Banner Waving and Consciousness Raising

LAST WEEK, Brown University approved a new field of concentration, "Media/Culture. "The concentration is a smorgasbord of hip ideas including semiotics and "historical concepts of culture." Challenging stuff? Says one of the Brown professors who pushed for the concentration: "This is not going to be a passive major. [Students] have to define it themselves."

One has come to expect this sort of idiocy from the school of no-fail academics and extracurricular prostitution--not to mention suicide pills and Amy Carter. In upcoming years, which for Brown concentrations in Zen Basketweaving and Gay and Lesbian Studies.

But, fair Harvard, let us judge not that we be not judged. Starting next year, Harvard will have its own program in consciousness-raising. It goes under the banner Women's Studies.

THIS CONCENTRATION promises to be similar to other laughable Women's Studies majors that have sprung up across the country. Its core will be a sophomore tutorial, "Women's Studies 10," and its highpoint will be "Classics of Feminist Theory I and II," a wrenching of the word "classic" if ever there was one.

The authors of these so-called-classics include Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollencraft, Kate Millet and others of similar stature.

Judging by some of the books to be read--Jesus as Mother, Lethal Love: Reading Biblical Love Stories and Poetics of Gender--concentrators are in for a unique academic experience.

It is disappointing that a major which proports to be on the forefront of liberal education uses such a limited group of thinkers and books. It is disappointing that a major which promises to unshackle the mind from the all-male dogmas of the past, only confirms the prejudices of the present.

Harvard does not plan to expose its Women's Studies con- centrators--many of whom will already be avowed feminists--to the range of literature--by both men and women--on women. While "Social Studies 10" treats both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, "Women's Studies 10" makes no pretense of an open mind. It advocates one narrow, often insipid. "approach," the feminist "approach." This "approach" wanders all the way from liberal feminism to socialist feminism to radical feminism. Other areas of the discipline--if it is a discipline and if it has other areas--are ignored.

Even when feminists deign to consider the classic thinkers of other social sciences, their arrogance is staggering, Susan Okin, for instance, in Women in Western Political Thought, describes John Stuart Mill as a "far-thinking feminist" but a limited thinker. Okin claims that Mill failed to consider adequately life outside the structure of the family. Fortunately feminist thinkers have transcended Mill's intellectual limitations.

An example is Susan Cavin's Lesbian Origins, hailed by Women's Studies enthusiasts as a future "classic" in the field. Cavin doesn't screw around, so to speak. The book's first sentence is blunt: "I am a lesbian feminist sociologist." Pages later, having uncovered "a logic to the ideology of sex," debunked "capitalist patriarchs" and explored "Cross-Cultural Lesbianism," Cavin waxes philosophical:

The origin of human society is characterized by...a year round prevalence of female asexuality, bisex, and homosex, compared to the relative infrequency of exclusive heterosex.

IF STUDENTS wish to study feminist "thought," that's fine. It's good for a laugh.

It is preposterous, however, to term so narrow a field of study a liberal education--or to crown it with a Harvard degree.

It is not surprising that the designers of Women's Studies neglected to include the genuine classics. Pitting feminist classics against genuine classics is like pitting yipping pups against lions.

Proponents of Women's Studies don't want to open students' minds. Better that they be closed, feminist--and empty.

Liberal education has become a thing of the past and slavishness has become commonplace. Universities have become a hotbed of passing fads and vulgar idols, teaching the classically fashionable rather than the truly classical.