Dear Johnny:

Thanks for getting in touch with me last week to express your concerns about your sociology class. You are not the first student to ask me why sociology professors spend most of their class time talking about the need for redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, and bigger government. Nor are you the first to ask me why your sociology professor didn?t major in economics. I know that your question, ?Just what the hell is sociology, anyway?? was probably rhetorical, but I will try to answer it as I address your other concerns in this brief letter.

First of all, your sociology professor probably isn?t that bright. She may have wanted to major in economics, but opted for sociology because the discipline is so much less demanding. If this sounds too harsh or sarcastic, just take a look at the grade distribution posted outside of a classroom in the sociology building. Last semester, while giving an examination, I noticed that the test scores for a junior-level sociology class were as follows: 34 ?As,? 2 ?Bs,? 1 ?C,? 0 ?Ds,? and 0 ?Fs.? Such a distribution produces a class GPA of 3.89. Remember that students only need a 2.0 GPA to graduate.

Something else you might not realize is that many graduate programs in sociology only require a 3.0 GPA for admission. Some of those programs require students to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), but only as a formality after the student has already been admitted. Sociologists don?t like standardized tests, because they think they are racist and sexist, despite the paucity of questions about NASCAR and deer hunting.

Lowering standards to boost GPAs is the best way to make sure that a discipline is filled with the least bright and least motivated students. Setting a GPA requirement for graduate admissions well below the undergraduate average is also a bad idea. It merely guarantees that incompetent students will wind up teaching sociology in college. It isn?t that way in economics. That?s why your sociology professor isn?t an economics professor. That also helps explain why she is a Marxist.

But, aside from low IQ, there are other reasons why your professor is in love with Marxism. You may have been barking up the wrong tree, however, when you asked me how someone with a Ph.D. could adopt such a failed political philosophy.

Yes, you were right to point out that the communists killed 100 million people worldwide in just 72 years. Yes, you were right to point out that sociologists cannot explain the fall of the Berlin Wall within the Marxist dialectic. Yes, you were right to point out that they cannot even explain why the Berlin Wall was necessary in the first place. You were also right to be outraged by your professor?s espousal of Marxism, given that your relatives fought to defeat communists and totalitarians over seas, while your Marxist professor?s biggest problem is spilling her four-dollar skinny latte on her $25 leather-bound edition of The Communist Manifesto.

But you were wrong to characterize Marxism as a political philosophy. Marxism is an emotional disorder, not a political philosophy. Continued...