dear steven fazzari

Hi, Steve, Fabio here. I recently read about how you are now the chair of the new sociology department at Washington University, St. Louis. It seems that you are getting advice from some excellent sociologists. Still, I wanted to offer a suggestion about how to build your program that I think has some merit  but that may not be obvious.

Here it is: build a program that, roughly speaking, is about 2/3 quantitative and 1/3 qualitative. However, don’t use the traditional criteria for “quantitative research,” which means anyone who does regression analysis or, as in economics, people who do research in theoretical statistics. Instead, the quantitative sector of the department should focus on unique and important quantitative types of data that sociologists are, or can be, good at. Roughly speaking, that means network analysis, social simulations, “big data,” and quantitative analysis of text. You might also toss in the experimenter or survey design guru.

Why? No one else is building such a program, but it would have a huge immediate impact on the profession of sociology. You would have an enormous first mover advantage. It also has other  benefits. For example, the graduate students would be immediately employable inside and outside academia; the faculty would be able to do some fundraising, though not as much as a demography center; and this sort of critical mass would increase the chance that WUSTL would be the origin of the next big quantitative advance in the social sciences.

The other 1/3 of the program should be filled with mid to late career qualitative scholars. You need this for a few reasons. First, sociology, especially the younger folks, has converged on the view that mixed methods is the way to go. So you will need top notch ethnographers, historical types, and interviewers to make sure that your PhD graduates have a proper view of sociology. Also, graduate students may opt for a qualitative PhD and you will need good faculty to make sure they don’t get lost in the cracks. The most important reason is that older scholars will be able to maintain a distinct identity and forge bonds in a program that is, by design, tilted in one direction.

As a well regarded private school, you might be tempted to mimic your peers and chase the “best people,” which means whoever recently graduated from high status programs with good publications. It’s not a bad idea, but you will directly compete with all the other top 2o programs that claims these graduates. Instead, you might consider a more focused mission that has a very specific, and achievable, intellectual goal. It’s worth a thought.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz/From Black Power