Saving Academic Sociology.

In this article the author argues that United States academic sociology threatens to slip into the limited relevance of scholasticism. Applied sociology and academic sociology are both quite heterogeneous sets of activities. The core of academic sociology consists of teaching, scholarship, and research. There are many different ways to fulfill each function, however: some teach primarily lower-division courses whereas others spend most of their teaching time with graduate students. Indeed, a case can be made that one specialty within sociology is what might be called "LD sociology," i.e., lower-division sociology. Similarly, scholarship and research are also quite heterogeneous. On average, if one counts all sorts of publications, faculty members publish one item every other year, but the median is close to zero, indicating that the average is strongly influenced by a minority who publish very heavily. Cutting across academic activities are the various intellectual styles within so ciology and subject matter specialization.