Are gender studies a fake but dangerous discipline?

Fake scholarship isn’t risk-free

Vincent J. Curtis

5 July 23

RE: The dangerous field of gender studies.  Op-ed by Catherine Anderson, who is Director of McMaster University’s Gender Studies program.  The Hamilton Spectator 5 July 23.

Forcing people to believe nonsense is not without risk.  Catherine Anderson has probably never heard of British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, but in the last years of his life Scruton railed against fake disciplines in academia.  These disciplines rely upon a massive fake scholarship and fake philosophy to give them apparent authority.  His example of a fake discipline was Feminist Studies. Scruton found it very difficult to imagine that you would succeed in that subject if you didn’t have at the outset, or certainly at the conclusion, Feminist opinions.

“The fake scholarship industry enables people to claim authority for nonsense; the purpose of that nonsense being that it make conformity to orthodoxy the only thing that you have,” he said. “If the scholarship is nonsense, what is there?  Only the conclusions, and those conclusions turn out to be the usual liberal axioms from which you actually begin.”

Ms. Anderson writes that has become accustomed to students complaining that her courses are too political, and she protests that she doesn’t understand what they mean.  You’d think after 20 years of complaints, she’d reflect upon the observations, but no.  Unconsciously, in defense of her program, she gets political: “There’s also ample evidence that our narrower social and political systems disadvantage pretty much anyone who’s not a white, cis, straight man.”

And if you don’t believe that, you can’t pass the course.  Gender studies is a fake discipline that enforces political orthodoxy at the cost of an open-minded pursuit of truth.

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The op-ed was written in the wake of a knife attack on a gender studies professor and two students at the University of Waterloo, which took place in her classroom while teaching the class. The attacker was a recent UW graduate, and the police immediately called the attack a hate crime.  The professor and two students suffered serious, but non-life threatening, injuries.  Never let a crisis go to waste, and the political advantages of this attack are being taken by everyone who can.  The claim that gender students are dangerous is self-flattery.  But when you force people to speak nonsense on pain of failure or banishment or personal destruction, some can get a little irate.