After Arday: is Sociology worth saving?

The Jason Arday affair at Cambridge – plagiarism allegations, contested credentials, a glittering appointment followed by resignation – has left more than one man’s reputation in ruins. It has been treated by some as a verdict on the entire discipline of sociology. Is this the moment sociology finally loses its claim to seriousness or is the furore just a lazy culture-war smear?

What, at its best and worst, is the subject actually for? The case against the contemporary discipline is not simply invented by tabloids. Critics have long argued that large parts of the field – and of its sibling ‘-ologies’ – have drifted from empirical inquiry into critical theory, standpoint epistemology and the privileging of ‘lived experience’. It seems more comfortable with denouncing power relations than testing whether the diagnosis is true. In this context, they say, it becomes easier to confuse narrative with scholarship, and harder for institutions to apply the same standards they would demand of the sciences per se.

Defenders reply that one contested career does not indict a century of social science or negate studying Weber and Durkheim. The public still needs reliable knowledge about how societies actually work. Good sociology still has an important role in delivering what the classical tradition promised: to gather sociological data on class, family, crime and education that compares, counts and studies patterns that neither common sense, activist claims nor official press releases reliably describe.

Sociology also asks how institutions shape behaviour rather than merely how people feel about them. At its most useful, sociology – by not taking official stories and statistics at face value – can puncture both government spin and act as a check on fashionable narratives driven by ideology rather than evidence.

Is a failure of due diligence at an elite university being used to license a broader assault on the study of society itself? Is treating the Arday scandal as the face of the discipline to indulge a moral panic about ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’, in which entire fields are dismissed as politicised fluff? Or are the ‘-ologies’ so corrupted by ideological capture that they have become little better than punditry and lived-experience podcasts, unable to distinguish testimony from proof? Can sociology still tell us how the world works – or has it become too invested in telling us how we ought to feel about it?