Letters to the Editor
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Irrelevance is a fantasy -- but a dangerous one
It's old-school anti-intellectualism, trying to reduce the value of education to a simple matter of pounds and pence.
To further this line of thinking, it's important to consider the productive relationship that feminist scholarship has always had with critical theory, of which it remains a vital underpinning.
The idea that modern philosophy and the study of power and social change has somehow become irrelevant is a fantasy of the troglodytes who long for a return to (or reinvention of) a time when the terms of acceptable academic discourse were well-regulated, and most students were content to be stapled, stamped, and ushered quickly out of the academy and into the professions.
The only danger to this kind of hyperventilation about the demise of actual scholarship is that, as Tedra Osell points out, the people who are prone to it also tend to have access to the levers of institutional decision-making. "Students don't want to be studying this" becomes code for "We don't want students to be studying this," and thence turns into department cuts and and so on.
Unfortunately, they have as their allies a generation of parents who believe that the sole merit to higher education is in improved pay grades. Academic feminism as a discipline is as productive as it's ever been — maybe now is a good time for a broadening of the concept of consciousness-raising to include the revival of academia as a whole.