many more, plus the amount of truly excellent, valuable work being done today by Sociologists who haven’t been chugging the “liberatory praxis” Kool-Aid, who speak clearly, who tackle significant issues, and don’t confuse complex statistics with scientific insight. Good sociologists who are doing good and fair and rigorous research and theorizing regardless of their own ideological leanings and commitments. Some of my own former students, who are doing excellent sociological work, one of whom is in a top graduate program right now, another who just received her Ph.D. in the field, another tenured at a major R1 university. They are out there.

But they are badly outnumbered, and more so by the day. It may be time to give up on the discipline altogether, time for those training in it to consider carving out their careers elsewhere—in Political Science, Criminology, Public Policy, History, Marketing Research (one of my former majors used her methods training to pursue a Ph.D. in the latter and is now a tenured professor in that area), Demography, Gerontology, somewhere other than in a Sociology Department.

And should public universities compel taxpayers to support a discipline that has devolved to this extent? Should the universities that they fund grant honored places in their core curriculums to it? There are programs that do not deserve the ax, but in case after case, the answer is simple. “No.”

Sociology as a whole is no longer salvageable as a legitimate, scientific discipline. It is past the point of no return. Gifted people interested in mastering disciplines that do objective, sound social science research will look elsewhere. They already do.

3. What about your own Sociology Department and program?

I am retired now. The major I used to head up is no longer offered at my former college. They have one full-time Sociologist and a couple of professors teaching some Sociology courses, to support electives and a minor.

I brought the major back into our college 28 years ago. I am pleased to say that we held the line on our faculty teaching Sociology according to the old rigor, and values of truth and objectivity, at least as much as imperfect humans can do that. At its peak we had about sixty-five majors, with an average SAT or SAT equivalent (based on ACT) higher than our college average, which had competitive admissions at the time and in which all applicants had to submit those scores. When we were fully staffed, students were required to complete one year of Theory, one year of Methods, plus Statistics, along with eventually presenting a Senior project based on original research. Partly based on national trends and partly due to starting a new Social Work program that attracted many of the students who would have previously majored in Sociology, we shrunk. But we then faced staffing cuts as an entire full-time slot in an already lean department was eliminated, leaving only one full-time professor of Sociology (a lot for a small college). They cut it, effective the year that I retired in 2024, and I supported the move under these circumstances. I felt we could no longer require what we used to require, and if we could not do it right, I did not want to offer the major.

I am proud of our alumni, and they have on average been successful. Their education prepared them well for life and for a range of occupational or graduate school choices. One of my daughters (now in Social Work professionally) majored in it, and another completed a minor in it.

4. What should be the next step for those who love Sociology and actually want to do real Sociology, if the formal discipline is now hopeless and crumbling fast?

In his Q&A on this site, Jonathan Turner suggested that a discipline be created that carries forward value-free, objective, rigorous sociology, preserving the rich legacy and work that has been done in the past and teaching, and promoting the continual development of such research and theorizing into the future. (He suggests “Social Physics,” Comte’s name for this discipline, but notes his reservations about Comte which I share.) A broad and integrative social science discipline like Sociology was and is at its best, unlike the narrower mission of other social sciences.

I find this idea as similar to what we have found in various mainstream Protestant denominations they have abandoned core orthodoxies, and idealogues have overwhelmed the denominational apparatus and pastorates. A new denomination breaks away, that is the old denomination sans corruption, but much smaller and often which has lost the core institutions and resources of the mainstream one. (Church building, schools, colleges, seminaries, mission organizations, etcetera.) The United Methodist collapse recently gave us the Global Methodists. The collapse of the mainline Presbyterian denomination has given us new entities such as the Presbyterian Church of America. The Episcopalian collapse led to the growing Anglican Church of Noth America.

If I was starting out and such a new/old “real” Sociology discipline had been birthed with viable departments, I would join up in a heartbeat, just as so many Methodists are flocking to the GMC, and just as the PCA and ACNA are growing while the PC-USA and Episcopalians are in free fall. But obviously, the challenges to establishing this as a recognized academic discipline would be formidable, to say the least. Journals, professional organizations and standards, conferences, graduate programs, massive funding, overcoming what would be the almost fanatical resistance of current Sociologists and Sociological organizations, etcetera.

Here are some more immediately achievable possibilities that do not rely on unrealistic expectations about reforming the discipline as a whole, or creating a new one (at least, right away).

First, identify graduate programs that have not been thoroughly corrupted, and the best scholars in them. Mentor students interested in graduate studies in Sociology through completing their graduate work in them, under these scholars. These students need not be coming out of Sociology programs (I did not). Psychology, History, Economics, Political Science. Given the broadness of Sociology as a discipline, the broader the education graduate students have, the better.

Second, make sure these students experience rigorous social science through other disciplines if necessary. I have mentored a student schooled in a tough Economics and History program at the college I retired from, performing exceptionally in graduate Sociology programs at two top research universities.

Third, identify departments that are still pretty solid and help these graduate students obtain faculty positions in them. Encourage these students to take the positions, even if that means choosing them over more prestigious appointments at corrupted R1 universities. Encourage them to become great teachers and steady scholars. We cannot rescue the discipline nor most departments, not at this point. But we can identify, strengthen, and even create islands of good, solid Sociology.

Finally, create professional associations, journals, and conferences specifically for disaffected “real” Sociologists. Stay involved in the existing ones if you wish. Publish in existing journals if you can. But create professional space, networking, opportunities for that minority (but still large, if aging and shrinking, minority), who voted against the current crop of ASA leaders, not because they weren’t radical enough, but because they held to the old vision of Sociology as a true social science, not an ideological weapon. And those who have given up on the ASA entirely.

Give me that association, and I will join it tomorrow. I will even pay the dues.