The victims study business on campus

Bruce Thorton:

Bruce Bawer, the intrepid international journalist and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, has just published The Victims’ Revolution, an expose of “Identity Studies” in American universities. These are the programs predicated on the allegation that certain minorities in America, mainly women, gays, blacks, and Latinos, are victims of continuing prejudice, bigotry, sexism, and racism. Yet the focus on these programs is not on the gritty, pragmatic political slog necessary in a democracy for effecting change. Instead, as though these professors know their charges of endemic American prejudice are overblown, the curricula and scholarship of victim studies are characterized by the once trendy, now passé, postmodern and poststructuralist fads that never stray from highly abstract obsessions with “representation” in language, art, and popular culture, all delivered in jargon-ridden pompous prose laced with progressive bromides.

Anyone familiar with university life today knows how deeply these programs have penetrated the curriculum and the institution. As the review on FrontPage shows, Bawer’s survey is a penetrating contribution to documenting the absurdity, hypocrisy, and sheer mediocrity of such programs. What I find interesting is the response of academic orthodoxy to Bawer’s catalogue of absurdities. Consider the review by Andrew Delbanco, professor of “American Studies” at Columbia, in The New York Times. It is a textbook illustration of how the academic establishment goes after anyone who exposes the corruption of a reactionary, failing institution.

Delbanco’s main tactic is to deny that the problem even exists. According to Delbanco, Bawer’s book contains only a “modicum of truth.” The rest is a “caricature” that is “out of date.” Bawer’s targets are a “shrinking sector of academic life,” a relic of the ‘70s and ‘80s generation now “losing its grip.” This is a curious statement, given how entrenched these programs are in most universities. Even at a middling Cal State university like mine, we have Women’s Studies, Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, and Chicano and Latin American Studies. All offer numerous courses, award majors and/or minors, and employ all together 17 permanent and numerous adjunct faculty. And they have a large presence in the General Education program, with a total of 42 courses. This institutional presence belies Delbanco’s claim that the ideology underlying Identity Studies is “losing its grip.”

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There is much more.

Has anyone ever done a study of what jobs these programs prepare students for?   What percentage of the unemployed college graduates do these majors compose.  They appear to be part of an academic fraud perpetuated on students as well as perpetuating a grievance mill rather than lifting up people to reach their potential in some study that is actually productive and value to them in getting a real job.

At best they prepare students to go into the grievance business perpetuating a self licking ice cream cone of academia.

How many of these students have student loans they will never be able to repay because they have been led to waste their time in these studies?  These people are taking advantage of minority students and victimizing them with predatory lending practices that allow those at the top to live like the one percent.