Career Advising at EOU

Working to Change the World 

Many people have a stereotyped image of Catholic "nuns" as stern elementary teachers or pious women who never marry and devote their lives to doing good works.  I had a different experience--one that led me to work for social change and eventually to become a professor of sociology.   When I was seventeen years of age, I joined a Catholic religious community and began an undergraduate degree program at Seattle University.  I don't think I even knew what sociology was.  I knew I wanted to be some sort of teacher.  I started off taking courses in religious studies, philosophy, psychology, English, and history.  For a while, I even thought I might be a math teacher (since there was a shortage of this kind of teacher in the schools where the Catholic Sisters taught).  This was not a good fit.  I labored over the math homework and endured more headaches and stomach pains than I care to remember.  The pain amazingly disappeared when I read books on church history, philosophy of religion, or biblical studies.  So I did what seemed obvious and majored in Religious Studies.

So how did I end up in Sociology?  Here's where history intervened.  During the 1960's, many people in the United States became involved in the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and/or in efforts to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam.  I found myself active in all three of these.  It started with working for change within the Catholic Church.  In 1962, Catholic leaders from all over the world had come together at a meeting called the Second Vatican Council and determined that the church had to change to meet the needs of people in the "modern world."  The university education I received had been carefully planned to expose me to a comprehensive curriculum--so that I could be the kind of teacher who could address those "needs."

I crashed into sociology one quarter in a general "social science" class when assigned to read a book by sociologist Erving Goffman entitled "Asylums."  In this book, Goffman described the characteristics of "total institutions"--places like monasteries, prisons, mental hospitals and military bases--where an individual's identity becomes transformed (and where behavior, clothing, freedom may be quite controlled).   I was amazed that human organizations had such similar patterns--and that you could study them.  Knowing that humans had organized these institutions and that traditions could be challenged--I began to question everything.  Why are some people really rich and others starving?  Why do some people seem to have so much power and others almost none?  Why aren't there any women priests (no U.S. Presidents and  so few presidents of Universities)?  Why do so many people with light colored skins seem to think they are a "better sort" than those with dark colored skin?  And how is it that social rewards and chances seem to be so often distributed by race, gender, or social class?  I grew more and more curious and more and more determined to be part of working for social change.  In 1969, I finished my undergraduate degree in Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco (a few blocks from the center of flower-power culture).  I had been transformed.  The institution that had hoped to make me into a fitting representative of the new Catholic church had unwittingly produced something a bit more revolutionary.  I had found in the middle of my study of religion a powerful incentive to study (and work to change) the social world.  I have been a sociologist ever since.