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A post by New Kid on the Hallway drew my attention to a conversation on EconLog in which a few individuals (mostly men, it appears), try to discredit individual disciplines by declaring them to be intellectually "corrupt":
Some academic disciplines are more bogus than others: Women's Studies is not Mathematics.
My first reaction to this claim, of course, was to let my blood boil. After all, my Ph.D. diploma does reference a designated emphasis in feminist theory.
My second reaction was to take a deep breath and read, with as cool a head as possible, the comments on the post.
My third reaction was to let my rage run free here on BlogHer. Fortunately--as you shall see later in this post--someone else has already (and recently) articulated my frustration for me.
Participants in the conversation within the post's comments not only name what they believe to be "overrated" and "underrated" disciplines, but suggest ways to measure disciplinary "corruption." In his comment, Dave Gottlieb says that his undergraduate thesis ranked disciplines according to "extrinsic factors"--factors he doesn't name--that he claims supports the thesis that "women's studies is not mathematics." Ironman favors disciplines that cultivate "formal thought, structural relationships, abstract models, symbolic language, and deductive reasoning." And Jason Malloy writes, "I would love to see a broader number of disciplines and subdisciplines ranked. [....] I suspect cultural anthropology is roughly as scientific as, say, astrology."
This conversation would make for excellent discussion in a women's studies class--as well as in any other disciplines where there is a large difference between the number of men and woman teaching or majoring in the subject. But what questions might a women's studies scholar ask about this conversation?
Perhaps she'd ask at least two of the questions the pseudonymous Blue asked in the comments:
Does lack of rigor in terms of quantitative observations automatically bring integrity into question?
How do we evaluate qualitative observations? In utilitarian terms perhaps?
What are the political agendas here?
I also appreciated jcsc's comment that. . .
To claim that women's studies is bogus without providing any level of data or analysis is nothing more than saying, "We don't value women's perspectives and achievements. Women are bogus!"
. . .because it sums up so nicely so much of the chauvinism and misogyny that underlies any attempt to rank disciplines. On the original post, Troy Camplin says that "The most overrated fields are any that have the word "Studies" in them. They are overrated because most of them have practically no standards."
Back at New Kid's, Ancarett responds to this charge:
It's the same old cry that anything which isn't part of the old guard is automatically suspect and that anything that is classified in the hard sciences automatically gets a free pass as being both relevant and rigorous.
You will have to do a lot to convince me that string theory is less bogus than feminist theory. But, then, I'm part of the brainwashed masses, aren't I?
(The irony, of course, is that Ancarett is a professor of medieval history. And if anything is literally old school, it's medieval history, yes?)
Here's the deal: Although there are new "studies" programs coming into being at universities every year--both as a result of the institutionalization of established studies and in recognition of new fields of scholarship (e.g. film studies or technocultural studies)--when people refer derogatorily to "studies" fields, they're usually talking about those that were recognized as university departments and programs in the 1960s through the 1990s, specifically gender studies, American studies, cultural studies, Chicana/o studies, African and African American studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American studies. And what kind of people cluster in these fields? Women and people of color. Dismissing these fields as a group of lacking rigor is tantamount to dismissing the concerns of the fields as well as the credentials of their frequently brown-skinned and/or female contributors.
To ask again Blue's question: What are the political agendas here?
The history of science makes them transparent.
The non-"studies" fields--and the sciences in particular--have a long history of denigrating the scholarship of, or even excluding the participation of, women and people of color. And so when male scientists and male social scientists (the usual suspects in these kinds of conversations) start downplaying the significance and rigor and most importantly the relevance of "studies" (often a code word, it seems, to reference the humanities), I want to inquire about the rigor of their own fields. Why do they
