Return-Path: sendmail 5.67/UCSD-2.2-sun Date: Wed, 10 Feb 93 15:49:32 EST From: Dan Ryan Subject: Departmental Rankings and Labor Unrest... To: socgrad@ucsd.edu Dear Colleagues Near and Far -- The ranking issue per se is not one that I want to get into -- following various thinkers, I suspect it tells us more about various organizational processes than it does about any particular sociology department -- but I do think that the several comments about the relation between graduate student strikes and the quality of a department merit some response. In a nutshell, I think it is an irrelevant point. Here at Yale we have a very strong graduate student employees organization (GESO) and we did have a three day strike last year (over recognition) in which other campus unions joined in support. We also had some serious problems in relations between the sociology department and the university (threats of 40% cuts) which have now been pretty much resolved (we're hiring 1 senior and 3 junior people this year). There are a lot of things one would want to know if one were evaluating Yale's graduate program in Sociology, but the knowing about the presence or absence of a student strike last year is way down on the bottom of the list of things that matter. To make the inferential jump from the knowledge of the existence of a strike to knowledge about a university or department strikes me as a leap into the dark. It sounds all too plausible, but really all it does is open up a space for all sorts of preconceptions about, and gut level reactions to, things like labor unions, preferences for stability over change, intellectuals and activism, etc. So, if we're going to talk about what makes one department better or worse than others, let's concentrate on characteristics that matter and that mean some- thing. As a matter of fact, I'm moved to propose a discussion of what sort of characteristics and attributes would make sense for "ranking" departments. Of course, such an activity suffers from the "I know about families since I grew up in one" phenomenon, but, hey, you gotta start somewhere. Dan Ryan