WELCOME AND CAUTION TO GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SOCIOLOGY AT WATERLOO

Kenneth Westhues

Published on the web, August 2003; updated September 2007.

That life among humans brims with contradiction is a basic principle of social theory. As a discipline, sociology embodies this principle. The Waterloo department embodies it in spades. Here you find along a single corridor accomplished proponents of sharply contrasting approaches to the field—including approaches in which contradictiion is not a basic principle.

A graduate student in this situation faces two challenges. One is to learn at least some of the contradictory approaches different professors represent, to find elements of truth in each one, and somehow build these elements into an approach of one's own. The other challenge is to settle into some approach at least enough to produce a thesis that a committee of professors will approve.

I wish every graduate student success in meeting these two challenges. I hope your time here results in both the development of your intangible mind and the award of a tangible degree.

Like each of my colleagues, I represent a particular approach to the field (in my case pragmatist, historical, policy-oriented, not heavily statistical) and particular specialties (mainly sociology of work and workplace conflict, and the study of social change). From this website, as well as from books and articles in the library, any student can learn the knowledge I stand for, and I try never to say no to a student who wants to discuss what I have written and taught, in relation to the student's own interests.

Graduate students should be aware of a specific, unusual contradiction that affects my relations with them. For the first eighteen years after I joined the Waterloo department in 1975, I worked quite a lot with M.A. and especially Ph.D. students. By the fall of 1993, I had supervised to completion as many doctoral theses as all the other sociology professors at Waterloo combined.

What set my career on a different path was an upheaval in the department and university from 1993 to 1998, that led to my being banned from further involvement in the department's graduate programs. I have assembled the main documents on this conflict in a webpage entitled "The Westhues Case" — Self-Study and Documents. Anybody interested can find abundant information there on what the conflict was about and how it unfolded.

Restrictions on my teaching were lifted in 1996, but I have never resumed graduate teaching in sociology at Waterloo. I am involved in graduate teaching and supervision in other departments and at other universities, but I have thought it best to content myself with teaching at the undergraduate level in my home department. I do not want to expose myself to further collective attack, nor do I want to expose students to the risk of being caught in crossfire between any of my colleagues and me. The intellectual path I have trod these past ten years has diverged in many ways from the paths of the colleagues who joined in excluding me in 1993. The scholarly differences between them and me are probably greater now than they were then.

It is in graduate students' interest that they be aware of the contradiction in my relations with them. Formally, they are best advised to pursue their degrees as if I were not in the department. Informally, I hope their relations with me may be as friendly and constructive as with the rest of the department's faculty. Some graduate students, my teaching assistants in particular, do end up working with me in formal ways, generally to both their satisfaction and mine, but I urge these students to keep their work with me separate from coursework and thesis research for their degrees.

For all the department's graduate students, my presence at Waterloo may be of some value as a close-to-home reminder of the seriousness of life, and of the fact that conflict and contradiction are essential aspects of life, with which any adequate sociology must deal. My own research toward this end over the past dozen years is summarized on my website about workplace mobbing in academe.