Mission
The mission of this department is to provide students with the requisite analytic tools for delving beneath the surface of everyday reality and perceiving the deeper meanings, recurring patterns, and concomitant structures that constitute the social world. As a department within a liberal arts college, we endeavor to integrate students’ study of sociology with Carroll’s broader and publicly articulated goals. Finally, as a department within a distinctly Catholic liberal arts college, we are committed to honoring students’ search for “Ultimate Truth” and highlighting the ethical ramifications of what students learn in the classroom about society.
The overall and ongoing goal of this department is to pursue our tripartite mission of honing the “sociological imagination” among our students, demonstrating to them the variegated connections between
sociology and other academic skills and disciplines, and conscientiously underscoring the ethical considerations that inevitably accompany their studies in the social world.
Objectives
1. The ability to place ourselves in the place of others.
2. The ability to step back and look at the context of human behavior.
3. Ability to analyze the manner in which social problems are often based in the social structure as opposed to individual actions.
4. As a Christian and Catholic school, place the “lens” of the sociological imagination within a Christian context.