Boy I wish this were true.

Bill Mallonee sings:

why is joy something i must steal
starving skeletons looking for a meal
out in the graveyard the church bells peal
earth has no sorrow heaven can't heal

I didn't do nothing illegal or anything like that,

So says former Auburn University tailback and alleged sociology student Carnell Williams. Last week the New York Times published a story suggesting that professor Thomas Petee provided independent study instruction to 18 football players in the 2004-2005 academic year. Collectively, these athletes earned a 3.31 GPA in Petee's classes but only a 2.14 in their other classes.

I first learned about the story from Jeremy who wrote:

the open secret that I didn't appreciate when I got into this business is that, at many (most? Virtually all?) places, sociology counts on lazy, lost, last-resort-looking and otherwise low-achieving students as an important source of revenue--which isn't to say we don't strive hard to lure bright students as well, as long as they aren't too politically conservative--and that's a kind of systematic bargain that in the aggregate makes abuse and publicized incidents like this every once in awhile inevitable.

As for Cadillac not doing "nothing" wrong... well, er, Mr. Williams, I can only presume that Petee did not grade your grammar. As for grade manipulation and football eligibility, I can only sigh. When I was at Syracuse, I remember a fellow graduate student complaining about athletic department pressure (I have no way of verifying that she was pressured; but I also have no reason to disbelieve her story). I can honestly say that I've never been pressured by an athletic department to boost an athlete's grade; and I believe I give every student the grade their work deserves.

I'm becoming convinced that big-time athletics should not commingle with academics. I say this as a football fanatic. As my wife will testify, from September until January, I spend every Saturday glued to my television watching college football. I played college football (NAIA, Division II). In fact, I wouldn't have gotten into college without football. I was admitted to college on academic probation thanks to the football team's lobbying. I was a poor student in High School with a lackluster SAT. It was in football that I first realized that I wasn't dumb. It's an incredibly complex game involving coordination of 11 people running full speed and reacting to 11 other people also moving at full speed. You can't be an idiot and play college football. In short, football has been very, very, good to me (that is, if we discount the 5 knee operations).

Yet, from where I sit now, college football seems to be a distraction. Not just for the athletes but for non-athletes too. ESPN is coming to town on Thursday September 14th for a 7:30 p.m. game vs. Maryland. I teach a Criminology class from 4:00 to 5:15 on Thursday evenings. Starting at around noon on that day the University will begin closing parking lots and preparing for the 60,000 people coming to campus. The traffic gridlock will start right around the time my class begins. At least one student will plead with me to cancel class on "gameday". I'll refuse and teach the 20 or so students (my enrollment is 100) who consider their classes more important than getting a good seat at the ball game. Last winter, a student actually criticized me on my evaluations for having class on the day of the Backyard Brawl basketball matchup between WVU and Pitt. I was criticized for doing my job!

I wish there was a way out of this cognitive dissonance. I will continue to watch college football and basketball. I will continue to hold class on the night of big nationally televised athletic contests. [Indeed, I'll probably go home after teaching the empty room and watch the game on ESPN]. But I do wish that we could figure out our priorities.

ASA Registration Fees

Is it just me, or did ASA significantly raise their registration fees for the annual meeting? The last time I went to ASA (as a registrant) the fee's were less than $50 for students. This year, students pay $65 and "Regular" members pay $165. I hope we get a decent tote bag this year for 135 clams.

Tragedy at Taylor

Taylor University, my alma mater (class of 1994) is in the news. Five students were killed in an accident on April 6th. A tractor trailer crossed the median of I-69 just miles from the Upland, Indiana campus. Earlier this week, we learned that two of these students were misidentified. I can't begin to imagine how awful this must be for both families. In one case, a family's hopes have been crushed; not only must they go through the grieving process, but they also have invested an incredible amount of emotional energy and worry wishing for the recovery of their loved one. In the other case, a family who thought they had burred their loved one, is told their daughter has been alive all this time.

I don't typically comment on these things. My heart goes out to all the families involved as well as the broader Taylor community. I also feel for the Marion County coroner, an elected official who lacks a medical background. He's become the scapegoat in this tragedy; with some asking why there was no forensic identification efforts. It appears to me that this misidentification is the product of multiple factors, which can not be reduced to one person or one official. This case illustrates how institutional linkages (public safety, medical, university public relations, and media among others) can function like a child's game of telephone.

Don't feed the men

I'm accompanying a collegue who teaches an inside out course at a State prison nearby. The course involves several inside students (who are incarcerated) and several outside students who are entrolled in this senior level seminar. I'll probably have more to post about this at a later date.

On the first night of class, the outside students were taken on a tour of the facility. For many of us (myself included) this was a first experience inside the walls of a prison. The most uncomfortable dimension of the tour for me was the recognition that these men have no privacy. We walked through housing units where these men live their lives without asking them if they minded. They were gawked at (some gawked right back) and scrutinized.

As we left one of the housing units, I heard one man shout out: "Don't feed the men".

Stata vs. SPSS, act 1

My colleagues here often ask me why I don't like to use SPSS*. I have a hard time explaining to them why I use Stata**, a package not widely used at this institution and not supported by our statistical support people. Fortunately for me, sociologist and short-fiction blogger Jeremy Freese concisely articulates what I've been unable to explain:

At first I worked with SPSS, which I found bewildering because it seemed designed to encourage users to do things in cumbersome and self-defeating way. Then, one bright day, I discovered Stata 5, and after like a forty-some-hour manuals-and-keyboarding-binge, all was bliss.

My experience is similar. I learned a number of neat SPSS programming tricks at ICPSR where I worked with one of the smartest people I've ever met. However, the more SPSS code that I wrote, the more frustrated I got with the packages limitation. As Jeremy writes, it forces you to do things in a cumbersome, repetitive way. SPSS doesn't do arrays well; it's loops are clunky; and the processing is slow. My mentor at ICPSR showed me how to use a powerful text-editor to eliminate some of the tedium in writing tedious code. But, I was convinced there must be more! I found SAS to be a better tool for these sorts of tasks. However, the learning curve on SAS was way too steep. I invested about the same amount of time trying to pick up SAS and Stata. The difference: at the end of these couple of days, I could use Stata to accomplish necessary tasks. As for SAS, I had to keep asking people for help.

* Leaving alone for a moment the fact that technically I'm an ethnographer and mutter my way through most regression tables.

** We also will leave aside the incredible price differential between these programs. Stata has an affordable price-point for student's or others with an academic affiliation. SAS and Stata seem to be pricing themselves to outfits with deep pockets.

The unbearable likeness of facebook

A student that I taught at my previous institution encouraged me to get a facebook account. To humor her I did. But after a colleague complained that her students were getting other students to sign them in* via facebook, I decided to troll through the WVU facebook stuff.

I come away from this experience with one word of advice:

If you seek a career in law enforcement, you probably should not post a picture of yourself hitting a bong on a public website.

Call me old fashioned... But jeez.


* It's tough to take attendance when you have 140 students in a classroom. Those who decide to take attendance often use a sign-in sheet. Given the ease by which unscrupulous students can have others forge their name, I've given up on that practice.

Wild and wonderful

Wild and wonderful
Originally uploaded by samhdaman.

In 1977, Kai Erikson published Everything in its path, a study of how a man made flood destroyed several communities along Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. I am starting a small follow-up study and went to Logan County last weekend. I checked into my hotel on Thursday and found this towel waiting for me. There are some parts of West Virginia which are a bit different, I guess.

Evidence that I'm not well traveled

Several bloggers have been posting their Visited States maps. Here's mine:



create your own visited states map

You can also do a world map; but in my case it would just show North America, so why bother?

Peter Berger on the state of Sociology

I just returned from an enjoyable 3 days at the Eastern Sociological Society's annual meeting. One session, a conversation with Peter Berger, gave me a lot too chew on. Berger's style of sociology attracted me to the discipline. Two books in particular sparked my imagination in a way that nothing else did: Invitation to Sociology & The Sacred Canopy.

Robert Wuthnow, another sociologist for whom I have great respect led the discussion. The first question pertained to Berger's most famous book (written with Thomas Luckmann), The Social Construction of Reality. There, Berger & Luckmann demonstrated that what we take for reality is filtered through socially situated interpretations. Wuthnow asked Berger if he is attracted to the contemporary constructivist branch of social theory, which if taken to the extreme, allows for equality of all competing interpretations. Berger responded that he's uncomfortable with such a free ranging relativism. The original body of theory never embraced relativism; it simply tried to show how human beings construct meaning within relatively confined social spaces. These meanings do not negate the objective realities which trigger them. [During the Q & A period, a debate about objectivity developed].

Wuthnow asked Berger if he thought there were any points where our discipline took a wrong turn. Berger replied that two come to mind:

1. The 1950s brought on the Lazarsfeldian style of quantitative analysis which emphasizes variables and measurement. As these methods gained hegemony, they limited knowledge to that which is produced statistically.
   
2. In the late 1960s, the cultural revolution led to an infusion of ideology into sociology. The social scientist came to be an agent of movements; rather than a scholar who comments on them.

He continued to pursue this theme of objectivity.

Be wary of any initiatives in sociology where the answer is pre-set by the way the question was raised.

I think Berger's assessment is quite accurate. When asked what we should be doing about this, he suggested sociologists should select the big complex problems for study (inequality, latent effects of pluralism, etc), but they should also stick to being sociologists (rather than movement coordinators or activists). His view is not that we shouldn't study politically contested issues, but only that we allow our positionality to dictate our findings.

Night classess

... are miserable.

There must be someone who is good at managing a 3-hour, one-shot class. If you (dear reader) know of strategies for making a 3-hour course work, feel free to let me know what it is.

Shhhhh, don't tell Michelle

In an article titled Sex and the Single Scientist members of the U.S. House of Representatives pontificated on the difficulty of promoting science:

Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, a Michigan Republican, noted that “pretty girls don’t date nerds.”

I must be an outlier. I'm people tell me I'm a nerd and my wife (who is very pretty) dated me.

*shrug*

Google, Phil Donahue, and the Born Criminal

University of Minnesota Sociologist & Criminologist Christopher Uggen recently blogged about using short video clips to augment lectures. One resource mentioned in that post is Google Video. This is the new service offered by Google serving up video streams of varying lengths on all sorts of things.

Since I'm teaching today about the foundations of positivist criminology and its linkages to Eugenics, I thought I'd see what a search for "Born Criminal" would turn up in the google search engine.

I think either the Google folks need to tweak their algorithm, or there's more to Phil Donahue than meets the eye! .

In the "speaking too soon" department....

I've been reading some of Ceasare Lombroso's translated writings in preparation for my Criminology course this semester. Lombroso is considered the founder of the Italian school of Criminal Anthropology, a program emphasizing crime's biological and hereditary sources.

Though early in his career, he advanced a theory of atavism, he moderated on this view later in his life. In 1899, he published Crime, It's Causes and Remedies, which was translated by H.P. Horton and reprinted in English by Little, Brown, and Company in 1918. In this book, Lombroso tried to synthesize everything he knew about crime. The first chapter is devoted to climatology effects on crime (e.g., extreme heat or cold).

Lombroso argued that extreme cold temperatures mitigate against violence and aggression. I found the following passage some what amusing (having the benefit of more than a century of hindsight.

This explains why, not only despotic Russia, but also the liberal Scandinavian countries, have rarely experienced revolutions (Lombroso 1899 [1918], pg 3).

Well, one out of two ain't bad.

Proposal: A Talking Stick for the Faculty Meeting

So I just got out of a faculty meeting. I never thought I'd be willing to suggest this, but.... Roberts Rules of Order might actually be a good thing.

oy.

Whose side... part 1

Tina at Pub Sociology posted the following today:

My work is in social movements, which on the surface seems just the right fit. We are at the beginning of the planning stages, so really I can shape it in whatever direction will suit my scholarly needs. However, it's very clear that what the community organization needs is data that will support its advocacy agenda: information on inequality, bad treatment of the group in question, structural barriers to success for said group, etc. I can help them collect that data, to be sure, by designing quantitative and qualitative measures, administering surveys, conducting interviews, and so on.

There's something that troubles me about the public sociology discourse [or at least what perceive to be public sociology discourse... perhaps I'm way off here]. What happens when such data do not exist? Or the data that do exist are either ambiguous or antagonistic to a particular political objective?

One possible answer suggests that the sociologist (or public intellectual) will harness his/her tools to discover hidden data. This answer is rooted to the a priori assumption of Truth. E.g., the group in question is treated badly; they do face structural barriers; we need only to document and measure the truth. [Additionally, this answer assumes that social science methodologies are up to the task].

I am currently doing some work on hate crime measurement. One of the most serious challenges we face in this work is sorting through all of the movement claimsmaking activity. Activists on either side marshal their experts (public sociologists?) to show how violence against X people is getting worse (or not getting worse). In doing so both sides gerrymander the definitions to achieve measurements that favor their intended outcomes.

What is a public sociologist to do in such situations? Should she pick a side and join the fray, or stay on the side and try to sort things out? In either case there's an uneasy tension. In one, we may be short selling science (that is, if you believe in the science of social science); in the other we may be undermining a cause which we support.

Just one more turn

By way of Timothy Burke.

The Firaxis team has come out with a new version of Civilization. This is undoubtedly bad news. Somehow I've convinced my wife not to divorce me through version I, II, and III of the series. However Tim suggests that this game is...

...the best in the series, hands-down. Pure silicon crack.

I may have met my match. My only sliver of protection here might be hardware limitations. It looks like the game requires a modern video card and I'm not sure the card in my laptop can handle it.

It's nice to see that there are other smart social scientsts out there who share my addiction to this wonderful game.

Budweiser's can't catch a break

When it rains it pours. First Anheuser Busch attempts to mass market an age old college drinking game, calling it bud pong. Then, the company's public relations department expresses shock and outrage when they learn that some irresponsible drinkers were actually drinking beer, instead of water as the rule book states, while playing the game. Now the game is being pulled from the shelves.

I wonder if they knew that drinking too much water is also dangerous? Perhaps they should get out of the drinking game business all together and focus on other things... Like making a beer that actually tastes good.

Lombroso's Children - Thinking about Criminology part 1

In a previous post, I lamented the sad state of my Criminology class. The students appeared to be bored and unmotivated, while I was unambiguously uninspiring and dry. Unlike my other course (the Criminal Justice System) where I seem to consistently find ways to engage (most of the) class in discussion; criminology is hit or miss. This led me to think about the problem of criminology. I'm convinced that Crim is just a hard class to teach at a 200 (sophomore) level. Elaborations to follow.

Criminology is the study of:

1. The making of laws
   
2. The breaking of laws
   
3. The ways society reacts to law breaking

Nearly every criminology textbook that I have ever seen (a topic for a future post) divides the subject into three areas:

1. Concepts of Criminology and law. This is where the big picture concepts, like what is crime, are introduced and defined. This also is where most texts cover the social science dimensions of criminology, explaining how crime is measured and what some of the baseline trends look like.
   
2. Theories of Crime Causation. Criminology does not have an overarching paradigm. Accordingly, there are multiple contemporary perspectives on what causes crime. These range from individual trait theories (biology, psychology, neuro-psychology) to macro-social pressures (environmental disorder, capitalist economy, etc). This is an area that is terribly challenging to teach because of the diversity of ideas... sometimes I think this comes across to my students as a bunch of meaningless words, names, and flowcharts.
   
3. Types of Crime. Property crime, violent crime, white collar crime, public order crime... (different texts vary beyond the universal violent, property, and public order). This too sometimes seems like a laundry list of facts and figures.

This organizational approach is troublesome. While putting all the theory together might allow us to compare and contrast ideas, focusing on strengths and weaknesses of each approach; in practice it becomes overwhelming to the beginning student. The substantive units on type of crime similarly allows us to examine similarities and differences of criminal behavior, they should be married more closely to the theoretical ideas.

This semester, I tried to resolve (some) of these confusions by joining some substantive units with theoretical units. Introducing Trait Theory & Social Structural Theories in conjunction with violent crime; Choice theory & critical theory with property crime, etc. This does not seem to be working either. I think, perhaps, we try to do too much with the basic introductory criminology course. Of course, at the moment I'm at a loss for what to do about it.

There is one thing that I do believe is fairly certain. People like narrative case studies (e.g., cases presented in a story form). I'm going to try and introduce more stories into the presentation of the content. We'll see if that fosters more discussion.

Now off to prep.

Contemplation on Criminology (preface)

I'm going to start a series of posts about teaching criminology in the coming days. Criminology (at least right now) is the class I least like to teach. While my student evaluations generally have been favorable; I don't have any sense that they are learning much in my class.

tonight's class was an unqualified disaster; and I knew it would be going in. While bad classes are usually attributable to me, I think in this case the problem is equally attributable to the content.

In anycase, I plan to use this blog space to re-think the course and organize it in a way that leaves me satisfied that the content is acceptable, even if the delivery leaves something to be desired.