Where these have been created, interestingly, they have commonly drawn relatively little on sociology and on the classical traditions in sociological theory. These curricular changes not only hurt sociology enrolments, they reduce the frequency with which students see sociological work as a part of a general intellectual project of either humanistic scholarship or scientific research. If they see it at all, it is more likely to be only in disciplinary courses. Moreover, the contemporary textbook and most introductory courses present the field largely as a summary of interesting factual information about society. There is little in them, however, to convey the notion that the discipline is a cumulative intellectual enterprise in which weaker understandings are replaced by stronger ones.
Theory appears less as a form of inquiry than as a set of fixed and competing schools.
It was largely theory, however, that connected sociology to the liberal arts tradition. It was also theory that provided for a cumulative internal organization of the major. With theory marginalized, sociology is among the least cumulatively organized of all college majors. To the extent any high level efforts are made to integrate different branches of the discipline, they are made by theorists. Ironically, rational choice theory, one of the least distinctively sociological of the discipline's major theories, probably attempts this more than any other.