HAP P [ N I
~I
G S
543
As we march, as we stand before the Amphitheater, we will be
looking fOIWard to the day when your job is easier, when you can per–
form your traditional tasks, and no one orders you to deprive your
fellow Americans of their rights of free speech and assembly.
WHY SOCIOLOGISTS?
The question of openings in the field of sociology (and psy–
chology) arises often enough to justify its careful consideration.
Two facts are immediately evident. Departments in the social
sciences are overcrowded in relation to the openings available at the
present time, and this is true even if we allow for a high rate of fail–
ures at the time of the examinations. This uncertainty on the part of
students with regard to future employment has its counterpart
in
a
theoretical uncertainty on the professorial level, where invocations to
science serve merely to make more apparent, by contrast, the confusion
in the various doctrines taught.
Moreover, the unrest that has developed since 1960 in the univer–
sities here and in other countries has been characteristic of sociologists
to an even greater degree than psychologists or philosophers (as was the
case after 1945), while the other liberal arts departments, not to men–
tion the sciences, were often characterized by a remarkable passivity.
Thus the problems of the university, and even of the society as a whole,
have been raised in new departments which have few members; while
no less paradoxically, the initiative for the Fouchet reform came from the
much more placid scientific quarters.
This phenomenon has been observed in the United States, France
and Germany, but also in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Why does the malaise in these countries choose to express itself in
departments of the social sciences?
TRAr.;SLATOR's NOTE:
Why Sociologists?
was written by the students who led
the demonstrations of the last day for a
"Universitt! Critique,"
and was
distributed at Nanterre in early April. The authors asked
L'Esprit,
in which
the French text appeared, to state that what follows is a provisional text,
prepared as a preliminary to discussion.
