december:
Not really. There are damn few campuses where feminists have not given it their all, and they have usually attained at least some considerations. But examine the state of “Women’s Studies” on most campuses today and you’ll find:
• Many of them are “certificate programs” (other terms may be in vogue now), meaning that they are just listings of Psychology Department classes that happen to pertain to women and/or gender; Sociology Department classess that happen to pertain to women and/or gender; History classes…well you get the idea. Classes, in other words, that were already there and which address women as subject matter without necessarily presenting any of the subject from the theoretical vantage point of feminist theory. You take a bunch of those classes you get the certificate. No (or few) permanent or dedicated faculty positions for WS.
• Courses that are more ostensibly “feminist” include a lot of “works by women” courses in literature, art, philosophy, and so on. Generally very little feminist theory is taught here either. You (december) may argue that the oft-mentioned “dead European white men” are or were better authors, poets, artists, and so on, and that this is just a form of academic “affirmative action” for women thinkers. I’d disagree with you, but that’s really neither here nor there, as it has nothing really to do with feminist theory except insofar as femtheory has been used as a tool for questioning the standards of excellence by which the “dead European white men” were said to constitute the “canon of excellence”. (If that’s all you’re attempting to pick an argument against, please let me know).
• Actual feminist theory courses – courses in which feminist theory is taught as a framework roughly parallel to and in contrast to theories such as structuralism-functionalism , marxism/socialist theory, social determinism, transactional “game” theory, and other variable-defining & background-concept-laying tools – are fairly rare and many of them ARE INDEED BOGUS but not in the way that I think you mean. A great many of them are bogus because they pretend to be presentations of feminist theory when actually they are merely presentations of a few convoluted hybrid strands of feminist-adaptations-of-nonfeminist-theory such as “socialist feminism” and “poststructuralist feminism”.
• Content courses for which theory is applicable for research papers and data analysis and hypothesis formulation abound on a college campus, but it is a rare college where courses on Economics in the Middle East 1300-1650 or Jurisprudence and the American Courtroom would be taught by professors who utilize feminist theory (the real stuff not socialist or postie crap, btw) as readily as they utilize marxist concepts in describing things that took place, forces that were in play, factors that students need to be aware of, etc etc etc. [You’ll hear “socio-economic status” four times per lecture; “ruling class” from your more marxist professors several times per semester; “social structure” as an unquestioned axiomatic presence once every fourth sentence; “deviance” and “market forces” from your structuralist profs two or three times per lecture; but you could attend every class except feminist theory without ever hearing adjectives like “patriarchal” or noun phrases like “subject/object dynamics” applied to anything except women and women’s specific concerns, if even there]
See above. People with your attitudes towards feminist theory are well-represented among tenured faculty, even if many of them are considerably more fond of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen than you would be. I can’t think of any universities that have stand-alone graduate-degree-conferring Feminist Studies Departments (by that title or any other), tenured feminist faculty running them, and big budgets. Perhaps you could name the ones you had in mind?