More from the Sosc Department

Associate Professor Michael Hill who has been in New Zealand for approximately 4 months has been nominated for the position of Chairman of the Sociology Department and pending the approval of the University Council will take up this position. He was the sole nominee after several of the staff members turned down the nomination.

The Staff Meeting was held in the May holidays. Some staff members were not present and the student reps were also not present owing to an alleged oversight to which an apology has been made.

The point remains: Prof. Hill was appointed in an excessively hurried manner - "it was rush job" admitted one of the staff who was present at the meeting.

Why is a person who has been here only this year asked to become Chairman of a department which is fragmented and under some internal strain? How is Prof. Hill expected to carry out his duties when his extremely short time in the department means that he has not come to know the complications of that department (and there are many)?

Why did no-one else run for the position when any staff member is eligible? The suggestion is that no-one wants the position because it is a hot potato and likely to become hotter as the year goes on.

Thank you for writing another letter to Salient, this one pointing out the mistake in the article about changes to the sociology major, written by the editorial team.

I'm surprised that you haven't become sick of being the man in the middle, putting forward a number of good points, but constantly apologising for your colleagues at the top of the department, who are so weak in their ability to argue on theoretical grounds that they have to hide behind the barrier of silence. Perhaps they believe that if they shut up long enough all those student letter-writers will go away.

It is attitudes like those displayed by the departmental heavies that make some students want to do something startling to break them out of their arrogant aloofness (see graphic).

The points that you make about the new compulsory course at stage two are very clear (thank you) although the course is now called sosc 208, not sosc 205.

However, the more important of the points that you make come in the latter half of your letter when commenting on the debate so far. Once again you revert back to the form of the sociology department as criticised by the Committee of Nine, teaching practices, and a plea to keep debate out of the pages of Salient. Perhaps it is a theoretical debate on the ideology of the department that you wish to avoid.

For it is notable that you have managed to do precisely this in the letters you have written to Salient. You have cleverly concentrated on replying to letters by the Committee of Nine while ignoring those from Sociology student and A Radical Student, both of which move into the ideology of the department.

This year I am doing Sociology 101, and while knowing next-to-nothing about the subject it was very interesting to read that sociology "describes never explains". This is precisely what I encountered in my first term in stage 1. We were bombarded with tables of statistics to analyse, which were very interesting, but hardly helped us analyse the make-up of New Zealand society, or any other society for that matter.

Later on I read the article by A Radical Student who commented on the sociology department being deeply entrenched in a very narrow system of ideas, with any alternatives falling within these confines. I understood the idea, but wondered how it occurred in practice. It wasn't long before I found out!

Our first essay in Sociology 101 (set by Professor Robb) was on the topic "What do Sociologists describe as Roles?" It then asked you to use examples from the set texts to enter into a discussion on the role concept. In the lectures, tutorials and set texts there was generally no discussion on precisely what part roles play in New Zealand society. Whose interests do they serve? Society's interest? Whose interests does New Zealand society serve? These questions were never tackled, let alone answered. Instead we played around with describing how roles are shaped by "role expectations" of others and discovered what "role sets" were.

I was really pissed off. As another fellow student said to me "this is the sort of thing we covered in sixth form liberal studies", and yet the Vic sociologists trot out the same shit under the mask of some sort of sociological analysis. The number of darts that lay scattered around the front of the sosc 101 lecture theatres was some indication of what students thought of the stuff they were being handed.

When, in the same essay, we were asked to discuss the role concept from examples given in Webb and Collette or Worsley, I began to wonder about whether it would be more educational to refer to your own experiences, but was told that Professor Robh had definitely said "No!".

So, I looked up Webb and Collette at the pages given and chanced upon an example of a magistrate's role conflict between the role expected of him by the most puritanical of citizens and that demanded of him by the more liberal types. We had to discuss how these different expectations Shaped what he eventually did. I thought of the allegations of narrowness made against sociology and saw this as the perfect example of it. While we were tinkering about on the surface, we had already been limited. Surely the magistrates main role had already been pre-defined (he is serving those who are presently benefitting by bringing punishment down on the heads of those who deviate from those actions which are non-threatening to the stat us quo), and we were merely playing around within these limits.

I believe that the challenges made in the early letters of Sociology student and A Radical Student have yet to be taken up by anyone in the department because they realise how true they are. So much of what purports to be theory in the Sociology Department is no more than a defence of the status quo, purporting to be scientific while expounding the unconscious ideological assumptions of the theoretician.

I look forward to a challenge on the points I have made, especially from the designer of the sosc I essay Professor Robb. I have little to lose hut my 12 credits.