Surveying the Disproportionate Fixation on Social Problems

The Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics welcomed sociologist Fabio Rojas as the featured speaker for its Spring 2026 Public Lecture Series, a vital forum for interdisciplinary dialogue and thoughtful engagement with today’s most pressing ethical challenges. The lecture, titled A Plea for Good Society Science, was held in the Diboll Gallery of the Malkin Sacks Commons on Tulane’s Uptown Campus and drew students, faculty, and members of the wider public for a lively and thought-provoking conversation. Co-sponsored by Tulane's School of Liberal Arts Department of Sociology, the event challenged some of academia's most deeply ingrained habits. 

Rojas, the Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington, studies social movements, political change, and economic sociology. His lecture opened with a candid admission: he himself has spent much of his career studying what he called the "bummer" topics — HIV, the Black Power movement, and the Iraq War. But that personal reckoning became the launching point for a broader argument about the social sciences as a whole. 

Across economics, psychology, and especially his home discipline of sociology, Rojas identified a deep and disproportionate fixation on social problems, such as market failure, poverty, inequality, dysfunction, at the expense of studying what actually makes societies flourish. Drawing on research by University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, Rojas traced shifts in American Sociological Association membership over the past two decades, noting that sections focused on race, gender, and inequality were among the only ones to grow as overall membership declined. 

He also pointed to patterns in the ASA's annual book awards and recent convention themes, which, he argued, reveal a consistent skew toward social problems research. This imbalance carries two major costs. First, it risks empirical distortion: “Inequality is real,” Rojas noted, “but it’s not everything.” Second, it creates a public image problem, as the discipline comes to resemble, in his words, “a bunch of whiners.” 

Rojas was careful to draw a clear distinction. He is not calling for the elimination of social problems research, as he noted — “sociology without social problems is like medicine without illness”, but rather for greater intellectual pluralism. His proposed corrective is what he terms Good Society Science: a research framework grounded in a simple but underexplored question: 

Taking a deliberately pragmatic approach to defining "the good," Rojas identified three widely shared markers of human flourishing: material well-being, health, and happiness or life satisfaction. 

The lecture was followed by a rich moderated discussion and audience Q&A that touched on the incentive structures that reward negative research, the role of the legal system, the racial politics of academic membership trends, and whether advocating for "good society science" risks providing cover for those who would dismiss the study of injustice altogether. Rojas met each challenge directly, returning repeatedly to his core claim: the goal is not to silence critique, but to build a discipline, and a culture, broad enough to document both what is broken and what works. 

A cornerstone of programming since 200, the Center for Ethics Public Lecture Series has hosted over 200 distinguished guest speakers, fostering critical engagement with ethical questions across disciplines. Lectures are free and open to all members of the Tulane community as well as the general public.   

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