Academic Disciplines: Sociology in Bloom

In their characteristic way, some sociologists define sociology as “the study of the behavior of human beings with, to, and for one another, and of the resulting arrangement of relationships and activities which we call human society.” Now something new is happening with, to, and for sociologists. They are finding to their delight that their work is in great demand in today’s self-conscious society. Their academic prestige is rising, and colleges are eager to pay a high price for their talents as well as their semantics.

Peppering the Profs. “We’ve come into a new day,” says Dr. Dan Dodson, chairman of N.Y.U.’s department of sociology and anthropology, while complaining that he sought seven new sociologists for his staff this year, but could snare only three because of the nationwide competition. “I fully expected to retire at $10,000 and live a fairly spartan life,” beams a young Emory University sociologist who got 14 job offers—one at $18,000 a year—even though he was not seeking a change.”I hardly know what to make of what’s happened.”

The Berkeley campus of the University of California—where some people would say a need has been demonstrated—has offered more than $25,000 a year to a few renowned sociologists, $20,000 to others less well known. The University of Southern California will pay $20,000 for a top professor, as will New York University. A big name can try for $25,000 at Harvard and probably get it. A sociologist at Tulane who only five years ago was drawing $10,000 now gets $21,000. And average pay is also rising. Median salary at the universities is $10,000, only slightly below economists’.

Moonlighting becomes them too. Publishers are peppering sociologists with offers. “I’ve heard it said that any sociology professor who can’t double his salary with extracurricular jobs shouldn’t be here,” says Brandeis Sociology Chairman John R. Seeley. A sociologist can command $100 a day as a consultant to industry, up to $90 a day as adviser to such federal agencies as the National Institutes of Health, CIA, Census Bureau, State Department, Office of Economic Opportunity, and Office of Education. Sociologist David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd) left Chicago for Harvard in 1958, not for money (“Any time I’m hard up I can give a lecture somewhere”), but because he was offered a special chair that would permit him to teach undergraduates without restrictions. Demographers are in big demand, and so are social psychologists and sociologists with training in medicine. The American Sociology Association, whose total membership runs to 8,500, has a medical-sociology section with nearly 600 members.

Dirty Hands. Why such new success for sociologists? “This is a complicated society with a lot of problems around, and there’s a demand for people who are trying to understand them,” explains Harvard Sociologist Talcott Parsons. Another reason, says Riesman, is that “the bloom of psychoanalysis is off”; people’s problems often have to be related to conditions that lie beyond their family situations. The new drives against poverty, urban blight and crime have also increased the demand for sociologists who, as George Washington University Vice President Jack Brown says, “want to get out in the field and get their hands dirty rather than just talk about social problems.”

For these reasons, student enrollment in sociology courses is rising rapidly at both undergraduate and graduate levels. “Students today want to get involved, to know the society they live in and to change it,” explains Sociologist Paul Sheldon of Occidental College. They are asking for such courses as “The Modern City,” “Social Pathology” and “Intercultural Relations.” Harvard’s survey course in sociology attracted 250 students last year; this year there are 325. Graduate student enrollment in sociology at U.S.C. has nearly doubled in the past two years. A few sociology departments even keep the names of their best students quiet and offer them graduate fellowships—at up to $4,000 a year—to entice them to stay. Among the most eminent departments are those of Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia and Chicago.

The same impact is felt at schools of social work. * Enrollment in the nation’s 59 graduate schools has increased over the past ten years from about 3,500 to more than 8,000. The U.S.C. Graduate School of Social Work has doubled its faculty in the past five years, still turns away increasing numbers of applicants. Boston University’s School of Social Work is looking for housewives with social work degrees to fill faculty vacancies. The nationwide Council for Social Work received 45,000 inquiries about career possibilities this year (three times that of a year ago), reports that 15,000 jobs for social workers are going begging.

“Young people today,” concludes U.C.L.A.’s Eileen Blackey, dean of the Graduate School of Social Welfare, “are very concerned with the catastrophic changes that are leaving people broken and bruised. The level of students who are coming to us now is very exciting. The whole society is more alive to social problems.”

* Which train social workers and other specialists seeking careers in welfare fields. Sociologists, on the other hand, are more concerned with theoretical studies.