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Dear Sociology Community, Alumni, and Friends,
As we celebrate our sociology majors and minors in the class of 2024, we have been reflecting a lot as a department on how fortunate we have been. Fortunate to have had the past leadership in the department that has gotten us here, fortunate for the many faculty and staff who have been part of so many of your lives as students, and especially fortunate for the alumni support you all have given us over the years. Recently the College shared the list of all the students, alumni, and friends of the department that have given to the department since 1995. Frankly, it brought tears to our eyes. We have utilized these gifts to wholly support our students, they have allowed us to support our students in internships with non-profit organizations, award faculty with funding to pay students as research assistants getting valuable experience and mentorship, to present at professional conferences, to bring speakers into our classes, to provide cash awards to our seniors profiled below, to pay for the memberships in our Honor Society, and many more. You’ll see some of the students behind this support in the stories below. To realize the depth and generosity and symbols of support, small and large give us this incredible foundation as we move forward. Thank you for your time, care, and support. It means more than we can express here.
And what an exciting moving forward time we are in. We will be starting program review as a department this coming fall. This three year process gives us time and the data to look back, to study other sociology programs, to get feedback from external reviewers, and to propose new ideas and dreams for our department. We’d love your feedback as we move into the first phase this coming academic year. If you have ANY thoughts, advice, musings you would like to share about what has been most impactful to you and/or what you’d like to see us build, here is a simple 2-question form you can give us any feedback you would like. We’d love to hear from you. In addition, the university is starting discussion about what should be included in the university’s Core Curriculum, one way we get to share sociology beyond our majors and minors.
You may have seen Sociology in the news recently. With debates raging over what can be taught in colleges and universities, curriculum gag orders and book bans are on the rise. Sociology has come under attack and has even been removed from the general education curriculum in the state of Florida. The field of Sociology has always used rigorous research methods to investigate inequality across a wide range of topics. We are very concerned that students in some states will never learn key sociological ideas about issues such as educational inequality, homelessness, the gender wage gap and racial discrimination in employment. The American Sociological Association has created The Value of Sociology Initiative, a national campaign to communicate the importance of Sociology for a well-rounded college education. And our very own Santa Clara Magazine has profiled the value of sociology at SCU, further, one of our majors wrote about the experience of being a sociology major in the campus newspaper. We hope you enjoy reflecting on the value that sociology has brought to your life, we always love hearing these stories.
Sincerely,
The SCU Sociology Department
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