Saturday, April 02, 2005

more on the sociology rankings

From the US News & World Report rankings of graduate schools, here are the rankings of departments for the subspecialty "Sex & Gender" in sociology:
1. University of California–Berkeley
2. University of California–Santa Barbara
3. University of Wisconsin–Madison
4. University of Washington
5. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
6. Stanford University (CA)
University of Southern California
8. University of Maryland–College Park
9. Indiana University–Bloomington
10. Florida State University
New York University
University of California–Los Angeles
13. Northwestern University (IL)
SUNY–Albany
University of Massachusetts–Amherst
16. CUNY Graduate School and University Center
University of Texas–Austin
18. North Carolina State University
Rutgers State University–New Brunswick (NJ)
University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
As my colleague Myra Ferree pointed out to me this morning, it is especially interesting to note in light of the whole l'affaire L'Summers that there isn't a single Ivy League school in the rankings. I wonder if there how many other subspecialties there are in any discipline where you can have rankings that list *20* departments and still not include any Ivies. If my laptop battery wasn't so low here at Borders, I would research this further.

Update, noon: On campus, I decided to feed my internet addiction by checking the above proposition. In all of the Social Sciences rankings (49 different rankings in History, Political Science, English, Psychology, Criminology, Sociology, and Economics), the only set of rankings besides Sex & Gender not to include a single Ivy league school was "Industrial and Organizational Psychology", and there only 10 schools were ranked instead of 20.

7 comments:

Brady said...

Hey, go USC!

Er, not that I place any stock in these ratings.

Anonymous said...

HOOOOAH!! This is almost orgasmic!

Anonymous said...

maybe becuase of the gender discrimination in Ivy League departments. Try and find Szonja Szelenyi's comments of gender discrimination in her former dept.

nina said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
nina said...

(sorry for the previous blogger delete)

Before jumping to the obvious, mightn't one consider the non-obvious? Most Ivy soc departments are pretty small. Unless you hire a gender superstar (Myra), chances are your department wont be rated favorably in this, since gender is so often just one of a person's research interests. And then there's the lag time: with Julia Adams recently moving to Yale and Michelle Lamont now at Harvard, these rankings may shift next time 'round. Just a thought...I don't really know much about sociology, nor rankings...

Anonymous said...

I would agree with Nina. Subfield rankings are rather suspect, given that they are liked based on the existence of one or two individuals.

Let me know if I am hearing the anonymous blogger and Prof. Freese correctly: the implication is that there is a strong suspicion of discrimination against women in departments of sociology.

I think that's rather bizarre. Sociologists are nearly 90% left/liberal, especially so in the top 50 departments. The gender discrimination sociologists are most likely to engage in, in 2005, is in *favor*, not against, women. Anyone who has sat on hiring committees in a Top 50 department knows that it is a benefit, not a liability, for a potential hire, or tenure applicant, to be female.

Anonymous said...

Here's some anecdotal evidence...evaluate as you will. I just interviewed at an top-ranked Ivy League sociology department where one of the old white males used the word "bimbo" in a conversation and the other used the word "ho". One of these two is openly conservative/Republican. The women in this department are completely outnumbered by the men, and there is no one doing gender studies...