How exactly do Women’s Studies Departments justify their academic existence(s) in various colleges and universities? What is the specific academic rationale for having an entire school or department devoted to gender centric studies of various kinds.
Has the creation of these separate Women’s Studies schools and departments enhanced the quality of the social, historical and philosphical analysis being done by these deparments? Are new intellectual horizons being opened up by these Women’s Studies schools and departments?
Women’s studies isn’t a formal department at all colleges, but some of the reasons why it takes that form on some campuses are practical for faculty and beneficial for curricular coherence.
On the faculty side: Women’s Studies is interdisciplinary. It borrows from other fields. Like other fields which have emerged and developed recently, it has probably developed some of its own research norms and standards of scholarship and truth and what constitutes an “important” problem worthy of study. When faculty who share that culture form a department, they can provide a peer group for evaluation (important for tenure and promotion). Otherwise, sometimes women’s studies faculty (who are appointed in other departments scattered across the campus)have a hard time advancing. Tenure tends to be awarded by departments, so faculty working on what seems tangential to their appointed discipline can suffer from lack of understanding of their work. And lack of mentoring.
Similarly, when faculty and courses are scattered across departments, it can be hard to develop a coherent curriculum with consistent expectations and prerequisites and capstones that build on previous work. Students can’t have a departmental “home” and instead end up “belonging” to no one. They can slip through the cracks and not have the kindsof academic experiences the college means them to have.
However, it’s my understanding that many fields like this are aware that there are also drawbacks to forming a department. In doing so, the field might lose the umbrella of legitimacy lent to courses when they are located in well-established departments. It might also mean that faculty and courses in other department stop addressing important issues in the field because “there’s a department to do that.” In that way, the knowledge/issue gets pulled out of the overall curriculum and sometimes the field can be “ghettoized.” It’s an issue in organizational studies and other area studies like women’s studies, asian studies, etc.
"How exactly do Black Studies Departments justify their academic existence(s) in various colleges and universities? What is the specific academic rationale for having an entire school or department devoted to ethno-centric studies of various kinds.
Has the creation of these separate Black Studies schools and departments enhanced the quality of the social, historical and philosphical analysis being done by these deparments? Are new intellectual horizons being opened up by these Black Studies schools and departments?"
That, however, would seem to indicate that some number of those departments are poorly organized or run, (or that those departments are dominated by people with axes to grind, rather than that they have no justification.
I agree with your overall point that there is a danger in simply assuming that either can be used to justify the other. Still, as a long-time critic of over-specialization in education, science, and business, I think Cranky makes a good argument for interdisciplinary studies.
To teach leftist ideoolgy of course. It’s really so transparent, if you look at it.
Before y’all jump on me, can you show me a conservative Women’s Studies professor? A moderate one? Or just the rose-colored glasses-wearing ones who believe in tangerine dreams and marmalade skies?
By comparison, The University of Chicago, my alma mater, has an world famous Oriental Institute. The academics who work there are not particularly Asian. They are people of all races who are interested in Asian culture of a certain historic period. Similarly, people in the classics department need not be Greek. There’s a real body of knowledge. The ethnicity of the academic individual is completely irrelevant.
My impression is that this is not the case for women’s studies and black studies.
Yes, it’s a trendy leftover from the late 60s/70s. Replace “women” with “people who don’t have a penis” to see how silly it is. The study of the role of women (or blacks) and institutions like marriage/sexism (or slavery/segregation/racism) are essential to the understanding of history, politics or (I suppose) sociology. But I don’t see how they’re, in themselves, “bodies of knowledge”, as december says.
Reminds me of “Dave Barry Slept Here” - the columnist’s hilarious parody of a high school AmHist text book. Nearly ever chapter in the second half of the book includes a sentence saying something to the effect of “Meanwhile, many important contributions were being made by women and minorities” with no elaboration.
That is exactly the point of women’s and black studies. Up until 30 years ago, history (and many other social science fields) were only from the white male perspective (in Western education). Thus, both have been (and still are) integral to understanding the contributions and importance of these groups.
I see it as something like BET, though, as in it will someday be outdated. BET, when it first began, was important because almost all sitcoms/shows were geared towards white people, with the “token” minority usually playing a stereotypical role. Now, TV is very multi-racial, and something like BET is not needed. Someday (I hope), women and minorities will be given an equal mainstream focus in history and other fields, and while courses on the subjects will still be pertinent, whole curriculums will not be needed.
Well, off the top of my head, Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers don’t exactly have a ton in common with Dworkin. There is a whole lot of variety of thought within the disipline.
If I bothered, I could have through enough classes of the classes I took together to create a minor in Women’s studies from the University of Minnesota in the mid- 1980s. A man did teach one of the women’s history classes I took. A conservative taught one of the women’s lit classes.
All the professors I remember that taught Russian history or language were of Russian background. I took a Scandinavian film class from a Swede. Niether my biology class nor my astronomy class were taught by young earth creationists.
In the 15 years since I’ve graduated, the women’s studies professors (the ones assigned to the department as opposed to the cross disaplinary ones that are all over the board), are still all women. But its a much more global disipline than it was when I was in school (when it was white middle class American women talking about white middle class American women and why there wasn’t better representation in women’s studies for non-white, non-American non-middle class women).
I think Cranky makes excellent points for and against having a seperate department.
I go to a women’s college. Having a women’s studies department seems pretty natural in a setting where all the students are women and have intentionally placed themselves in an environment where all the students are women.
I would be hard pressed to show you a conservative professor in any department at my own school. I don’t personally know any at the university where my mother works either, and while I am sure they must exist I cannot think of a single one at any college or university I am familiar with, the notable exception being institutions affiliated with fundamentalist Christian groups. It has been my experience that most professors are not conservatives, it doesn’t matter what department they are in.
All students in women’s studies classes at my school are women, because all students at my school are women. However, all students in classes dealing with African-American studies (we do not have an African-American studies department) are not all African-American. The class I took to fulfill my women’s studies requirement was a course on African-American women writers, and none of the students in that class were African-American. More than half were white Americans. There was also one white Englishwoman. The remainder were foreign black students from the Carribean and Africa.
As to the OP, Women’s Studies Departments don’t need to justify themselves any more than Art or Music Departments. The studies may not seem necessary to some, but the classes exist for the edification of us all. The body of knowledge is only gender specific in content, but not in who is allowed or encouraged to take them. It is in need of its own department simply because the canon, history books, research, etc., barely make room for the history and writings of women. In history, much more attention is devoted to the cultures in power at the time, which of course makes it logical to study men because the culture in power has pretty much always been male. It leaves the women a bit in the dark, however.
After all, we make up half of the species. Surely we’ve earned the right to study our own history, which is rarely the same as that of men.
The arguments against a Women’s Studies department would then be that if female contributions to history have been lost, they should be dug up and presented in the general history department so that everyone will be exposed to them (and fewer troglodytes will then be able to stomp around claiming that women have never done anything but tend the hearth).
Your second point presents an interesting side note. It appears that in some cultures, the men and the women have maintained separate histories. This has led to some confusing reports when a Eurocentric anthropologist or historian has interviewed people and gotten only one of the histories while a second anthropologist or historian came back with a significantly different picture.
My memory is that the Iroquois were one group who maintained separate histories and that, while a history of the League has been written in English for over 150 years, we have learned some fascinating new information about the league’s origins when it came to light that there was a whole separate tradition regarding that story.
It’s a common mistake to think that a discipline is mainly defined by a separate and distinct body of knowledge. But that’s but one facet of what makes up a discipline or field. It’s easy to say “politic science is about power, economics is about markets” and that’s not untrue. But what makes these disciplines distinct are a whole host of other characteristics. Methods, lingo, agreement about approach, a canon of previous research, etc. Even more basic things like how schaolrs in the field work together, how long their research articles tend to be, how they decide who gets first authorship, and how they review each others’ work are distinctive.
It’s true that scholars in social science fields (which I think we could put area studies in) don’t always exhibit consensus about these things in the way that “hard” sciences do, but scholars have been able to show that the distinctions hold across disciplines and fields.
december;By comparison, The University of Chicago, my alma mater, has an world famous Oriental Institute. The academics who work there are not particularly Asian. They are people of all races who are interested in Asian culture of a certain historic period.
Well, the Oriental Institute at Chicago dates back to 1919, when so-called “Oriental studies” (meaning largely the ancient Near East) in Europe and North America were almost exclusively the province of white scholars (like most other kinds of scholarship at that time). Nowadays the field is much more multicultural, but most American “Orientalists” (including yours truly) are still white.
The ethnicity of the academic individual is completely irrelevant.
My impression is that this is not the case for women’s studies and black studies.
If what you’re saying is that most scholars in these fields tend to be female or black, respectively, I think that’s reasonably accurate. If, on the other hand, you’re saying that being female or black is somehow a requirement for academic work in women’s studies or black/African-American studies, respectively, that’s false. I can think of several non-black faculty members in well-known African-American Studies programs—Ronald Thiemann, Sudhir Ventakesh, Nancy Jacobs, Madhu Dubey, for example. And male scholars in prominent women’s studies programs include James Schultz, Ralph Steinhardt, David Bevington, and Robert Bell. As Cranky points out, lots of these programs are collaborations among lots of different departments, so any faculty member whose work directly involves race or gender issues stands a good chance of being affiliated with one.
As Cranky points out, lots of these programs are collaborations among lots of different departments, so any faculty member whose work directly involves race or gender issues stands a good chance of being affiliated with one.
Many labor economists do work that directly involves race and/or gender. I venture to guess that most of them are not affiliated with a woman’s or ethnic studies department. I suspect this is related to the latter’s non-quantitative tradition, but this is a WAG. Please correct me if I am off base here.
As an aside, Claudia Goldin has done some great work in women’s economic history, IMHO. As far as I can tell from her online CV, she hasn’t affiliated much with women’s studies departments.
I don’t really think that justification is necessary. If people didn’t want to take the classes, they wouldn’t be there. Some people are obviously interested, so they’re studying it. I’m sure the justification comes from student interest. If there wasn’t any, the department would soon dissapear.
well… if they didn’t exist they couldn’t very well have much quality analysis could they? Maybe you meant to say something else…
I’m not sure why you might doubt this. Please explain.
I think perhaps eventually this will happen, but we simply haven’t reached that point yet.
As to the second point, you are absolutely correct. The histories of women in (I would say) most cultures do not coincide with the histories of men. Simply by being the secondary class of citizens that we have been for so long, that is true. Our histories simply are not the same, and therefore both need to be researched, documented, and studied.
I apologize if I was unclear. The question was intended to address the specific reasons as to why it made more sense academically, operationally, organizationally, methodologically etc. to form a separate school or department concentrating on gender centric studies of various sorts, versus the alternative of these areas of study being under taken within the boundaries of the existing schools and departments from which they emerged.
CrankyAsAnOldMan covered most angles of the question pretty well.
Re your second question -
I don’t “doubt it” so much as I don’t have concrete information about what these new intellectual horizons might be and am asking for enlightenment on this issue. Since you apparently don’t doubt that new intellectual horizons have been opened by Women’s Studies and assumedly possess information about what they are, could you please share the specifics of what these important opened intellectual horizons are?
