3/8/98
   THINKING ABOUT THE FEMINIST AGENDA 
    Scripps Howard News Service 
    Release date: SUNDAY, 03-08-98 
    Colorado Springs may not use 
    Column 
    By LINDA SEEBACH 
    Scripps Howard News Service 
     
      Envious, narrow and closed, worse than the old boys' network it challenged _ that's how Christina Hoff Sommers characterized the discipline of women's studies in a talk she gave Thursday at Colorado State University about her 1994 book "Who Stole Feminism." 
     I wouldn't know about "envious," but as for the rest, it explains as well as anything how I, a journalist, ended up being drafted as one of two people asked to respond to Sommers' lecture. 
     Normally that role is taken by professors at the host university, but the organizer of the lecture series, Professor James Lester of the Policy Studies Institute, wasn't able to find any female faculty to appear despite numerous phone calls. 
     In the question-and-answer period after the talk, one professor said she would have been happy to speak except that she was already signed up for a later lecture in the series. I appreciate the clarification, and her courage. 
     I made many of the same calls Lester did. Three women were going to be out of town, and a couple didn't have voice mail, but I left seven detailed messages by voice mail or fax, and only one person responded. 
     That's very unusual. After reporting on higher education for more than 10 years, I can assure you that faculty are normally delighted when someone from the press takes an interest in their work. In fact, I can remember only one similar occasion. It was at the University of Minnesota, only one person out of several from Women's Studies ever returned a call, and the visiting lecturer was _ no surprise _ Christina Hoff Sommers. 
     What has she said, to deserve being shunned? She's a feminist, by her own description, someone who believes that women should have the same opportunities as men. 
     But she rejects the dominant orthodoxy of academic feminism that women are helpless victims of male oppression in American society. She isn't inclined to male-bashing _ in fact, she's working on a book to be called "The War Against Boys" _ andoshewrecognizes that biology plays an essential role in shaping the differences, ds well as the commonalities, between men and women. 
     Nothing radical, you understand. 
     She also exploded some enduring feminist fictions _ one in four women will be raped during her lifetime, 150,000 girls die of anorexia, domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects. 
     But facts are inconvenient for the feminist agenda. Since they can't be refuted, they have to be ignored. 
     The scope of the feminist agenda is breathtaking. In the most recent issue of "The Women's Quarterly," a magazine published by the Independent Women''s Forum, Jessica Gavora reports that the Clinton Justice Department is drafting regulations to guarantee strict proportionality between men and women in every academic program. 
     That's already happened in sports, where schools have had to cut men's teams because not enough women wanted to be varsity athletes. If the same thing happens in engineering, astrophysics and medical research, the effects on American society will be catastrophic. 
     Another feminist utopia is described in "Vision 2000," a document from the New England Council of Land-Grant University Women prescribing goals for universities. 
     Daphne Patai described "Vision 2000" as "a stunningly imperialistic move to put in place a questionable feminist agenda, thinly disguised as a plea for equal opportunity and fairness," in an article she wrote for the "Chronicle of Higher Education." Patai is a profesor of Brazilian literature at the University of Masschusetts at Amherst and co-author, with Noretta Koertge, of "Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies." 
     Faculty members whose students judge their courses insufficiently "inclusive" will be denied satisfactory teaching evaluations and merit raises, administrators will be judged by their success in achieving gender equity, and departments that don't make progress will lose their autonomy. 
     Every detail of the curriculum, and even of many extra-curricular activities, will be monitored to ensure it is "women-friendly and culturally diverse," the monitoring to be carried out _ naturally _ by an autonomous Women's Studies site and active scholars in Women's Studies. 
     Calling such a vision "imperialistic" is not far-fetched, but it won't come to pass without the complicity of campus administrations. To gain that the visionaries have to paint the situation of women in higher education as so dire, so hopeless of improvement under current leadership that only women's studies can redeem it. 
     Given women's gains in the last several decades, and the sorry state of academic freedom within women's studies, the thesis is absurd. Sommers and Patai, in their books and their lectures, reveal the absurdity, not only to students, but also to parents, alumni and even legislators, who do have something to say about campus goings-on. 
     No wonder their views are not welcomed, but what a sad commentary on the intellectual bankruptcy of the feminist agenda.