“Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists.” So says the Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. Accordingly, one move in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s higher-education putsch has been the removal of “The Principles of Sociology” from the list of courses that satisfy the general-education requirement at Florida’s 40 public colleges and universities.
As would be expected, the American Sociological Association objected. Sociology, the group explained, “is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior,” and to omit it would be “a failure of civics education.”
I agree about the importance of sociology and its place in the general-education curriculum. But the discipline seems to be doing all it can to prove DeSantis right.
Consider, for example, the American Sociological Association’s Resolution for Justice in Palestine, which was recently adopted by a 59-percent majority in a membership vote.
The resolution begins with 17 “Whereas” clauses, associating Israel with various unsavory regimes and wars, while reciting casualty figures in Gaza that have been questioned as inaccurate and unreliable. There is not a single mention of Hamas or its October 7 massacre, as though Israel had invaded Gaza without provocation and for no purpose other than to inflict casualties. Coming from an organization that claims to study “the social causes and consequences of human behavior,” the list of predicates is remarkably one-sided and monocausal, composed in the style of an advocacy group rather than a scholarly association.
Following the “Whereas” paragraphs, the sociologists’ statement includes only two actual resolutions. The first calls for “an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.” The second “supports members’ academic freedom, including but not limited to defending scholars’ right to speak out against Zionist occupation.”
Shockingly, the resolution does not call for the release of Israeli hostages, which is obviously a necessary condition of any cease-fire. Even Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and no friend of Israel, included the release of Israeli hostages in her own cease-fire demand.
Within Israel, many hostages’ families are among the loudest voices calling for a cease-fire. They hold weekly protests in Tel Aviv and other cities, demanding the government negotiate a deal with Hamas, and asking other countries to bring pressure as well. Any meaningful attempt to encourage a cease-fire would at least reference the role of the hostages’ families, which would require seeing them as human beings. To the sociologists supporting this resolution, however, it seems that Israelis exist only as objects of condemnation.
It is possible to despise the Netanyahu government and support a Gaza cease-fire (as I do) without calling for it to be “immediate and permanent.” An organization comprising “sociologists and kindred professionals who study, among other things, war and peace,” as the ASA describes itself, ought to grasp that a stable cease-fire must be negotiated between the belligerents, or mediated by third parties, with each side making compromises.
And although they are not historians, some sociologists must surely be aware that there was a permanent cease-fire in place as recently as October 6, 2023, which Hamas unilaterally violated the next morning on the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood took the lives of about 1,200 people. Hamas raped women, killed children, and seized over 200 hostages.
Moreover, Hamas has vowed to repeat the October 7 attack “time and again until Israel is annihilated,” which makes the very idea of a “permanent” cease-fire impossible.
A less extreme statement, unmarred by relentless anti-Israelism, might even have convinced others to join the call for a cease-fire.
Scholars who had actually considered the stakes in the Israel-Hamas war would have known of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2728, which demanded a “sustainable cease-fire” and “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages” (italics added). Scholars who purport to study “conflict resolution and violence” while using “empirical research and logic to assess the accuracy of claims made about the social world” should realize that pushing unattainable demands is no way to resolve conflicts.
Finally, there is the defense of the “right to speak out against Zionist occupation,” by scholars who, the statement asserts, “have been silenced, intimidated, punished, and harassed.”
Defending academic freedom is a core responsibility of every scholarly association. The ASA’s commitment to free expression would be more credible, however, if the statement had managed to spare a word for the Israeli academics who have been excluded from conferences and publications by the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, the writers who have been deplatformed, or the Jewish students on many campuses who have been bullied, blockaded, and threatened by the Free Gaza encampments.
The leaders of the American Sociological Association have denounced DeSantis for “politicizing education.” They do not seem able to perceive their own pronounced turn from scholarship to partisan advocacy.
The ASA could have issued a powerful statement in defense of Gazans — one that supported academic freedom, adhered to universal scholarly values, and recognized some complexity in the Israel-Hamas war. That would have buttressed the discipline’s claim to be “a crucial component of civic literacy.” A less extreme statement, unmarred by relentless anti-Israelism, might even have persuaded others to join the call for a cease-fire, including some of the 41 percent of members who voted against the resolution.
Instead, the ASA’s refusal to simply acknowledge the humanity of Israelis has reinforced DeSantis’s accusation that sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists.
