What is the matter with academic sociologists?

I know, it is far too difficult to restrain oneself from offering a gazillion punchlines as responses to such a question.  But, I suppose we could ask such a question of many academic disciplines and their scholars, too.  It is this question about sociology and sociologists that Russel Jacoby takes up in his funny, sarcastic, and biting review of a book by the president of the American Sociological Association (ht).  Jacoby has plenty of zingers there, which had me laughing aloud.  Like these:

The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential.
In a memoir elsewhere, Wright comments that every September since kindergarten in 1952 he has been in school. It might be time for him to take a break.
That he did not label this book Volume One and promise Volumes Two through Ten shows restraint.
To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water.
[Only] sociologists force-fed as graduate students will not choke on this book. That many of them have come to adore this stuff is only striking proof of the discipline’s collapse.

 Jacoby's concluding comments?l:

C.Wright Mills, who despised sociological jargon, has been succeeded by Erik Olin Wright, once given the C.Wright Mills Distinguished Professor Award at Wisconsin, who cranks out sociological cant. With Wright as elected president of the sociological profession, the conservative nightmare of radicals taking over the university has in part come to pass. But if this book exemplifies academic Marxism, conservatives can rest easy. We should all fear, however, what it suggests about the contemporary university and its scholarship.

And in another book review, again thanks to A&L Daily, are these concluding comments, which fit into this discussion really well:

[When] it comes to the state of contemporary higher education, there are no quick fixes. That is why, today, Herbert London continues to cast his vote against liberal academia​—​but from the outside: “I realize, like G.K. Chesterton, that the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.”