Bluemoon_Rising
08-21-2005, 03:16 PM
City Journal
Summer 2005
Don’t Fund College Follies
Heather Mac Donald
It is easy to give money foolishly to colleges and very hard to give it wisely. . . .
The Radcliffe Institute supports some of the silliest academic orthodoxies around—a belief that knowledge, gender, and race are “socially constructed” rather than based on any reality, a fascination with homosexuality, and an obsession with endemic American sexism and racism. At the end of this past academic year, the institute brought two prominent feminist journalists to lecture on campus. Susan Faludi—whose 1991 bestseller, Backlash, argued that the “patriarchy” was trying to re-enslave women—claimed preposterously to her Radcliffe audience that 9/11 had triggered yet another “backlash against feminism.” Barbara Ehrenreich, who lectured on “Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology since the 1970s,” is a fierce critic of the economic system that made donor Knafel a megamillionaire. American capitalism, in her eyes, is a racket whereby the privileged perpetually exploit the underprivileged. . . .
Such mismatches as the Knafel fellowships will continue, however, for most donors can’t possibly decode the jargon of constructivism and wouldn’t believe its premises if they could. An academic insider hears such Radcliffe research topics as “how the conceptualizations of race and poverty have shaped discourses of social mobility, cultural difference, and nation building,” or how the “twenty-first century reenactments of [a slave couple’s story] illuminate the constructions of black masculinity and femininity they help to fabricate,” and immediately knows the worldview that these mannered phrases connote. But how could a businessman who graduated from college back in 1952 guess that beneth the ubiquitous "discourses," "constructions," and “negotiated meanings”—behind the coy hyphens, parentheses, and slashes—lies the belief that there is no such thing as the “self,” or “truth,” or “males” and “females,” or “good” and “bad,” that all are arbitrary categories designed by an oppressor class of white male heterosexual capitalists to keep a victim class of minorities, women, and poor people silenced and powerless? How could he know that, according to the dominant campus ideology, Western civilization is merely a factory for “colonialism, slavery, empire and poverty,” as a Yale English professor puts it, and that the purpose of studying its great works is to unmask the various defenders of white male privilege?
Link: http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_college_follies.html
Summer 2005
Don’t Fund College Follies
Heather Mac Donald
It is easy to give money foolishly to colleges and very hard to give it wisely. . . .
The Radcliffe Institute supports some of the silliest academic orthodoxies around—a belief that knowledge, gender, and race are “socially constructed” rather than based on any reality, a fascination with homosexuality, and an obsession with endemic American sexism and racism. At the end of this past academic year, the institute brought two prominent feminist journalists to lecture on campus. Susan Faludi—whose 1991 bestseller, Backlash, argued that the “patriarchy” was trying to re-enslave women—claimed preposterously to her Radcliffe audience that 9/11 had triggered yet another “backlash against feminism.” Barbara Ehrenreich, who lectured on “Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology since the 1970s,” is a fierce critic of the economic system that made donor Knafel a megamillionaire. American capitalism, in her eyes, is a racket whereby the privileged perpetually exploit the underprivileged. . . .
Such mismatches as the Knafel fellowships will continue, however, for most donors can’t possibly decode the jargon of constructivism and wouldn’t believe its premises if they could. An academic insider hears such Radcliffe research topics as “how the conceptualizations of race and poverty have shaped discourses of social mobility, cultural difference, and nation building,” or how the “twenty-first century reenactments of [a slave couple’s story] illuminate the constructions of black masculinity and femininity they help to fabricate,” and immediately knows the worldview that these mannered phrases connote. But how could a businessman who graduated from college back in 1952 guess that beneth the ubiquitous "discourses," "constructions," and “negotiated meanings”—behind the coy hyphens, parentheses, and slashes—lies the belief that there is no such thing as the “self,” or “truth,” or “males” and “females,” or “good” and “bad,” that all are arbitrary categories designed by an oppressor class of white male heterosexual capitalists to keep a victim class of minorities, women, and poor people silenced and powerless? How could he know that, according to the dominant campus ideology, Western civilization is merely a factory for “colonialism, slavery, empire and poverty,” as a Yale English professor puts it, and that the purpose of studying its great works is to unmask the various defenders of white male privilege?
Link: http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_college_follies.html