Simultaneously with the changing demographics of students in fields like Philosophy, Sociology, Geography and Planning Departments robust intellectual critiques of analytic, quantitative mathophilic traditions exploded - as much as anything from more or less established white guys on the left of the disciplines/programs. In philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, economic geography and beyond, really powerful arguments were reintroduced or generated for the first time that undermined the coherence of the categories and hierarchies that were the intellectual foundation of the analytic, quantitative and orientalist (yes, I know, its a problematic term... you know what I mean, tho) traditions.
What's analytic philosophy to do with The Frankfurt School, Feyerabend and Feminism? What's quantitative and mathematical sociology to do with irrefutable arguments that race is historically fluid, spatially differentiated and inherently contested, that sex and gender are not dichotomous, that income is not a decent proxy for class, that the census is an inextricably political instrument, that power operates more by making relations invisible than visible and that attitudinal surveys are both polluted by researcher biases and respondents who are uninformed, say what they think they should say and straight out lie? What are adherents to the quantitative analysis of local expressions of Maslowian hierarhies of needs to do with Geertz' rather powerful argument for the absolute necessity of thick description? What are urban planners to do with demands that the undemocratic nature of the translation of their often hard-earned Progressive scientific expertise into policy operates, at best, in a manner that produces more negative unintended consequences than intended positive ones and, at worse, in a fashion that makes it more a tool of power than one of progressive reform in the name of advancing social justice, equality and development?
Its not just that quantitative methods and statistics were used to intimidate and discriminate, its that quantitative researchers felt - and many still feel - like the embattled scientists who have to defend the closest thing their departments/fields have to hard, morally erect, masculine science against the hordes of leftists, women, and people of color committed to soft, intellectually flaccid, femmy "literature". Under these conditions, in my experience, insecurity reigned, faculty and researchers doubled-down on the math/stats and student cohorts were shredded and departmental factions were intensified.
There's nothing soft about Marx, Weber, DuBois, Gramsci, Benjamin, Samuel P. Hays, Mills, Feyerabend, Ollman, Foucualt, Butler, Baran and Swezey, Geertz, O'Connor, Harvey, nor William Foote Whyte, Carol Stack, Jim Clifford, Stuart Hall, Latour and Woolgar and on and on and on... but the discourse of math is hard, ethnography is soft remains and is constantly reinscribed. The quantative sociologists at MSU didn't even want their grad students to have to take contemporary theory... sure that I was going to pollute their pristine minds with detumescent drama and deductivist doodoo. Whereas what I was actually doing was critiquing lousy work on all fronts in sociology by teaching how important - at a theoretical level - it was to really understand the operationalization of variables and the disciplined analysis of results... but, you know, there was no convincing them.
**
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 11:38 PM, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:
>
> ...SNIP... There was a more informal integration system in depts like
> Philosophy, Sociology, and City Planning, and to some degree in
> Architecture.
>
> But even in those department, the subtlies of merit/reward,
> class/difference were just awesome to consider. Take philosophy. Where do
> you suppose women/minority students went? Analytic, inductive theory, and
> science? Hell no. They went for the so-called soft core: continental,
> social, linguistic, and everything but analytics. The remarkably simple
> answer was analytics uses mathematics as an intellectual tool of
> intimidation and discrimination.
>
> ...
********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319