For Professor Terry Weiner, the connection between his classroom and community work is a direct line.
As a member of both the Sociology and Political Science Departments, Weiner teaches courses about education and politics.
And, as a member of the school board in the town of Niskayuna, N.Y., he regularly applies his expertise in education and politics.
“If one is interested in education, one has to be interested in the political processes by which those decisions are made,” he says. “And many of these issues-like whether or not we have a multicultural curriculum-are not just school issues. They are issues about what type of nation we should be. Consequently, they are highly politicized, and you need to know something about politics.”
Weiner came to Union more than twenty years ago after earning his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of North Carolina (his dissertation topic was “The Effect of Class and Educational Factors in Political Socialization”). Soon after joining the faculty, he and a fellow sociologist, Eugene Schneller, began to investigate the
newly-emerging vocation of physician's assistant. In the classroom,
he developed courses in such areas as health care politics, the sociology of medicine, political sociology, and issues in American education.
“I learned quickly that the things I am interested in are highly political, and that you couldn't understand what's happening to these institutions without understanding the political system,” he says.
In 1990, he decided to carry his multiple interests one step further and became one of four candidates seeking two seats on the Niskayuna Board of Education. It was, he says, “an effort to get off the sidelines,” and, somewhat to his surprise, he was the top vote-getter.
As the parent of a handicapped child, Weiner is interested in special education. He hopes to improve how educational institutions respond to the needs of disabled children and how disabled children are treated by the health care system.
He says that being on a school board enables him to speak
with greater expertise about how schools are funded, how decisions are made, and the constraints that exist in education. He requires the students in his “Issues in American Education” class to attend at least one school board meeting, hoping that they might gain some similar insights.
This winter and spring, Weiner is on leave and getting back to his work on health care, examining (with Schneller) the issue of managed care and HMOs for a book chapter that will help explain the changing health care system to doctors; the two also will look at the consequences of the growing use of managed care to deliver services to the Medicaid and Medicare populations.
There is little doubt that the research will become part of the sociology curriculum when Weiner returns to the classroom next fall.