Departmental programs in sociology today, both for undergraduate and graduate students, tend to ignore or play down the importance of social problems, policy making, applied sociology, and so on. It would be a worthwhile hypothesisand an eminently researchable oneto maintain that sociologists who push for a curricular emphasis on considerations of the practical variety that I have just mentioned, tend to acquire less prestige and rewards both in the discipline and in professional associations. This phenomenon is, perhaps, most marked in the teaching of courses on social problems. It is largely the teachings and the postures of the formalists and the methodological purists that are riding high in sociology today. Although these teachings and postures were developed by men who were active in the sociological controversies of the 1950s, nevertheless they are being most actively purveyed by a younger group of men who constitute the spearhead for those methodological procedures and outlooks that are currently "in', professionally. Many of these younger men have gained positions of power and influence in departments of sociology and, to some extent, in the professional associations of the 1960s.The preceding assertions, of course, reflect convictions which may or may not prove to be sound perceptions. As I have already indicated, they constitute a set of hypotheses each of which lends itself to confirmation or repudiation by standard, statistical procedures. But it would be of value to submit some of the reasons which have prompted the framing of these hypotheses.I have maintained that there is a younger group in sociologywith a partisan, methodological outlook and a purist stance toward what should properly constitute the content of a scientific sociologywhich has established an intellectual "squatter sovereignty" in the province of sociology. The chief offenders make up a sector of sociologists in a certain age-range in the United States, a sector whichfor want of a better term -I have christened "the sheltered generations." These sociologists constitute a group whose real indifference to the social issues and problems of our time and whose refusal to be involved with such matters is, in large part, a result of their generational biography. Please note that I am stressing here the fact that I am refer-Rev. canad.
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