Sociology and Other ‘Meathead’ Majors

Legendary Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield on the poor choices students make in selecting their college courses and majors :

In colleges today, choice is in and requirements are out. Only the military academies, certain Great-Books colleges and MIT (and its like) want to tell students what they must study. Most colleges offer a cornucopia of choices, and most of the choices are bad.

The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not quite at random, let’s take sociology. That great American democrat Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn’t get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.

Part of the problem is the political correctness responsible for “Gender Studies,” a politicized major that has its little echoes in many other departments, and that never fails to mislead.

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