Letters to the Editor
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Good for the UK.
Women's studies departments are indeed viewed with suspicion in academia, and although sexism plays some role in this, much of the criticism is well deserved. As someone who has been in academia for seven years now, and who has studied women exclusively (within another department), I have a few observations about "women's studies." Their enrollees tend to have lower GPAs and GRE scores going in than those of students in the traditional liberal arts, sciences, or professional disciplines. This really shows in their writing and analysis! As far as I can tell, the field of women's studies has no disciplined methods of inquiry, or rather no unique methods of inquiry that aren't borrowed from history, philosophy, or the social sciences - and subsequently watered down. This suggests rampant interdisciplinary dabbling - the worst kind of scholarship.
Rather than herding all of the feminists into the academic ghetto of women's studies, which is insular and navel-gazing even for academia, why not bring feminism into the traditional disciplines where feminist analysis is often greatly needed? There are feminist historians, psychologists, anthropologists, ethicists -- feminism represented in every discipline under the sun except perhaps the bench sciences -- and these women are doing "women's studies" work, only with much more critical audiences to keep the bar appropriately high.