Women's
Studies (a.k.a. Feminist Studies) programs at colleges and
universities across the United States invariably echo the
theme that women, by and large, are the oppressed victims of Western culture's
inequities -- which are tied most closely to capitalism. One of the
oldest and most influential Women's Studies Departments in the U.S. is
at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Soon after that department was established, its creators renamed it "Feminist Studies" in order to
reflect their real agenda, which was to provide a training center for
political radicals.
Since its inception, the chief architect of the UC Santa Cruz
program has been the longtime lesbian activist Bettina Aptheker, a former Communist
Party comrade of Angela Davis. Aptheker says she overcame
her initial reluctance to pursue an academic career when Marge
Frantz, a lecturer in American Studies at Santa Cruz -- and, like
Aptheker, a Bay Area Communist -- advised her: “It’s your
revolutionary duty!” Aptheker soon began to view teaching as "a form of political activism" and a “revolutionary praxis” -- a
Marxist term for the art of political organizing. She seeks to inject
a “women-centered perspective” into her curriculum, in order to correct
what she claims is the “male-centered” bias of traditional
university study. Structuring her courses as "overtly
political" endeavors, Aptheker immerses students
in a one-sided overview of radical feminism, with no
critical apparatus and no offering of texts skeptical of its agendas.
Aptheker's
colleague at UC Santa Cruz, Nancy Stoller, teaches a course called
“Feminist Organizing and Global Realities.”
The required text for this class is Women’s
Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational
Politics –
a compendium of essays by feminist anti-globalization activists,
co-edited by Stoller. There is no evidence to suggest that students
in the class are exposed to critiques of feminist theories about
globalization. Rather, they are informed that the course is designed
to “prepare you more specifically for your activist work in the
fields of gender and sexuality.”
Stoller
also teaches “Women’s Health Activism,”
a course which, according to the professor, emphasizes
“activism—making change, especially from the grass roots.”
Books
assigned in the course are written exclusively from a radical
perspective. Representative of these texts is Killing
the Black Body,
in which author Dorothy Roberts claims that the federal government is
waging a racial war against the “reproductive rights” of black
women. Another assigned text is The Vagina Monologues by feminist
author Eve Ensler. Instead of being asked to examine the work critically, students
are required to select a section from the play and perform it in
front of the class. A collection of feminist writings is also
required; a representative article from the reader is titled,
“Not feminist, but not bad: Cuba’s surprisingly pro-woman health
system.”
Another noteworthy course at UC Santa Cruz is “Women
and the Law,” which contends that
complex institutions such as the law should be viewed through the
prism of “gender.” The course is also informed by “critical
race theory,” a radical legal framework that integrates Marxism with
racial politics. Among its chief tenets is the notion that race is a social construct invented by white people in order to
oppress racial minorities. Related to this is the course’s
underlying theme that “the law” is inherently oppressive. To this
end, students are taught that “the law structures rights [unfairly],
offers protections [to the privileged], produces hierarchies, and
sexualizes power.”
In a UC Santa Cruz course titled “Introduction to Feminist Science
Studies,” which examines “a variety of feminist approaches to
scientific methods and practices," students are required to read
essays like “The Science Question In Feminism And The Privilege Of
Partial Perspective,” by the radical feminist Donna Haraway, who
claims that science has always been
“tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male
supremacy.”
The worldviews and political perspectives advanced in these UC Santa
Cruz courses are representative of those in Women's Studies programs
all across the United States.
Adapted from "The Worst School in America," by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin (September 13, 2007).
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