According to Gov. Pat McCrory (R-N.C.), I am a member of the “educational elite.” Administrators and professors like me have ominously taken over our public colleges and universities. We are offering worthless courses that offer “no chances of people getting jobs.”
In a national radio interview Tuesday with Bill Bennett, U.S. secretary of education during the Reagan administration, McCrory specifically attacked gender studies and Swahili language classes as not worth our tax dollars.
“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine. Go to a private school and take it,” he said. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if it’s not going to get someone a job.”
This is not new. Conservatives and many liberal scholars regularly attack gender studies (and the like) as lacking purpose, as being political, as if all of the other disciplines in the academy are not political through their maintenance (or challenge) of the status quo.
But this strategy appears to be relatively new, a new way to attack liberal arts, which for Republicans, produces too many liberals, too many radicals, too many critical thinkers. In the 2012 election, the GOP tried to reduce the electorate to win. That failed. Now, they are trying to dumb down the electorate by shelling our factory of knowledge.
McCrory was very clever in attacking gender studies and Swahili. He did not attack the hallowed ground of history, philosophy and anthropology. He condemned the margins to gain bipartisan support to one day attack the liberal center. Today, it is gender studies. Tomorrow, it will be Africana studies. In a year, it will be philosophy and history. Every day it is the liberal arts.
We must understand that within this political context, when you attack gender studies, Africana studies, queer studies, you undermine the livelihood of your own discipline. The more we strengthen the margins, the more we strengthen liberal arts.
