UK: Taking the ‘he’ out of higher education

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2013-08-12 17:23

Article here. Excerpt:

'Upon co-founding Girton College for female students at Cambridge University in 1869, Davies expressed her intention for it to be ‘a college like a man’s’. What she meant by this was that the same subjects should be taught, in the same way, and to the same academic standard, as in the male colleges. She had previously suggested that the best girls’ schools ‘are precisely those in which the masculine subjects have been introduced’ (mathematics, Latin and Greek), and she carried this view into higher education, insisting that for women to have anything other than equal access to the same knowledge as men would result in their education being forever considered inferior.

How things have changed. Today, many feminist academics working in social science or humanities departments in British universities no longer campaign for female students to have equal access to the same knowledge as men; instead, they argue that the very notion of ‘a body of knowledge’ is oppressive, patriarchal and elitist, representing only the concerns of those who are ‘pale, male and stale’. They seek to replace the dominance of one hegemonic, patriarchal body of knowledge with the recognition that there are multiple bodies of knowledge, each one constructed according to the life experiences of traditionally subordinate groupings, with women (and feminism) to the fore. These other bodies of knowledge are to be afforded equal value with more traditional notions of academic knowledge.

So, where once women battled to be allowed into lectures and fought to sit exams, today many feminists in the academy argue that traditional teaching methods employed by universities are representative of an historic, white, middle-class, patriarchal hegemony and as such need to be ‘disrupted’, as they alienate non-traditional students. Lecturing is considered representative of a male tendency to preach and profess – and, in so doing, to silence the audience. Apparently, seminars also represent a male desire for competitive one-upmanship, where confrontational arguments win out over seemingly more constructive attempts at intellectual compromise. The assumption of these feminists is that female, working-class, and black and minority-ethnic students will feel out of place in such an educational environment. Instead, many feminists argue for ‘learner-centred’ practice that promotes cooperation rather than competition, with personal reflection or peer assessment replacing examinations.
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The early campaigners for women’s right to attend university assumed female students were just as capable of academic independence and rationality as their male counterparts, and as such deserved equal access to the same research and scholarship. Now, however, many feminists promote the idea that there is no body of knowledge worth learning. Higher education is merely about students engaged in personal projects of transformation and recognising their own privileges and limitations as they share experiences.'

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The academic feminists' (in collusion w/ the rest of them) ultimate goal is to throw males out of higher ed entirely. Possibly they want boys booted from pre-collegiate schools, too. They seem to be doing a pretty good job of hamstringing them by collectively marking them down as compared to girls. Anyway, if feminists have their way, anything that used to be of value coming from a typical college degree will be null and void soon enough. Colleges are, it seems, happily complicit. As full profs retire, they're getting replaced by adjuncts that are paid per-course or maybe by the hour, usually a pittance, without anything like retirement or health benefits. Meanwhile, the price charged to students keeps going up.

I remember when the typical college prez was a PhD in something and rather dowdy-- but a respectable academic. Today's college prezes are a lot more likely to be slick MBAs with a lot more experience running businesses than schools. It's pretty obvious where "higher ed's" priorities are these days: higher payoffs selling economically worthless degrees for 6 figures to naive kids with the doofy complicity of their out-of-the-loop parents. How so many 40- and 50-year-olds these days can actually willingly subsidize their kid's pursuit of a BA in English to the tune of $100k+, getting into 10s of 1,000s of $ in debt for a degree that, if you're lucky, will qualify you to pump gas is utterly beyond me. But yet for some truly bizarre reason, ppl are still doing this-- ppl who really ought to know better, too. Well, anyway, sorry guys, I'm ranting on this topic again. It just really drives me nuts to see all these kids get into the greatest debt of their lives (many of them, anyway), all before they're 21. We're the species that preys not only on the fathers of its own children but on the children themselves. Ugh.

Anyway, with college admins happily going with the dumbing-down of even liberal arts degree courses/req'ts (at the behest of such academically-rigorous types as women's studies professors) all to make the "college experience" more of a wave-through to collect course credit hour tuition fees, is it any wonder most employers these days are far more concerned with what recent grads actually know how to do rather than what they studied.

Funny thing is this: Once they've utterly wrecked the credibility of higher ed (aside maybe from colleges still teaching STEM), the degrees they're peddaling will finally be generally and openly derided as useless. I predict most STEM, incl. hard science fields along with applied sciences, will eventually move into private STEM-only colleges/institutions as STEM topic instructors/profs get fed up with the gender-politicization of their depts. and worse still, efforts to make them pass off false findings for truths. (Drexel U in Philadelphia, PA, for example, started out as an applied trade academy. It awarded no degrees. But it produced a lot of skilled, employable young ppl to work in industry. Only later did it become a uni. So I can see a return to such trade schools and more narrowly-scoped educational institutions that do not have any "humanities" depts.-- or goddamn women's studies depts., too.) Eventually, today's "modern" unis and colleges will do themselves in with their own greed and craven caving-in to feminists. Sad.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2013-08-13 16:29