OPINION
As I’ve asked several times, now, Is it Time to Bulldoze the Universities? Of course, I was half-joking when I first put the question. Only half. But less and less so, as the years have rolled on.
Perhaps, though, there are less drastic alternatives. Just bulldoze a couple of departments. Starting with anything with “diversity”, “equity” and/or “inclusion” in its title.
Once they’re reduced to rubble, turn the D9 on the “Gender Studies” department.
Which, metaphorically, one US college is doing.
Predictable accusations have greeted the announcement by Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo, trustee of the New College of Florida, that the college is abolishing its gender studies program in a move designed, he wrote, to ‘begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings’.
Earlier this month, Rufo explained in City Journal that cancelling the program is part of the university’s renewed commitment to ‘revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college’.
Cue, of course, the indignant screeching of tenured nobodies.
In response, 36 professors opposed to the plan have either left the college on their own initiative or been dismissed.
How nice of them to do the job for us.
Critics have been quick to paint the gender studies decision as an attack on academic freedom. They say that it will transform New College of Florida into a know-nothing institution in which critical thinking and open-minded exploration will be walled out of the school.
In fact, the very opposite is true.
Try standing up in a gender studies course to argue that we do not live in a rape culture, and see how many instructors applaud your critical thinking. Try arguing that biology, not ‘discourse’, is the primary driver of gender roles. Try arguing that gender dysphoria is a disorder that should be treated as such, not augmented with hormone blockers and surgery. Try arguing that white men do not have privilege as white men, and that in fact, they experience systemic discrimination in North America.
Try, indeed, pointing out that all the founding thinkers of gender/queer theory were and are paedophiles or pro-paedophile activists.
Any such critical thinking will not be welcomed.
A liberal arts education, on the contrary, is completely opposite (which may surprise many readers who’ve fallen into the similar linguistic trap of believing that “liberal” is synonymous with “left-wing authoritarian”, and that all arts are for pansies).
A liberal arts education, by contrast, encourages questioning because it pushes no specific iron-law ideology; rather, it examines ‘the best that has been thought and said’, as Matthew Arnold put it, and draws rich content from the greatest thinkers in history. Unlike the fly-by-night trendiness of gender ideology, a classically liberal education is founded on the tradition of Great Books – from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers, from (in the English literary tradition) Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Long-standing classics of philosophy, art, literature, and political thought are taught, as much as possible, without ideological distortion, presented in their particular contexts and carefully read (not blithely dismissed or acclaimed) so that students can grasp their enduring significance. Once their meaning is grasped, students are encouraged to question, judge, compare, and criticise.
A gender studies academic would rather die than let that happen.
Indeed, the vehement opposition of most campus academics to free thought and a true liberal arts education can be gauged by the unhinged fury from the university established when the Ramsay Foundation announced that it would fund a course in Western Civilisation. The same universities which happily take the CCP’s money for Confucius Centres, and come over all “Coexist” with Islamic Studies departments, went berserk at the very idea of having a Western Civilisation department.
Gender studies has […] been judged from the beginning in ignorance and rage, without proportion and without rational argument or sound evidence. It has pushed lies as truth (see, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ debunking of fundamental falsehoods about women’s experience in Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women), denying biology and history.
From its earliest incarnations, gender studies have promoted preposterous contentions […] Its purpose was never to encourage critical thought, let alone disagreement or resistance.
Marinating in the impenetrable jargon and the gaseous outrage of victim politics, students learn almost nothing of substance except to hate their society and to embrace the utopian necessity of its destruction.
But abolishing gender studies is somewhat akin to cutting out the tumour and ignoring how its cancer has metastasised right through the academy.
A rot that has now spread throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences, even into many faculties of business, journalism, law, and medical science, as research is corrupted by social and political advocacy. It will not be easy to reform the universities. Still, New College’s decision to abolish an avowedly radical, anti-family, and anti-social program is good in itself and sends a good signal […] As the (feminist) slogan goes: Never retract, never explain, never apologize: Get the thing done and let them howl.
Spectator Australia
Failing that, well… fire up the D9s, lads.