Welcome to the South Carolina Sociological Association

Academic Culture and Culture Wars: Fighting for the Soul of Academia

Higher education is in crisis. Amid a growing body of research suggesting that learning gains throughout an undergraduate career are negligible in the United States, colleges and universities persist in announcing new initiatives, and sometimes mere buzzwords, most of which ignore emerging sociological research. The responses of college faculties have ranged from overly reactive to effete, and faculty morale plummets while increasingly professors are allowing events to define them instead of defining events themselves. Accordingly, the theme of the South Carolina Sociological Association's annual conference for 2019 will be the cultural crisis in academic institutions and faculty responses to it. Theoretical and empirical articles, as well as state-of-the-discipline reports, are welcome. Among possible topics are the following:

• The proliferation of business models of education and their impingement on the educational process
• The increasing acceptance of student-as-customer ideology
• The appropriateness/applicability of market-based criteria of educational value
• The decline of academic standards and the epidemic of grade inflation
• Formal dismantling or de facto evisceration of shared governance/faculty control of instruction
• The triumph of educational form and branding over educational substance
• The legitimacy problem of social science in general, and sociology in particular, in society at large
• The place of critical analysis of social institutions (such as education) in a neoliberal era

Contributors to the conference are invited to submit papers on these or broadly related topics. In addition, submissions are being solicited for a general session on research and a poster session, and participants are sought for a pedagogical session on online teaching. Persons interested in submitting papers should send an abstract of fewer than 150 words to scsociology@protonmail.com Persons interested in participating in the poster session or the panel on online teaching should submit a brief e-mail indicating their interest to the same address.

The conference will be held at the Hilton Myrtle Beach Resort in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 10000 Beach Club Drive, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina 29572. Rooms are available at a special rate of $99 per night, plus resort fees, for Friday 2/15 and Saturday 2/16. Please notify the Hilton of your participation in the conference when booking reservations to qualify for the special rate (use the code SCS). Rooms must be reserved by January 23 to qualify for the special rate. Reservations may be made by calling (800) 876-0010, option 3, or online using the link below. A reception will be held at 6 PM Friday 2/15 in the hotel bar, with the conference sessions to follow on Saturday 2/16. A program will be posted on this website as it becomes available.

Directions and information on online booking: https://www.hilton.com/en/hi/groups/personalized/M/MYRBHHH-SCS-20190215/index.jhtml?WT.mc_id=POG