I've just spent the past week attending the AAUW (American Association of University Women) convention and college symposium at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. They chose the perfect venue; with all the talk about how "white men" control the world, I felt like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen shout "Off with their heads!" (Let's not forget that feminist groups like the AAUW, convinced Disney to change its Pirates of the Caribbean ride to a more "PC" version by changing the man chases woman scene to a man chases woman with food scene.)

I attended the convention and symposium on "Gender and Race on the Campus and in the School: Beyond Affirmative Action" because I thought the AAUW dealt with educational issues -- not political activism. Like Alice, in her fall down to Wonderland, I was surprised to find that things were not as they seemed.

The main purpose of the symposium and convention was to promote activism; not education but activism. Education is where you are supposed to learn about all sides of an argument in order to come to a position on which to be an activist. Activism of the AAUW sort is where women are told what they should want, the only question up for discussion, is how to get it.

For example, here are just a few of the workshops: Effecting Progressive Social Change: Why There Can Be No 'Beyond Affirmative Action'; Taking the Sciences Beyond Affirmative Action: Cultural Impediments to Gender and Racial/Ethnic Inclusion; A Study of Sexual Harassment of Faculty in Higher Education and the One Minute Activist.

Other interesting entries included: Rethinking Identity: Race, Gender and Queer Theory in the Classroom; Surfer Girl; On Line Advocacy -- a workshop on how to use cyberspace resources to strategically advance your public policy goals; Shout: Making Headlines -- learning the "ins and outs" of working with the media to get the media to promote your message.

There were four separate workshops dealing with affirmative action (e.g. Proposition 209) alone. Lest you have any questions here, the AAUW line on preferences based on race and sex is to keep them, keep them, keep them. It preaches to college educators who should know better, that there are no real objective criteria for college or professional school admissions.

While I might agree with convention speaker Lani Guinier (of Clinton's failed nomination fame) that standardized tests are not necessarily the best indicator of success in college or law school, not one of the educators present questioned the fact that Guinier ignored grades as an objective criterion. Somehow they forgot that they give grades to their students and that those grades might actually mean something.

Conventioneers were also repeatedly told that there are no such things as race or gender based quotas and that failure to achieve numerical "goals" and timetables for hiring women and minorities carries no penalties. Hey -- I really am in Fantasyland.

What bothers me most though, is that this women's organization somehow presumes that all women ought to think alike. That if you are really a woman and/or feminist, you will of course agree with the party line of the organization. That presumption belies the very reason women sought and won the right to vote -- not to vote for what someone else told them (including their husbands) but to exercise their own educated minds and vote independently of any pressure group.

In this AAUW Wonderland though, there were no counterpoints to the group rights positions incorporated into the convention and symposium. Members were presented with only the views held by the organization and the in-house advocacy research to support those views. For a conference supposedly about education, the AAUW seems to have forgotten the difference between education and propaganda. In fact, the AAUW succeeded in creating just the sort of backwards nonsense world that Lewis Carroll would be proud of.

-Pamela Lewis

Senior Fellow in Women's Studies and Race Relations