March 27, 2000

Faculty in the Department of Sociology have written articles about prisons, religion, demographics and gender issues. They have discussed AIDS, racism and how people interact with dogs. And they have done it often enough that a new survey conducted by the American Sociological Association has ranked the department the 31st most productive sociology department in the country - the only public university in New England to make the top 40.

The ranking - which places UConn only nine spots behind Harvard, and seven places ahead of Yale - was developed by counting the number of articles printed during the past three years in the discipline's three most important refereed journals: the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and the journal Social Forces. The study ranked individual departments' productivity by raw numbers, with control factors added based on the number of full-time faculty, and with weighted controls for the number of full- and part-time faculty.

"This is a testament to the effort our faculty put into their research, and to their ability and training" says Wayne Villemez, department head. "UConn's students can take pride in the education they receive - their professors are in pretty good company."

Indeed, the ranking reads like a who's who of the nation's elite colleges and universities. The list, topped by Ohio State University, features such heavyweights as Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, Wisconsin, the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton and Duke. Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University had fewer articles published than UConn faculty.

Besides journal articles, says Villemez, the department's faculty also have authored more than a dozen books.

Richard Veilleux