Esteemed feminist author and scholar Camille Paglia argued
that Women’s and Gender Studies Departments should be defunded in a recent
conversation with Professor Jordan Peterson.
In a wide-spanning discussion with
Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto, Camille Paglia argued
that Women’s and Gender Studies departments should be defunded.
“The
English Department had taken a century to develop,” Paglia began. “All of a
sudden, to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start taught
by people without any training in that field? What should be the parameters of
the field? What should be the requirements of the field? How about biology? If
you are going to be discussing gender, that should be a number one
requirement.”
Paglia
argued that active programs in the field were thrown together out of the
urgency to highlight women’s issues in the curriculum of the American academy.
“The administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a
situation with very few women faculty nationwide, at the time when the women’s
movement had just started up. The spotlight of tension was on them. They needed
women faculty fast. They needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast. So they
just like, poof! ‘Let there be Women’s Studies.'”
“Now we
will just hire some women, usually from English departments, and we’ll just
throw them together,” she continued. “‘You invent it, you say what it is.’ That
is why women’s studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology of the early
1970s.”
Paglia says
that early scholars in the field rejected the notion that biology played a role
in shaping gender. “I couldn’t even have a conversation with any of these
women. They were hysterical about the subject of biology. They knew nothing
about hormones. I probably got in fist fights over this. People were so
convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences.”
It was announced this week
the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth College was shut down over a lack of funding. The college
claims that most of the work done by the research will now be conducted by the
school’s Women’s and Gender Studies Department.
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