*snicker* Hoist on their own petards! It is ever so with the Cultural Marxists (motto: “On The March, Ever #Forward!”, they know not where, just that they are getting good gas mileage), driving America over a cliff and Americans into the gulag of NewSpeak and indoctrination. Meh!

Black Studies is not an intellectually rigorous discipline, but it is easy to pick on it.  Examine the dissertations in other fields like Sociology and Education:  while there may be some serious scholarship in some, it is certainly not required – and is well down the list of attributes needed to win the degrees.

There is no perfect way to assess these soft subjects or their benefits, if any.  Too much subjectivity enters into the equation from the beginning.  There is however a self-correcting regulator which, if reconnected to education, could over time reduce or eliminate the  resources wasted on jargon and gibberish.

It’s called the marketplace.  Remove federal funding, and let colleges, universities, and technical schools compete for student dollars openly and freely, with no big fat thumbs on the scales.

Cool. The thickness of the skin of a black-studies Ph.D. is measured in single digit nanometers.

I never understood why black people at Harvard have to study being black. Or did Elizabeth Warren recruit them?

War on wimmenses

She criticized work that she had never actually read on the grounds that it wasn’t intellectually rigorous enough. Isn’t there a certain level of irony there, at the very least?

It’s in the post where she responded to her critics. “Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them.” 
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/black-studies-part-2-a-response-to-critics/46401

She implies it, leading us to infer it. And if the implication wasn’t clear enough, she is more explicit in what follows the sentence I quoted. “I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery.”

Ok, honestly if you are going to criticize something you should probably read it first — but, but…if a dissertation is starting to stink on the first page (heck, even the title) you can pretty much take it to the bank that the rest of it will be no damn good.

This has been an ongoing problem in academia: many of the traditional liberal arts departments have been broken up piecemeal into a million and one special interest “studies” departments.  The reasoning behind this was there was too much emphasis on “old, dead, white guys”…what it actually was, was a full on assault against the Western cannon and Western Civ…period.
Now we have a million and one “studies” departments which do not engage in any sort of thorough critical study of anything — the academic work is really sub-par; the topics “critiqued” are laughably nonserious and contribute nothing to a better understanding of our culture (in fact, they often help degrade and undermine it)….and heaven help you if you, as an academic, say a word against these special interest departments.

Which our protagonist here has recently discovered it would seem.

It’s always about the Money, then indoctrination don’t know is useful education is in there at all. This is why we need to abolish all federal grants.

 Would you care to edit your third paragraph so it makes some kind of sense? Because otherwise, it makes you look like a nattering nincompoop who can’t read or write in English.

Actually, I don’t see much evidence that the traditional departments have been broken up. I’m a professor of philosophy. I don’t think that I’ve ever come across a university where a department like philosophy had been done away with and the faculty moved into “studies” departments. Sometimes there will be a joint “philosophy and religion” department, because there aren’t enough people for separate departments to make sense. but even  schools that have added “studies” departments don’t seem to have done away with philosophy, English, history, etc.

Reality is that it’s a lot easier, in our society, to discriminate against women than it is to discriminate against ethnic minorities.

As this is National Offend A Feminist Week, I am forced to respond to your statement by asking the question: And the problem is???

In the humanities — half of the English profs are now engaged in “studies” rather than teaching lit (and this also translates into a shift in where students can pick up credits — they can study traditional humanities, or they can pick up their credits in the “studies”…guess which are the more “fun” classes?  so you can guess where they go).  Same with history department, and the philosophy department has been curtailed to a very small corner on most campuses.  This also translates into affecting the business, education, and even sciences/math departments because of an initiative 20 odd years ago to promote studies across the curriculum — in short, all departments engaged in across the curriculum sharing (interesting from a pedagogic angle, but what it translated into was a wider field of influence for the “studies”).

I know, because I was a grad student who had to help a PhD. do the research to set up such a program on a university campus, which then turned around and developed the program at the tributary jr. college (and that university did so due to the program being implemented at an even bigger, local university).

So no, not done away with — but when most of your profs in the department are teaching “studies” half the time rather than their actual field…