The Sociologist's Quest for Respectability.

Academic sociologists and those trained in sociology have a long university tradition, and even though we are sociologists and professors, we often fail fully to appreciate this tradition in our daffy existence of teaching, research, and other roles. As professors we sometimes forget that we have a long and eminent tradition. We have positions of high status, a status reflected in an often-quoted Swedish statement that "the professor walks second only to the king, who walks next to God." Universities extend as far back as the ninth century, but they were largely specialized institutions dealing with medicine, law, and theology. As groups of schools, faculties, and colleges, universities date primarily from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following the accumulation of knowledge largely derived through the rediscovery of Aristotle, Arabian commentaries, and the study of the broader liberal arts. Many universities from which we trace our traditions have existed for as long as nine hundred years: Bologna (1088), the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge from the twelfth century; Prague (1348); Vienna (1365); Uppsala (1477); Mexico and San Marcos de Lima (1551); and Harvard (1636). Universities today, as compared with the past, have developed well-established innovations, such as the preparation of theses in place of disputations, seminars, electives, laboratories, and separate graduate schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]