CLEARING THE CUCKOOS OUT OF THE ACADEMIC NEST.

The so-called area studies departments, or critical studies centers, if you will, have long treated interesting working hypotheses as Articles of Faith.  "The fundamental problem confronting the 'studies' departments is that a lot of what passes as critical theory rests either on untestable priors, or is normative per se.  Don't say I didn't warn you."

It has long been my position that much of the work done in ethnic studies or critical theory can be handled, perhaps more properly, in existing academic departments, whether sociology or anthropology or English, and perhaps the presence of more conventional scholars might get the True Believers to offer better arguments.

Northern Arizona University recently acted in a manner consistent with that recommendation, and two "feminist scholars," who hold conventional appointments in addition to their affiliation with critical studies centers, took to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, to reveal how tight their priors are.  "How did we move so quickly from centering women in higher ed to erasing them?"

It defies parody.

In 2022, we published an essay in Inside Higher Ed about what it meant, as feminist scholars, to work in a women-serving institution. Writing from a university campus with a student body consisting of 63 percent female-identified and 37 percent male-identified students, we addressed this historical shift in gender dynamics and discussed the implications for institutional change. Our optimism seemed to know no bounds as we discussed representation, women’s sports, free menstrual products and childcare options and affordability.

Four years later, we find ourselves in a very different world. With little faculty or staff input, this past fall semester the university administration “sunset” our five universitywide diversity commissions, including the Commission on the Status of Women. In spring, faculty voted to merge women’s and gender studies (WGS) with ethnic studies into a single department, erasing the unit title and independence while reorganizing the women’s and gender studies graduate certificate program and related graduate coursework. Writing as two former WGS directors, we find ourselves feeling both whiplash and grief, wondering how more than four decades of progress on campus has so suddenly slipped away. How have we moved so quickly from centering women to erasing women from university policy and practice?

Might it be that the tightness of your priors, combined with the quick retreat to the fainting couch, produces certificate-holders incapable of forming a coherent argument, let alone performing a job more difficult than fixing a latte?  I mean, even before the October 2023 terrorist raid on Israel, the head of the American Association of University Professors recognized what a scam all that diversity agitprop was.

It came to this, dear reader, when the supposedly liberal institutions decided that setting up departments, primarily the so-called area studies departments, specifically for the purpose of cheering on their own.  The idea, though, was that each department would only cheer for its own team.  When gender studies departments sign up for Team Hamas, that's too much for longtime American Association of University Professors prexy Cary Nelson.

It's not that the intersectionality coven at Northern Arizona necessarily donned keffiyehs and chased Jewish students, but all they really needed to do was treat differing perspectives with respect.  "You are wrong, and you deserve to hear elaborations thereon; you are partially correct, and you deserve to have your thoughts strengthened; or you are right but you deserve to have your conclusions challenged."

That's too much to ask for the women of the fevered brow.

The rapid about-face from our optimism of just four years ago feels like a sudden death. We find ourselves mourning loss, writing from mourning and writing as an act of mourning. Ginetta E.B. Candelario reminds us that feminists reframe grief from a private, emotional experience to a public, political act that challenges injustice, colonialism and systemic violence. And so, we write to address radical transformations that feel different from the ordinary shifts that time brings. We write to make sense of the erasure of a program that has been our interdisciplinary home and a vital force on campus, expanding curricular options, creating interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary community and scholarship, hosting feminist art and programming, and shaping diversity efforts campuswide.

As scholars, we’re unaccustomed to writing from emotion. A historian, Sanjam, and an anthropologist, Frances, we conduct scientific inquiry with primary sources, develop themes and construct narratives to make sense of the world. But our feminist peers have long engaged the affective turn as a critical intervention, revealing how emotions and embodied experiences are not peripheral to knowledge production but instead are central to understanding power, inequality and resistance. We find affirmation and solace in these feminist insights as we come to terms with our collective sense of loss. We also know that we are committed to nonerasure and that writing is an act of memory, an act of story, an act of remembering. Whether comfortable or not, we write from inside these changes, providing the emic to the neutral observer’s etic view.

Put another way, they could get away with Minimal Publishable Units that Taylor and Francis would accept for publication without having their tight priors challenged the way they might had they offered work in history and anthropology journals that might retain respect for the standards of scholarship and suggest they save the "affective turn" for more social settings.

Easier to blame Trump.

More recently, women’s and gender studies units on campuses have been ensnared in ideological attacks on diversity, critical theory and intersectionality. Political in nature, the threats have incited anxiety and anticipatory compliance on the part of upper administrations and fear on the part of non-tenure-track faculty, who on average make up 40 percent of the programs’ instructors. Our own program was historically composed of only nontenured faculty in dedicated lines, with tenured and pretenure faculty in lines shared with other departments (i.e., history, sociology, applied Indigenous studies). As directors, we were constantly aware (and reminded) of the program’s fragility. We were right: It takes surprisingly little to topple historically marginalized and neglected programs. Without dedicated tenured faculty lines, the WGS program at our university was structurally unsustainable. While the work was central to the university’s diversity initiatives, we were unable to convince administrators to make real investments in the program.

That said, women’s studies programs have been easy targets. Feminists have long been at the forefront of transforming academic and public discourse, reshaping social imaginaries, and expanding the conceptual vocabularies and lexicon through which inequality can be recognized and contested. The past several decades have witnessed a profound shift in public consciousness. Dominant normative assumptions and prejudices that once masqueraded as common sense have increasingly been exposed as historically contingent systems of power rather than natural social arrangements. In hindsight, it’s not a surprise that the discipline has been caught up in Christopher Rufo’s self-aggrandizing, partisan attacks on critical race theory.

Circling back to our theme four years ago, we begin to see the discipline of women’s studies as less an easy than a necessary target. Microtargeted by the MAGA voter base that emerged over the past two decades, the animosity was stoked in part by what we then called the “rising anxiety … around changing gender demographics across higher education.”

That any serious scholarly work, that is, if there was any serious scholarly work to do, could have been done in history or sociology or anthropology without creating additional administrative posts, and that "historically contingent systems of power" well might be institutional arrangements that confer evolutionary stability and you deconstruct them at your peril doesn't occur to these two.

Rather, they resort to the usual squid ink.

We do not inhabit a postfeminist university or world order; on the contrary, we are witnessing a move to undo five decades of systematic feminist research that questioned heteropatriarchal, ableist, colonial, neoliberal and Eurocentric systems of knowledge and power. Women’s and gender studies programs are facing contraction and erosion; feminist intellectual traditions are increasingly delegitimized through processes of epistemic exclusions.

Although feminist scholarship has often been institutionally marginalized within underfunded WGS programs, its intellectual influence has extended far beyond departmental boundaries, transforming disciplines ranging from history and sociology to law, literature, public health and the natural sciences. The erosion of feminist scholarship will reverberate far beyond the university. It threatens to reverse decades of conceptual and political work that enables societies to identify and name structural forms of violence, inequality and exclusion. Such erasure is central to contemporary conservative and right-wing projects that seek to restore traditional gender hierarchies under the banners of family values, national renewal, Western hegemony and cultural common sense.

They deconstructed institutional arrangements of long standing, and now they've discovered it hasn't worked so well.  Predictably, they revert to their institutionalized professional protest community roots.

Current efforts to rehabilitate racist, classist, sexist and gendered hierarchies require coordinated resistance, not only from women’s and gender studies faculty but also from colleagues across the academy whose scholarship has benefited from feminist intellectual interventions. Even as women’s and gender studies evolved from social movements, emerging from the streets into the classroom, it retained its transformative and counterhegemonic ethos, enriching the university's intellectual mission through critical inquiry, ethical reasoning and evidence-based knowledge production across disciplines. While we mourn the retrenchment of our university’s program and the sunsetting of commissions, our commitment to sustaining women’s and gender studies is inseparable from a commitment to preserving higher education as a space for rigorous scholarship, inclusive pedagogy and expansive ways of knowing.

"Expansive ways of knowing" is antithetical to rigorous scholarship. Turf them out.  Or learn to brew mochas.