Esteemed feminist author and scholar Camille Paglia argued that Women’s and Gender Studies Departments should be defunded in a recent conversation with Professor Jordan Peterson.

https://twitter.com/yeyoza/status/919909423849582592

In a wide-spanning discussion with Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto, Camille Paglia argued that Women’s and Gender Studies departments should be defunded.

“The English Department had taken a century to develop,” Paglia began. “All of a sudden, to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start taught by people without any training in that field? What should be the parameters of the field? What should be the requirements of the field? How about biology? If you are going to be discussing gender, that should be a number one requirement.”

Paglia argued that active programs in the field were thrown together out of the urgency to highlight women’s issues in the curriculum of the American academy. “The administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide, at the time when the women’s movement had just started up. The spotlight of tension was on them. They needed women faculty fast. They needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof! ‘Let there be Women’s Studies.'”

“Now we will just hire some women, usually from English departments, and we’ll just throw them together,” she continued. “‘You invent it, you say what it is.’ That is why women’s studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology of the early 1970s.”

Paglia says that early scholars in the field rejected the notion that biology played a role in shaping gender. “I couldn’t even have a conversation with any of these women. They were hysterical about the subject of biology. They knew nothing about hormones. I probably got in fist fights over this. People were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences.”

It was announced this week the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth College was shut down over a lack of funding. The college claims that most of the work done by the research will now be conducted by the school’s Women’s and Gender Studies Department.