Apple Podcasts | Android | Spotify | Email | RSS | YouTube

How can sociology reclaim its commitment to rigorous inquiry and viewpoint diversity? 

Today, John Tomasi sits with Jukka Savolainen, Ph.D., Sociology professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and the moderator of the Heterodox Academy’s Sociology community. They discuss the discipline's current challenges, including ideological bias and lack of viewpoint diversity, and explore potential paths toward reform.    

Jukka shares his journey into sociology and his decision to leave Finland to pursue a PhD in the United States due to concerns about postmodernist influences in Finnish sociology. He addresses the core aims of sociology, its present state of fragmentation, and the impact of ideological bias on research and discourse. Jukka highlights the importance of empirical evidence and viewpoint diversity while pointing out taboos and restrictions on certain topics within the field.

The conversation also examines the role of external interventions, using the example of the Danish government's restructuring of the sociology department at Copenhagen University in the 1980s, and the more recent actions by the state of Florida.

In This Episode:

• The ideological capture of sociology and its impact on research
• The lack of viewpoint diversity in the field
• The importance of empirical evidence and rigorous methodology
• Efforts to reform sociology from within
• The role of external intervention in addressing systemic problems
• The case of Mark Regnerus's controversial study on same-sex parenting

About Jukka:

Jukka Savolainen is a professor of sociology and criminology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, holding a dual appointment in the departments of Sociology and Criminology & Criminal Justice. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the State University of New York at Albany and an M.Soc.Sci. from the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on criminology, demography, cross-national comparisons, and the sociology of violence. Savolainen has been a vocal critic of ideological conformity in academia, particularly within the field of sociology, and is an active member of Heterodox Academy, where he serves as a moderator of its sociology community. He has also contributed essays to outlets like Quillette and the National Association of Scholars, challenging prevailing narratives on race, policing, and academic freedom. Previously, Savolainen served as Director of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Jukka Savolainen, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Jukka Savolainen: Thanks for having me.

John Tomasi: It's really a pleasure to have you here. I think you and I met a year ago at Chicago at the HXA conference in Chicago.

Jukka Savolainen: That's right.

John Tomasi: And you also, of course, are the leader of our online disciplinary community, HX Sociology. We'll be talking a lot about that. I wonder if you could just begin by just introducing yourself to our audience. You're a sociologist. You were born in Finland. I don't know much more than that. Maybe you were born a sociologist in Finland. Can you tell us something about how you came to be where you are now and your story?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah. I wasn't quite born a sociologist, but I was a pretty early adopter in a sense that my dad is an attorney and I was retired, but he had a lot of sociology friends. And I guess he worked for, maybe he was in a board of the Finnish equivalent of the Census Bureau of Statistics Finland, and he would bring in all these kind of charts and graphs. And I was really fascinated from an early age that you could study people's opinions and happiness and their standard of living and those type of things. So I really was always kind of introduced early to that. So when I did end up taking summer university courses when I was still in high school and anthropology and sociology, I ended up majoring in sociology at Helsinki University and ended up moving all the way to the PhD. So I've always been a sociologist.

John Tomasi: You did your PhD in Finland?

Jukka Savolainen: No, I did it in State University of New York, Albany. Albany, New York. So actually, kind of related to probably to our theme here, I basically, I was on track of doing a PhD in Finland and doing like kind of medical sociology, quantitative research on that in a good group. And ultimately, I left Finland because I escaped what I would consider this sort of a postmodernist turn in Finnish sociology, the sort of continental French theory and the kind of stuff that I know if you're familiar with Alan Sokal's Hoax, where that he, I think he dubbed it fashionable nonsense. So I escaped for America, honestly, to do a PhD in sociology that was more empirically grounded and quantitative and believed in things like objective science and even theoretical progress.

John Tomasi: And where do you teach now?

Jukka Savolainen: I teach now at Wayne State University. I'm in two departments in criminology and sociology.

John Tomasi: I want to go back a bit to what you were saying, the young Jukka, when you were first watching, looking at the charts and things your father was bringing home. Can you just tell us a bit about what sociology is? What are the main questions that sociology asks? What are the methods they use? Describe to us what a well-functioning sociological discipline might look like. Because, as you know, we're going to be talking about some of the malfunction.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah.

John Tomasi: But more important, we're going to be talking about some of the ways, some of the work that you've been doing and others have been doing to reform sociology. But let's just begin with the platonic form of sociology. What is sociology and why is it important?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah. So, probably would differ based on currently practicing sociology. You might get different answers, which is already kind of an indication of specialty of sociology. It's that it's very non-paradigmatic, that there's a lot of stuff that goes on under sociology.

John Tomasi: But you're asking me, so my… So, you're saying there's different methods that are thought of. There are different epistemologies, I would imagine, and so on, right now.

Jukka Savolainen: So, sociology is notoriously fragmented, I guess I would say. But if you're asking me, so why I always stuck with sociology, I actually looked into all kinds of different majors. Even I was a little bit frustrated with sociology. I looked into economic history and social history. I looked into, I was very interested in philosophy, but I wanted to do something, I guess, empirical. You know, I still love philosophy and social psychology, those type of things. But I think the sociology, to me, is, I guess, integrative, general social science that is supposed to look at big, big questions. I'll give you an example. You may be, many listeners may be familiar with Joseph Henrich, weirdest people in the world, this argument about weird. I teach his book in my sociology theory seminar because, to me, that's a perfect example of what my vision of sociology would be. He's actually, in some ways, very Weberian. Max Weber is a preeminent classic of sociology, although he himself, of course, wasn't trained in sociology. But his Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism is a cultural explanation of emergence of this economic system in a certain region of Europe. And Henrich's explanation is of how sort of Western mentality and Western mindset and institutions evolved in a particular type of environment by a different kind of processes. And he uses anthropological data, he uses behavioral, economical experiments, he uses historical archival record survey data, and he asks these big questions using it. So, to me, that captures what I think sociology should be a lot of the time. But I don't think it's like that so much in these days.

John Tomasi: So, let's talk a bit about that. How is, what's sociology like these days? You said, I've heard you say a couple of things. You're saying that, I've heard you say that sociology, in its ideal form, perhaps, is capable of studying big questions about the nature of human social interaction. It is the study of society, most generally, I mean, literally. But you're also saying that it's a discipline that is very fractured in terms of the different methodologies it uses. That could be a productive thing. If you have some economic tools and some historical tools and some philosophical tools, you could bring that together to understand the human condition, for example. But let's talk about sociology as practice today. What's it like as a field?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah. So, I would say that the issue that I have with sociology, among many things, is that it's more or less openly, I would almost say that as follows. Whether you are a critical of a present-day sociologist or you're sympathetic to it, both sides would agree that there's a lot of ideological or political bias. The first half would say that it's a bad thing because we ought to be a science of social life. The other half would say it's a good thing because we're supposed to be advancing what Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist, describes as the sacred project of American sociology. He wrote a book about it, and this is a preeminent, very meritorious sociologist. Christian Smith, in 2014, he wrote this book where he basically describes that the mainstream of American sociology is a kind of a political activist project of the left-wing persuasion, obviously, that masks itself as a neutral science. And was that a critique of sociology, or was he saying that the mask is appropriate? Right. I think it was, most people would look at it as a critique of sociology. He is, incidentally, his sociology is of religion, so he's probably more trying to be neutral about it and just understanding and maybe arguing that we ought to be honest about it and own it if that's what we want to do. But no, he's critical of that. He definitely was suggesting there ought to be a return to a more neutral and scientific approach.

John Tomasi: I don't know that book. Okay. So forgive me, but just help me a little bit then with the ideas. Was he saying that there was a lack of viewpoint diversity within sociology? Is that central to the thesis?

Jukka Savolainen: Absolutely.

John Tomasi: When we track viewpoint diversity on the dimension of ideology, we find that sociology is one of the disciplines that is most imbalanced between people who identify politically left and politically right. At HXA, of course, we care about viewpoint diversity on a variety of dimensions. But that dimension of ideology is a very important one to us. And sociology, from our studies at least, suggests that it's one of the most extremely unbalanced fields. So in that context, what do you see about viewpoint diversity? What do you see about viewpoint diversity in sociology? How does that affect the study of society?

Jukka Savolainen: Well, it creates taboos, topics that you are not allowed to touch, or you are supposed to talk about certain things only from a certain perspective. There's a recent article by two excellent heterodox sociologists, also members of Heterodox Academy, John Iceland and Eric Silver from Penn State University, where they point out how the research on inequality, especially racial inequality, is entirely dominated by this sort of systemic racism type of perspective or sort of a critical race theory approach that you cannot consider other factors that might explain these outcomes, like just pure class differences, educational attainment, and those type of things. You cannot consider cultural differences in socialization, which in other fields are pretty okay.

John Tomasi: It's rather ironic that one couldn't use class analysis to talk about race.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, that it's all about the kind of a sort of white supremacy type of thing. So I would say overall that sociology, when I arrived in graduate school, there were more vibrant discussions about like, even I think it was in the 70s, but William Julius Wilson had the declining significance of race book, and that became a little bit, fell out of favor. But his later research looked at the dynamics of deindustrialization and family disruption as causes of sort of underclass formations. These type of topics are now sort of taboo, or even like criminology or crime, which is my area. You don't see serious efforts to explain these days in sociological literatures, why is there so much violence, lethal violence, for example, happening in this country, in poor communities? How do you address it? Instead, the focus has shifted into how bad the police are, how terrible the criminal justice system is, and so on. So it's become much more of this sort of a social justice advocacy kind of problem, discipline, rather.

John Tomasi: And can you say something about, I want to hear, I'd love to talk with you about your experience running HX Sociology. How'd you first find out about Heterodox Academy? When did you join? And how did that lead you toward taking the lead? You're the leader, I think, of that community.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, I think the term is moderator, although I like leader.

John Tomasi: Maybe the supreme leader.

Jukka Savolainen: You can work on that, but I think it's the moderator of the, yeah. Good luck leading our Heterodox people.

John Tomasi: But just tell us a bit about how you came to Heterodox Academy, and then also tell us about that community.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, absolutely. So I have, I'm not sure how old Heterodox Academy is, but I think I joined.

John Tomasi: We'll be 10 years old this summer.

Jukka Savolainen: Oh, yeah. So I've been definitely part of it from the jump. I've been to all the meetings, the first two in New York and Denver and this one. So I'm a, and obviously because I care about these things. It probably speaks to my, probably speaks to my interest. As I mentioned, I was interested in philosophy, particularly philosophy of science. And so I very much appreciate the importance of the norms of research and such that these are things I care about. So yeah, I've been a kind of hardcore member for a long time.

John Tomasi: And what about HX Sociology?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah.

John Tomasi: When did that start? How did it start? I should just say to our listeners that Heterodox Academy sponsors, we have members all over the world. We sponsor campus-based communities, 74 of those now in the U.S., Canada, and in England. And we also sponsor a series of online virtual communities, some based on geography, like HX Sweden, HX New Zealand, HX Far East, HX New York, interestingly, HX Canada. But we also have disciplinary communities, and HX Sociology is one of those in that category. Can you say a bit about, were you there for the formation of HX Sociology? How did you get involved?

Jukka Savolainen: Not as such. I think I've known about it, but I think it's been, had been dormant for a good number of years. I was active in another community, Heterodox Academy Writers Group, which had some sociologists.

John Tomasi: The HX Writers Group.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but one reason why I probably decided to step in as a moderator, I think I was asked by a member of HXA. But, and I agreed to, to, to jump into that leadership role, because I think it was, not only was dormant, but I sensed that there was a pent up demand. I was meeting more and more sociologists, more and more sociologists were joining the organization. And there were all kinds of other synergies we can talk about that, that, you know, I'm not usually a leader of groups or organizational person, but I thought this was important. And, and so, so sure enough, so we, we have been, meeting and communicating, and, and, planning things. we have about, I'm told over 230, sociologists who are members and, and there's a shorter mailing list that I have about 70 plus.

John Tomasi: Are they, are they from all over the world? Are they mostly in North America?

Jukka Savolainen: Yes, that's, they're mostly from North America, but we have someone from Italy. We have a Swedish, professor from Stockholm. We have, UK people. We have a very active Canadian and we have some Dutch people and, and so on. so yeah, it's international, which makes it a challenge to, to organize the zoom, zoom meetings.

John Tomasi: And is, is, is, do people speak English?

Jukka Savolainen: Yes.

John Tomasi: And, how often do you meet?

Jukka Savolainen: Well, we probably meet, the idea is probably to meet like every other month or something like that, you know, and, and we just have one, one meeting coming up. And then, we also are meeting, here in, in New York, head of the, the, the main conference of Heterodox Academy. We're meeting here and having a small symposium, about these issues. And we have also reserved a little session, during the meeting.

John Tomasi: That's right. As I, as I understand, you're coming here to the Segal Center to do a meeting of the sociologists before going to Brooklyn, to our main HXA conference in June. tell us, tell me more about the other synergies you mentioned a moment ago. You mentioned there, but other synergies within sociology. What were you thinking of?

Jukka Savolainen: Well, one important, very accidental, I guess, development, I would say. Accidentally, in a sense, it wasn't planned by any of us who were involved, is that, there's a, well-respected, journal of sociology called Theory and Society, which was, and I have no prior, involvement in this journal, but.

John Tomasi: There was some kind of scandal with that journal.

Jukka Savolainen: It wasn't a scandal. It was, it was a dysfunction, I guess I would say. It was a, well, scandal in the sense of how the transition took place, but.

John Tomasi: An academic scandal.

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, you could say that, depends on the perspective. From what I understand, and I think I know, know the details pretty well, it was a very, poorly functioning journal in terms of just, just the actual management and the, edit, excuse me, the publisher finally got fed up with the status quo and was seeking, new, new blood and, and end up through process.

John Tomasi: Because it had been the same editor, editorial group for a very long, for decades, for decades.

Jukka Savolainen: Decades, exactly. Yeah, and they apparently were very unresponsive, but there's a statement about, it's in Retraction Watch, if you want to read it, the, the publisher, was frustrated with attempts to renew the, the, the, the revitalize or, or fix the problems with the journal. So they end up, I don't know through what process, end up, nominating, two new editors, Jonathan Turner, who's a, a veteran of, of sociology, who has been, criticizing this sort of this, shall we say, this sort of activist turn into sociology. He's in favor of more scientific and the kind of sociology that I was describing, earlier. What meant like empirical, empirical, empirical and theoretically ambitious and sort of almost like a cumulative science type of thing is, is, is what I understand his vision is. And, and then, and his, his student, Kevin McCaffree, are the new editors and to my, so I didn't know anything too much about this, but they asked me to join the editorial board. They asked, John Iceland and Eric Silver and Steve Pinker, a lot of people, all HXA members, Cory Clark, all this sort of, some of them are well-known and, and, and, and members of Heterodox Academy. So it's still, it's not like a Heterodox Academy journal, but by any means, I think it's last time I checked was like one third, maybe we're members. So that's not a requirement, but the point is that it's very open and they already have published very interesting stuff. It's not, it's, I want to emphasize it's open to all kinds of contributions, but it's definitely one of those outlets. So it's a nice thing to have a, an enthusiastic, HX, a HX sociology group, and then combine that with a, an actual outlet that's sympathetic to these perspectives. So that's, that's the sort of a type of synergy that I'm talking about.

John Tomasi: Well, that's interesting where we often talk, the team and I about different ways HXA can have impact and we have focus on our, our main work focuses on campuses and improving the campus culture. We're seeking a campus culture for open inquiry. And there's a lot more I could say about that, of course, but we often are interested as well in disciplines and how disciplines can be reformed. Can you give us any, I mean, sociology, as I said, is, is sort of infamous for being ideologically, uniform. Do you see other, we described now this example of a journal where it sounds like the impetus came from the, was it Springer who, who, who, which journal group was it?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah, it was, Springer.

John Tomasi: Yeah. And where it was, was that who decided to make the journal more viewpoint diverse?

Jukka Savolainen: I, it was the editors. So I, I think, I think this is my interpretation is that Jonathan Turner, they turned into him because he had published so much, many books about sociological theory. So he had the status as a, preeminent sociological theorist. So maybe had a relationship with the publisher. I don't know, but, but it, it sort of, turned into that, maybe because in order to, to, to pursue that type of vision of sociology, you want to have folks that are, happen to be also, also members of Heterodox Academy.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating. And, and how influential is that journal, journal in the sociology?

Jukka Savolainen: So it, it, it really took a turn, a kind of 180 change. It was pretty established, within a, what you would call theoretical sociology, more of a, not so empirical. It was, established by Alvin Gouldner, who's a kind of a legendary sociologist, and, who passed away. and, so, so then I would turn into, in the car, in the context of this change, the sociological mainstreams, the folks who were part of this journal, they openly were saying that we're going to boycott this journal.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Jukka Savolainen: And then there was a lot of, vitriol directed at this new leadership, you know, especially because they were members of Heterodox Academy, especially because they published in, so I published pieces in Quillette and those type of, contrarian or Heterodox. So that's in sociological mainstream, that means that you're a hardcore conservative, if not a fascist, if you're, if you're doing this type of stuff. So, so there was a lot of that type of country. So, so I think.

John Tomasi: But that, can I, can I interrupt you to say that that's, but that's your, we're, we're examining, we're describing the views of social, professional sociologists who take the view that what they're doing is in some sense is political ideologically based.

Jukka Savolainen: Right. Right.

John Tomasi: So if you're not with us political ideologically, we're going to attack you. If you were with us ideologically, we wouldn't attack you.

Jukka Savolainen: Sure.

John Tomasi: Whereas what we're trying to talk about, what we're trying to move is away from ideology to actually something like regular science, real normal science.

Jukka Savolainen: Right. But I would say that the norms of regular normal science, norms that, paradoxically or, enough were most famously formulated by American sociologists, Robert K. Merton, Columbia University is famous for formulating the four norms of science, organized skepticism, disinterestedness, communism, and I forget the fourth one is. Basically, it's a, he's a sociologist, but, but if you advocate for these type of values, in contemporary sociology, you, you know, those are sort of, questionable, maybe even right wing values.

John Tomasi: So let me, let me just read from the wall across from the HXA way, a set of five norms, is make your case with evidence, be intellectually charitable, be intellectually humble, be constructive, be yourself. Are those norms of sociology? Are those recognizable?

Jukka Savolainen: these are, these are, I would work across this. I would, I would say that those would very much capture what's missing in, in mainstream American sociology, especially making the case with evidence is, is, the issue is, and of course it's not only sociology, a lot of social sciences have the same issue is that, what I've observed and what I've written about is that evidence, requirements or standards of rigor for evidence depend on what, what the, what the results are. Like, for example, it's a famous case, okay, in sociology from 2012, where Mark Regnerus is another member of Heterodox Academy, a full professor of sociology in the University of Texas, published a study that suggested, based on the data, that, children that had been raised in, at least part of the time with a, in a, non-heterosexual family situation, like parents had, you know, maybe gay, gay marriage, this was before gay marriage, by the way, had some, suffered some more negative outcomes, if you will. So, so basically there was a negative association between growing up with a same sex parent and parents first. And, and so of course this was controversial in, in sociology and there was a whole movement trying to cancel him, trying to investigate the journal. And there was no scientific misconduct. There was a thorough investigation, but simply because the results were unappealing and contrary to a favored narrative. And by the way, I mean, I, I certainly, I, I, it was, it was a study, important topic, and I think you ought to be able to, report them, but, but folks in sociology thought it was so harmful that they tried to suppress and punish, that type of behavior. And that's such a nice example because that's our number one on our HXA is make your case with evidence. This is an example of this, I don't know, I don't know the study, but from your describe, it's an example of a person discovering something about the social world. Right. And that fact you described that people growing up, I'm going to change it, but people, children raised in same sex families have less positive outcomes. If that's, if that is a robust fact, there's evidence for that. That raises all kinds of interesting, opens all kinds of interesting avenues or critique, justice-based critiques. You could ask, why is that the case? What does it mean? If there's no Marriage Equality Act yet, maybe that would explain it. So you can, so you can, you can take that fact and argue for progressive solutions. You could do it conservative ones as well. You could do it lots of, it's just a fact. Absolutely. So that's why we like, that's why make your case with evidence as a way of saying, let's talk together on the basis of a thing out there in the world that we can both hold onto. It doesn't spin that this conclusion is any particular direction. It's a fact that we can address. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a single study. I know we shouldn't put too much with single study, kind of a, one type of survey. And, and so there was no tolerance for just entertaining the idea that, any given scholar might find with any given data set something that didn't exactly fit the narrative and it was needed to be, extinguished from the literature.

John Tomasi: It's fascinating because obviously one could take that study and use that as a basis for the claim that there should be more support given. Absolutely. But there's all kinds of ways we can go, as we said. can you say a little bit more about HX sociology? What's, what's your experience being part of that group? has it, has it, do you see it? Do you see, do you see sociology as a discipline that can be helped, can be returned to the, to a better, to a better way? Yeah. And can it happen from within? I want to talk to you in a few minutes about governmental interventions, which are all in the news these days. I know you've been involved with some of those or observed some of those, but before we talk about the governmental interventions, and we'll talk about them abroad as well as in the US. Yeah. But before we do that, just say a bit more about what you see as prospects for changing the discipline as professors from the inside. What do you see? Yeah, I think, so I was very, positively surprised about the enthusiasm based on those initial, initial, meetings with, with the group and HX Sociology group. this already to prove that there's a, hunger and desire and, critical mass of people who think a, that we have a problem and we've got to do something about it, whether or not you can do it internally. I went one, one example that I can give you is that in some people, think we need new organizations.

Jukka Savolainen: Maybe the journal that we, we, we happened upon is a, is an, is a new avenue for something like that. But in Germany, they actually had similar issues with sociology and they established a kind of a rival, more scientific. I think it's called something like the Academie for sociology or something like that. And, and they're trying to, you know, I think they have something like something similar happened in psychology back in the day too. so, so yeah, can it happen? My, my own, I've been around, for a while now and, and, I think, I think we need some, shall we say, external intervention. And the example that comes to mind, from my, my, my past, all the way from, 1980s, that I, I, I would, I would like to hold up as a, as a, as a good model potentially is that in the 1980s, the Danish government, their ministry of education, decided to, they were, frustrated with the direction of sociology in Denmark, specifically at Copenhagen university, which had two sociology departments at the time. When we're talking about Denmark and, and, and, and Copenhagen, what you have to understand is that at the time, a nation of some 4 million people. And so Copenhagen is the center of learning. So when you, so what they did is that they, they, they appointed an external Nordic, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, established empirical sociologists with international reputations to review, take a look at the department and they ended up decided, decided that this is way too far gone. It's become this sort of Marxist hotbed of non-empirical speculative esoteric theorizing. And of course the government was worried about training people who could do analyze social data, you know, Danish welfare state. There's a lot of these types of things that you need to need to have, people who understand this. So they end up dismantling, the sociology department for a couple of years and rebuilding it from, from scratch in the early nineties. And, and look, just fast forward to present day. It's one of the most, I, one of the most impressive sociology department that I can think of.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating. So let me just, let me share, let me take some of those pieces apart to be sure I understand what happened. So there was, two, there were two departments in sociology, in Copenhagen that both that have been, let's say, captured by a particular ideology, an ideology that is sort of infamously not, evidence-based. It has a certain self-replicating way of done badly. Certainly Marxism can lead to this self-replicating cycle where everything proves itself without any kind of possibility of external, impingement coming in to change the direction of the conclusions. And what interests me there is that two things. One is that the government cared enough to get involved. I want to know about how that happened because we're seeing in the U S the government now care, caring, if that's the right word, very much about to get involved. But then they also, it seems that they made a decision to, to get other experts in sociology to conduct the reviews. There wasn't just politicians taking it upon themselves to go in with us two by four and smash the place up. Rather, they got some experts together. And did, do you know what, how close to that are you? Or do you, do you, do you know that what happened? It was the eighties, I know. Right. But, did, did, did, did, did the government, that those, did that board hire new people? They put those departments into receivership?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't, yeah, this is something that I've, there's an, the history. Yeah. I don't know the history in detail. I, I, I suspect it was definitely a sort of centrist right conservative government in Denmark at the time, which of course, centrist, government in Denmark means like it's somewhere in the left side of the democratic party. But nevertheless, I'm sure there had been, myriads of complaints about this sort of, sort of a neglect of scientific integrity in this air area. And of course it's part of the Nordic. So I think it was, it's a known, known, known thing. And I think there was a genuine concern as I indicated that, this is a waste of resources and this could be an important thing. and sure enough, Denmark does have a very good social science, tradition. so, so they were worried about probably all about that. I don't know how they decided, but I think it's legitimacy of having this, this sort of, you know, like part of the Nordic family, some of them were, based in America, some of the, I think that one of the, one of the academics, but, but, but I think they chose people who were, represent the type of, so there was this, you know, the, the, the government chose, of course, people who represented the type of sociology that they, you know, I think one of them was recently passed away a Swedish sociology. I'm gonna say Henke Varys has a Finnish name, does this sort of welfare state research, you know, and so on. So definitely not, not right-wing sociologists, but some sociologists who I think were cared about concrete social science research, you know, and, and I don't know too much about the hiring bodies. No, they gradually built it, gradually built it. And, and like I said, there are some very, very excellent. I can tell you that this right now, there's a Christopher Carlson is a, he's a professor there. And he's, he, I like him for a lot of reasons. He's won a lot of awards for, for methodological innovations, but he's also an editor of one hopeful sign in sociology. There's a journal called sociological science and they are in the avant-garde of adhering to the open science principles of reproducibility and transparency and those types of things, which is very rare in sociology. so, so, so anyway, so that's a little side side point, but, but that's, that's as far as I know is what happened in Copenhagen by and large. And it's interesting because you said that as I understood you, that the government was concerned about, about those departments producing students with an education that could be useful to society and themselves. Absolutely. and I also just want to mention that, that, that process of there being external experts, evaluating the department, that's very familiar to me. I've been taught in the U S for most of my life, every five years or so we would have in different departments. I was parts of, we'd have external examiners come in, external reviewers.

John Tomasi: They'd come in, they'd spend a few days talking to people. They would do some polling about research reputations of the people in the, in the department. Then they'd write a report, which would go to the administration and the administration would typically choose half of the external examiners and the department would choose half, but they all have to be from high powered departments and well-respected people. So that kind of a process of departmental review, it goes on regularly, just in normal, normal academic life. I think people often don't realize that we often think that departments are just completely self-governing to do whatever they want to do. So many of them do go bad, but there's this kind of interesting already existing structure that with some tweaking, perhaps could be made, made a bit more muscular, be made a bit more effective to be made. They can be some work done to the selection procedure that people doing the evaluating to actually maybe follow, ask them questions like, do this department encourage people to make case with their evidence? Do they encourage intellectual humility?

Jukka Savolainen: You can, we can imagine a variety of ways in which what you would describe happening in the 80s could happen in contemporary universities. Yeah. Why? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lesson from this the Copenhagen or the Danish, Danish model in the sense that, so we, there's a lot of talk about these days about this sort of tension between government, government intervention and the academic freedom. And, and I would argue that obviously in a, in a technical way, the, the, the Danish model, the Danish government violated, I guess, academic freedom in a sense that they, they just, they, they unilaterally nominated chosen, experts who they, who adhere to their, this sort of a vision of sort of more concrete and practical and empirical sociology. so they could have chosen some other experts, right. Who would have probably said, oh, they're doing great. They're in there with the, with the, with the post, post Marxist theorizing type of things. So, so there was this government intervention with a certain perspective, but, but I would argue that it's justified. And even in our contemporary situation, it's justified when there's sustained evidence of, of, of violating the, the mandate, violating the norms of, of, of good science. And actually, I want to give you, if you have time, I'll give you an example of, of how, the American sociological. So, so, so for, for listeners, I don't think we've covered this yet, but the state of Florida, I want to ask you about, yeah, the state of Florida, decided to, it was a year or two ago, to, to remove, sociology, the intro sociology course, it was called principles of sociology. I think it was three years ago. Okay. Yeah. Three, remove from the general studies curriculum, which means that, that sociology was no longer eligible for the, or any, for students who need to satisfy the social science general studies requirements. Sociology was not, no longer eligible.

John Tomasi: It was no longer required. So you'd no longer had, no longer had to take sociology.

Jukka Savolainen: No, it was more than it was. So you're required to do some social, some number of credits in social sciences, right? And sociology was one of the options, but now sociology was no longer an option. So you cannot, you know, you get, cannot get the exposure. So it wouldn't count. You can take a sociology course if you want, but it won't count. Absolutely. Which means in effect that a lot fewer students will take sociology. Huge, huge by huge margin. So, so the state legislature did that in Florida. It wasn't, it wasn't part of the Stop WOKE Act. I remember it happened a little bit before, but it was still, it was part of the same sure political moment. Absolutely.

John Tomasi: When the government was saying what's going on and they chose sociology. Is this an interesting to me? Like how do they, how do they zero in on sociology to remove that one?

Jukka Savolainen: Absolutely. Well, that's, so it should say something. If you want to, choose, the sort of the quote unquote, the woke is disciplined and why did they zero in on sociology? but the, and often sociology is kind of reacted to that kind of flattering. It's also because we're so dangerous and edgy and radical that they can't handle it. But, but I think, so what, what, what, what the, rationale was that they, you know, the, the education commissioner of Florida at the time, maybe still many ideas said something to the effect that sociology has been hijacked by, by left-wing radicals and, and so on. So what I was going to say is that American sociological association, of course, responded as they should have to this, to this, challenge and of course denied and said, we are a pure science of social life, interested in causes and consequences of, all kinds of, and relevant fields like agriculture and, and, and finance and healthcare that that's, that's my direct, quotes from, from, from the, and then when you fast forward nine months later, it's August, 2024 and it's the American sociological association annual meeting. And the whole theme is something about intersectional, not intersectional solidarities and, and, and, and there's a liberatory praxis and how the president of the society explained the theme and said how this is all about how we need to engage in social activism, social reform. And so, so, so on the one hand, the, you know, when people are watching and when you're, when, when the, when the conservatives are, are, are, attacking you, we are a pure science, but then we are having our own party and, and, and bonding with ourselves. We are, an activist organization. And this, by the way, is something that Christian Smith in his book, the, predicted 10 years before, because he said exactly the same thing that for the outwardly sociology presents itself as this sort of science of social life, but inwardly it pursues this activist, what he called the sacred project of American sociology.

John Tomasi: It's amazing. It's amazing. Do you have other, do you have other thoughts about your, your, your, your, I mean, you're not, not quite an American. You have.

Jukka Savolainen: I am an American.

John Tomasi: Well, are you an American?

Jukka Savolainen: I'm a dual citizen.

John Tomasi: You're a dual citizen. I still think you have a bit of an outsider's eye, set the eyes on what's happening in the U S you're, we've been seeing over the last few months, the Trump administration bringing some, I'm not sure what the right phrase is, tough love to universities or certainly toughness, whether or not there's any love there. I'm not so sure. What do you think about the prospects for reforming universities and the government's play a role? You're, you're so active in, in a disciplinary based reform efforts through HX, HX sociology and the other work you do. You've seen some successes through, professors doing this on their own, calling, starting new journals, for example, or change or taking over journals as it were, and supporting new journals. what do you, what prospects, and you have an example of the government being effective from your own historical experience. What do you, what do you see in this particular moment from, with your, with your Nordic eyes?

Jukka Savolainen: Yeah. So I, overall, the simple answer would be that there's no question. These, these problems have been going on for a long time. That's why Heterodox Academy exists. I haven't seen much progress prior to this. In fact, as far as the sort of ideal, ideological capture and, and there's sort of things, things along those lines, the DEI that has only grown stronger. and, I used to teach at Michigan and the New York Times did a big article about the DEI in Michigan and my son is just graduating from there. So nothing has been happening. so we need a jolt. We need an external is the, is the one that the Trump administration is proposing, the most sophisticated one. No, but I'm, I'm sort of this, I'm reflecting on this fact that this sort of, ideological excesses and, whether it's about affirmative action or DEI or in my area of social science, the biases in social science research or humanities, they are now costing. It seems like they're, costing to, grant funding related to STEM research and medical sciences and so on. And, and in, in, in some level, this seems like unfair and inappropriate that, that why should, why should they suffer? But part of me thinks, and I've been saying this for many, many years, honestly, when I've been observing this is like, I've been in this DEI kind of conferences and I've been pushing back and it's the STEM people as well as everybody else who are not caring about these clear violations of academic norms that have been going on. So in some ways I said, say, we say that this is a result of you not protesting, you not, you letting this slide by and you virtue signaling you, so that's where we are. So I, I have, this is not surprising to me, honestly. That's fascinating. any last, any last word you want to, you want to give us about sociology and the, and the, and the future for sociology? Well, I guess my last word would be that if there's a sociologist, or sociology adjacent person listening, please, join, join us. And, with Heterodox Academy, you have to also separately join the sociology community. So you'll get to, come to our mailing list. So we have a lot of, there's a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of people who are interested in doing things. And so just join the group. Jukka, your, your work for us is just, is really wonderful.

John Tomasi: And we, we, we appreciate and admire so much the way you go about doing it. You have such a good spirit and you're also so principled on these topics. And we just really admire that. thanks for, thanks for appearing on Heterodox Out Loud. Thanks so much.