Letters to the Editor
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from a professor in a Women's Studies department
There are so many assumptions flying around in the responses that it's hard to know where to begin. First, the idea that the disciplines function as coherent "bodies of knowledge" is a fantasy. Disciplines do not function in this manner, because scholarly networks that produce scholarship are already interdisciplinary. Departments are merely convenient units for academic bureaucracy; they have nothing to do with the way scholarship actually works. Each form that Women's Studies takes in universities--whether it is a major or minor and whether it is an autonomous free-standing department or a program in which faculty members share time with departments--is not a product of any "ideology." It's a product of the local conditions that give rise to the demand for courses in the study of women or gender.
I know less about Britain, but the U.S. university system is large and extremely diverse; it's impossible to generalize about women's studies departments.
Within Women's Studies itself there are debates about what institutional form is best, for whom, and under what conditions. That said, the idea that Women's Studies departments are dying is silly. I teach in one, and our enrollments are up every semester. Our major numbers are up. We have male students who enroll in courses and major in Women's Studies. They don't come out saying that we indoctrinate students. In fact, our students, find the job market as challenging as other college graduates--no more, and no less. We have graduated students who go to law school, medical school, work in Hollywood as screen writers, go into Social Work, run their own businesses, go into the Peace Corps, go to graduate school, work for battered women's shelters, become grant writers.
Research shows that fields in which students major have nothing to do with their first job after getting their college degree. The fact that some students are interested in Women's Studies does not mean they are innocent lambs waiting to be indoctrinated (after all the average incoming age of a college student today is not 18 but much older--in loco parentis seems an odd model for faculty-student relations given the reality of "life-long learning."). Christine Summers is entitled to her point of view, but readers are not entitled to assume she is right without reading more arguments that counter her's. After all, isn't learning about struggling with contending views, sifting through their evidence, and then deciding after a process of inquiry, what is truthful?