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Notes & Comments

June 1998

Weirdo studies



We have had occasion to comment on the phenomenon of college “women’s studies” programs before. No feature of the contemporary university is more destructive than these “sites” (to use the favored jargon) of politicized “transgression” (ditto). Black studies and other programs of racial and ethnic redress certainly compete with women’s studies for utter intellectual nullity. Most are little more than academic ghettos —often extremely well-funded ones—set up to accommodate the results of “affirmative action,” i.e., admission to college of the academically unqualified on the basis of some approved badge of victim status. Such programs are self-perpetuating, of course, for what are their graduates equipped to do except become “professors” of the politicized nonsense they have been spoon-fed in college? Thus we have witnessed not only college admission, but hiring, promotion, and tenure a ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 June 1998, on page 3
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