Oft reported, never actually seen.

Two articles on the radar screen this morning, Women's Studies Departments Are Failing Feminism by Elizabeth Segran and then Princeton and Wellesley May Re-inflate Grades by Paul Caron.

From Segran's article.

For three years, I taught feminist theory to undergraduates while working on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. There was a time when Berkeley was the epicenter of radical feminism: In the 1970s, women’s rights activists regularly stormed campus buildings, demanding birth control, abortion, self-defense classes, and childcare. But when I started teaching in 2007, nothing particularly radical was happening anymore.

Far from being sites of activism and empowerment, Berkeley’s Women’s Studies classes were weighed down by theory and jargon. Using departmental guidelines, I crafted a syllabus that was meant to help my students think critically about gender, but what that really meant is that we spent our days wrestling with dense and difficult texts, parsing the works of Gayatri Spivak, Monique Wittig, and Judith Butler. We devoted inordinate amounts of time to asking whether gender and sexuality were social constructs, rather than biological facts. We casually threw around words like “subalterneity,” “essentialism,” and “phallogocentrism” as if they really meant something.

When talking with people from Studies programs, it has been my experience that they are often passionate about the ideas, and naive beyond comprehension in terms of trying to relate those ideas to the real world in which everyone else operates. The jargon and theory are abstractions that they use as barriers to comprehension. When you start drilling down into specific definitions and logical consistency, it quickly emerges that there has been little critical thinking or comprehension of what they have been studying for four years. I don't think it is the student's fault. They have been hoodwinked. They have been sold a bill of goods. Boldness in imaginary theory has been presented as critical thinking.

In Segran's article the real value is in the discussion going on in the comments. I don't have the impression of New Republic being a particular hotbed of conservativism but the commenters are certainly taking Segran to task for the weak argument.

Caron's link might have part of the explanation for this paradox of a field of study claiming to be based on bold critical thinking but actually being a cacophony of discordant ideas. Granted this data is from a single university, but it does not contradict other evidence I have seen.

There is the traditional and common divide between the objective fields of study (sciences, maths, et al) and the more subjective fields such as the humanities. But even within the humanities, there is a material range. Women's Studies is the field of study with the second largest grade inflation. Apparently, you have to work hard to get something less than an A-.

It would appear that Women's Studies is highly subjective, has little objective information, is riddled by theory and jargon, has no standards of rigorous performance, and therefore likely has little empirical or logically rigorous discussion of ideas and applications. Perhaps this breeds a high degree of confidence (see all these high grades) with a low capacity to argue (jargon laden field irrelevant to outsiders and unaccepting of exogenous information).

It is easy to look at the long running myths constantly propagated by advocates as a function of ideological purity, as proto-religious belief systems: War on Women, Rape Culture, Gender Wage Gap, Patriarchal discrimination, etc. All these are mainstays of media discussion despite repeated debunking by multiple sources here and abroad.

But perhaps there is more than just ideological conviction. Perhaps there is actually an incapacity to actually argue a point or to accept confounding data. I suspect insularity, failure to deal with empirical information and absence of reasoned and logical arguments all contribute to a state of mind incapable of perceiving the reality in which everyone else lives.

Peter Wood in Campus Activism: The Fight for Imaginary Victories has a good summary of this curious state of affairs.

Campus activism is, by and large, the world of make-believe. Whenever students occupy a president’s office, Tinkerbell is not far away. Whenever faculty demand a boycott, Professor Dumbledore winks at Professor Snape.

The premise behind campus activism is always the same. The college campus is a microcosm of the larger world. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens at Oberlin or Sweet Briar is imagined to rock the foundations of the old order. Patriarchy trembles. The Zionist Entity is called to account. The coal-breathing capitalist Earth warmers feel the chill of a generation walking on their graves.

That premise, of course, is always mistaken. It matters not a whit to the energy producers that Pitzer College chose to divest from fossil fuel companies, or even that Stanford, with its much larger endowment, decided to pull out of coal company investments. Israel will do what it needs to do to defend itself against its enemies, regardless of what resolutions the American Studies Association passes. “Patriarchy” stalks the American college campus the way the plesiosaur stalks Loch Ness: oft reported, never actually seen.

A mistaken premise, however, is still a premise, and we anthropologists have written many books about the way people organize their lives around interesting misconceptions. If you believe that witchcraft causes unfortunate events, protecting yourself from witches becomes a significant preoccupation. This is especially so if everyone else in your village is worried about witches too. From such preoccupations arise communities that appear to outsiders to be dominated by irrational fears and sometimes destructive obsessions. The classic anthropological text, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) by the great British investigator, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, deals with a central African tribe. Evans-Pritchard neatly showed that given the Azande premise of invisible, malevolent witches, the anti-witch precautions made perfect sense. And there is no way to prove that when a termite-ridden granary falls over and kills someone, a witch didn’t arrange it. The Azande had developed what today’s climate activists call the “precautionary principle.” In the absence of evidence, better to assume the witches are at work.

Indeed, when I go through the list of things campus activists are now focused on, it is hard not to think of the Azande. Our college campuses are busy fretting over numerous imaginary dangers, which of course forestalls them from thinking seriously about some real problems.

All of this ties in to this noxious article in The Atlantic. The premises behind the article are both racist and misandrist. Tallying Female Workers Isn't Enough to Make Tech More Diverse by Adrienne Lafrance. Again, the commenters rescue an otherwise execrable article by logical and reasoned arguments pointing out both the flawed premises and the confounding evidence in the article itself. Lafrance is irked that only 30% of the workforce in technology companies are women.

Lafrance wants to accuse the tech companies of both racism and misogyny. Her approach prompts the biblical admonishment "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

Lafrance wants to believe that all roles ought to be in proportion to demographic representation. If 50% of the population is female, then 50% of the workers ought to be female. She strips away all diversity of individual opinion, culture and decision-making.

For an investigative reporter, she is curiously innumerate. She thinks she has a damning point when she observes:

Company-wide representation of women might be 30 percent, but the percentage of women in tech and engineering roles at Google and Yahoo, for instance, was about half that.

So women are about 15% of the tech and engineering roles in tech companies. And what percentage of technical and engineering degrees (the pathways into technical roles) are earned by women? 15%! Apparently Google and Yahoo are admirably hiring people in a gender and color blind fashion. Lafrance's beef is actually with all those women, such as herself (Journalism major) who chose not to pursue technical studies.

But making the argument that women, against their wishes, should be taking more technical and engineering degrees, is not the argument that Lafrance wants to make. Perhaps it is too boring. Much more rewarding and entertaining to make baseless accusations against successful companies.

But the most egregious violence against reason, evidence and logic is the assertion:

This drumbeat of diversity data has been anticlimactic, not least because it shows what most people already expected: that leaders in technology are overwhelmingly hiring white men.

The data in her own article show that males are about 70% of the workforce and that about 40% of the workforce are people of color (primarily Asian). That means that about 28% of the workforce are white men. I don't think there is anyone outside of the academy, and apparently MSM, who would equate 28% of the workforce as being overwhelming.

So really, what is it that allows apparent misandry and racism in a mainstream publication to be acceptable, as long as it is aimed solely at white men?

I am guessing that the answer lies in the academy and its abandonment of reason and evidence in popular fields and its unwillingness to debate protected ideologies.