Sociology Wasn’t Removed in Florida. It Was Tested.

In recent weeks, the Florida Board of Governors voted to remove introductory sociology from the state’s general education core, setting off predictable outrage across higher education. Critics have framed the decision as political overreach, even an attack on the social sciences themselves. Supporters see something else: a long-overdue response to a discipline that, in too many classrooms, has drifted from inquiry toward advocacy. The debate is not trivial. At stake is not only sociology’s place in the curriculum, but what it means for any field to deserve a place at all.

I write this not as an outsider to the discipline, but as someone trained in it. I have a degree in sociology. I teach it. I use it. I rely on it. And I value it deeply. At its best, sociology offers powerful tools for understanding institutions, culture, inequality, and social change and the contributions many of its scholars have made to the understanding the social relations are profound. Sociology sharpens our ability to see the world clearly and to ask better questions about how it works.

It is a field worth defending.

But it is also a field that, in many quarters, has lost its balance.

Anne Hendershott, a sociologist at Franciscan University of Steubenville and longtime critic of the discipline’s ideological drift, recently argued in Minding the Campus that Florida’s move goes too far. She acknowledges the field’s ideological narrowing and activist drift, but contends that sociology remains too important to a liberal education to be pushed from the core. In her view, the answer is reform, not retreat.

Hendershott is right about more than many of her allies may want to admit. Sociology, as it is too often taught today, has drifted from its empirical and analytical roots toward something closer to advocacy and overt activism. What was once a discipline grounded in careful observation, competing frameworks, and methodological rigor now frequently presents students with a single moralized lens - one that regularly privileges activist engagement over inquiry and slogans over evidence. That is a profound failure of intellectual responsibility.

But where Hendershott sees retreat, Florida’s move is better understood as a corrective.

The Florida Board of Governors did not act in a vacuum. For years, critics inside and outside the academy have raised concerns about the narrowing of perspectives within core social science courses. These concerns were not met with sustained introspection or meaningful reform. They were dismissed, minimized, or absorbed into the very frameworks being questioned.

When a discipline ceases to take criticism seriously, it invites external pressure. That is not an aberration. That is how institutional accountability works. In a healthy system, institutions correct themselves. When they don’t, oversight follows. Oversight exists precisely for moments like this- when internal self-correction fails and external intervention becomes necessary. The Board of Governors did its job.

In explaining the decision, Chancellor Ray Rodrigues put the point bluntly and with force: “We didn’t murder sociology. Sociology committed suicide.” The phrasing is direct, but the underlying claim is hard to dismiss - that the discipline’s current predicament is, in large part, the result of its own intellectual drift.

Hendershott is correct that understanding society - its institutions, its inequalities, its patterns of association - is essential to a liberal education. But the question is not whether sociology matters. It is whether the version of sociology currently offered in many classrooms is worthy of that central place.

When introductory courses function less as invitations to inquiry and more as exercises in moral affirmation, it is reasonable for policymakers to ask whether students are being taught how to think or whether the course is pre-interpreting the world for them.

Seen in this light, Florida’s move is not the abandonment of sociology. It is a test of it.

Chancellor Rodrigues did not bury the discipline. He issued a challenge. Introductory sociology remains available as an elective, free, in his words, “to compete in the marketplace of ideas.” That is not a death sentence. It is a challenge - and one sociology’s own intellectual tradition should know how to meet.

After all, sociology has long studied how institutions change, how organized constituencies challenge entrenched power, and how reform emerges when old arrangements fail. If sociologists in Florida believe in those frameworks, now is the moment to apply them. Organize the departments. Rebuild the enrollments from the ground up. Revise the syllabi. Teach appropriately and without bias. Make the empirical case for sociology so compellingly that the Board of Governors revises its judgment when the evidence warrants it. The Florida Board used its authority - that authority can be exercised again, in the other direction, when the discipline has shown it deserves the chance to be back in the core.

Too often, criticism is met with defensiveness rather than engagement, with procedural objections rather than substantive reform. That pattern helped produce this moment. It will not resolve it. Hendershott ends her essay warning that Florida has left students “less equipped to recognize” ideology. That may yet prove true. But it is not yet true, and it need not become true. Nothing about the Board’s March 26 vote prevents Florida sociologists from filling those elective seats - except a professional culture too often more comfortable lamenting loss than earning trust.

Teach the course without the ideological scaffolding that invited this intervention. Show what sociology looks like when it is rigorous, pluralist, and genuinely open to competing explanations. That is not a concession to political pressure. That is the discipline at its best and what I try to teach in my own classrooms. And, it is the only argument that will matter to the people with the power to reverse this decision.

Sociology does not have to be what it has become. The tools are still there: the rigor, the competing frameworks, the empirical tradition that made the field worth having in the first place. Use them. Make the case in the open market rather than behind a general education mandate.

In a free society, no discipline is guaranteed its place. Each must justify it through the seriousness of its work. The floor has been removed. This is not a eulogy. It is a dare. Now let’s see whether the discipline is serious enough to answer it.