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Originally posted by Spanky
Really? Have you met her collegues from Texas A&M? Have you met her collegues from other schools? What was your impression of them? Did you find them to be discplined academics that were committed to research and study, or did you find them to be ideologues that were more concerned with pushing a political agenda? In other words, did they seem to be the type of people that spent most if their time in the library, or who spent most of their time speaking at rallys? Has she ever talked to you about the general reputation of sociology departments at universities and what she thinks about that reputation?
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Yes. I've spent a lot of time with her colleagues and I never get to see her because of how much time she spends on her research.
This is her current project. I don't know what the political agenda of figuring out how kids learn about the circulatory system of the bat in an online and realspace environment but I'm sure you could find one.
Nor do I know what the political agenda of an ethnography research of online community (though there are a lot of sociologists that will argue that it's impossible to do research on online communities because they're not "real". I say bullshit, and would point to
this online community). Is she liberal, yes. She's my friend, most of my friends are liberal. Are her colleagues liberal? Some are, some aren't. Most of the colleagues that I've met were in backyard barbeques and at her wedding, so they tended to be friends. I presume that wasn't the full spectrum of the department.
I do know that she has at least six or seven kids every year in her Family and Marriage class that get irritated that it's not a how to class. But it's A&M. Aggies are a funny people (and boy howdy is that just a data point just begging to be analyzed).
I don't know too much about other institutions, but her dissertation was looking at Supreme Court cases in the 1820 through the 1920s in Missouri and Kansas and seeing what the difference with regard to race, class and gender were in a slave state versus a free state that were pretty similar otherwise.
Like I said, I work in academia. Her department seems no more or less fucked up than a cardiology department in a medical school. The political issues seem to be at the departmental level rather than the national or even local level. Her tenure process was a very stressful event for her.
