Washington, D.C. — Last month, UC Regent Ward Connerly called for a review of ethnic-studies programs in the University of California system. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he simply wants to get the university to question why it uses race and ethnicity as the basis for scholarship, noting that he believes such pursuits may contribute to racial divisions. This inquiry raises important questions.

What is the academic value of teaching kids to focus on difference and victimhood? Is that a productive use of university resources, and a valuable use of students’ time? These same questions apply to one of the most prolific areas of “identity” issues — women’s studies.

Created in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the women’s-lib movement, women’s studies programs can be found on virtually any college campus in the country. Course works vary but the offerings at Berkeley reveal the sort of curriculum that produces thousands of women’s-studies degrees every year.

“The Berkeley Women’s Studies Program considers the position of women throughout history, across the world, and in different economic, ethnic, and racial groups. It engages the question of gender itself,” according to the program description. “It examines the sexual inequality and conflict created by gendered roles and the rapid transformation of those roles today.”

As critics like Christina Hoff Sommers have pointed out, women’s studies as a discipline is about throwing out discipline altogether in the name of oppression and patriarchy, and reinventing the academy with new, more fluid rules. Thus, the obsession with definitions and the roles of the sexes. Consider the following undergraduate courses now available at Berkeley: Cultural Representations of Gender, which introduces students to models for understanding both how “gender is constructed/reconstructed through cultural representation.” Or Comparative Gender Systems, which studies the “systematic ways gender structures social life and patterns of asymmetry, hierarchy and inequality.” Then there is Identities Across Difference, which argues that identity is not an inherited marking but “a product of articulation and an investigation of self and other.”

These courses teach their mostly female students not simply to question standards and tradition — de rigueur for a modern university — but to encourage them to believe the world is working against them. For if oppression is built into the very fabric of our lives — into relationships and language and culture — how can one woman work against it all? Women’s studies programs are content to spread the gospel of oppression to young women around the country. And the word oppression is not an exaggeration.

“Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed,” says the National Women’s Studies Association. As a rule, Women’s Studies programs are explicitly committed to promoting a feminist agenda in the classroom, teaching women about their own plight. The possible impact outside the classroom is alarming.

All those young women going out into the world armed with the dogmas of oppression and gender discrimination lug a hefty chip on their shoulders. What happens when one goes in for a job interview with a male employer? If she doesn’t get the job, it could be very easy to blame it on the “models of gender construction” she studied, instead of focusing on pro-active self-improvement. And this, finally, is the danger of the “identity” curriculum in all its forms.

By focusing on difference and victimization, women’s studies and its ethnic counterparts are teaching young people division instead of cooperation, victimhood instead of initiative. There is a case to be made for academic projects that seek to broaden our understanding of history and culture by including undiscovered voices. But that’s not what’s happening, and in the meantime, the young people in those classrooms are being fed a steady diet of interpersonal poison.

— Katherine Post

Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity