From Ms. Magazine: Academic Freedom?

Academic Freedom?
The right-wing campaign against women's studies turns a treasured ideal on its head

By Martha McCaughey

Within a month of the horrifying mass murder at Virginia Tech last spring, Phyllis Schlafly was busy on her Eagle Forum blog, blaming left-wing professors.

“Why was [shooter Seung-Hui Cho] consumed with hate, resentment and bitterness?” Schlafly asked. She then pointed to a course taught by Bernice Hausman, a feminist professor in English and former director of women’s studies, whose class syllabus Schlafly found online: “One of the assignments…[was] to ‘choose one day in which they dress and comport themselves in a manner either more masculine or more feminine than they would normally.’”

“It sounds like just the thing,” Schlafly declared, “to confuse an already mixed-up kid.”

Professor Hausman never taught Cho, however. Her theory course was for graduate students. But why let facts get in the way of a good diatribe? Schlafly concluded by asking “why taxpayers are paying professors at Virginia Tech to teach worthless and psychologically destructive courses.”

Schlafly’s vicious attack is just one of many far-right shots fired over the bow of academe. Targeting the “leftist university” as part of a broader political and cultural project to restore America’s “traditional” values, ultraconservative activists condemn women’s studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies and other scholarship that questions dominant Western culture. Criticisms of this scholarship as “ideological” are not new. Nor are they entirely rational. But they are now particularly well organized.

Women’s studies programs, and even individual feminist scholars, have always had to cope with professors, students, alumni and others engaged in anti-feminist intellectual harassment. On my campus, an alum sends a yearly letter to the dean and other high-ups declaring his horror at our annual Queer Film Series, each time closing his missive, “Heterosexually yours.”

READ ON...