Some professors at Texas A&M have issued a letter expressing outrage over the recent decision to eliminate the women’s and gender studies degree programs. Revving up the dramatics, faculty who run the program warn that the university is dismantling this degree track at a “moment of incendiary dispute across cultural, social, and political difference on the issues of gender.”
A moment of incendiary dispute? Let’s take a closer look.
In 1971, I helped found the first chapter of the National Organization for Women in the Southwest. Back then, rape was close to a free crime — prosecution depended almost entirely on whether a woman could prove she had done nothing to invite the attack. Jobs were openly segregated by sex — into men’s work and women’s work. Women often couldn’t get loans or credit cards without the signature of a father or husband. Discrimination against women in hiring and college admissions was illegal — but still widespread. Men outnumbered women on campus by roughly 56 percent to 42 percent, and most of women in college were training to become public school teachers because the doors to many other professions were limited.
There were 19 women in Congress.
Like most boomer women, I have a million stories about the real barriers women faced in those relatively recent times — but enough about me. I raise my personal story only to make one thing clear: I would never support ignoring a truly incendiary moment for women. I’ve got the battle scars—and a few medals—to prove it.
But that is not where we are.
Today, 57 percent of university students are women, while 42 percent are men—a reversal that some of us actually think deserves serious attention. That imbalance holds in elite professional schools as well: About 55 percent of law and medical students are female, compared to roughly 44 percent male. Among Gen Z, the wage gap between men and women is almost nonexistent. And there are now about 150 women in Congress—still not proportional to the population, but frankly that may say more about the job than about women’s ambition.
Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are universally recognized as serious crimes and they are prosecuted.
The fights that got us here were real and they mattered. But pretending we’re still living in the seventies is political theater, not scholarship. Which brings us to women’s and gender studies.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) claims that women’s and gender studies at Texas A&M has “advanced the core values of the institution.”
Seriously? Exactly how does a women and gender studies program, which places ideology over empirical data, identity over merit, and activism over scholarship advance the values of a serious university like Texas A&M?
At their foundation, all women’s and gender studies programs rest on the claim that gender is entirely “socially constructed.” Give girls trucks instead of dolls and—presto—they’ll all want to play football. Or something like that.
Layered on top of that socially constructed mishmash is Marxist-feminist theory, which insists the United States is a functioning patriarchy where it’s the boys who rule — everything, while girls drool. Trying to challenge that theory is dismissed — in the true Marxist manner — as false consciousness.
Then there’s queer theory and contemporary gender ideology, built on the deeply unscientific claim that gender is arbitrary — something you can select, reject, remix, or reinvent at will. In this framework, nothing is objective or innate: not sex, not meaning, not norms, not reality itself. Everything is negotiable.
And then come the intersectionality’s. Entire courses are devoted to ranking oppression based on sex, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, religion, body type — whatever category happens to be in fashion. Students are taught not to see themselves as individuals, but as political identities nested inside grievance hierarchies.
Is it any wonder this entire enterprise is widely known on campuses across the country as “grievance studies”?
One Texas A&M sociology professor who has been teaching women and gender studies for years responded to the program cut with this rallying cry: “We have to keep fighting and standing up for our students’ right to have an education that is critical for the times they live in.”
As someone who actually did my share of fighting for women’s rights, I don’t believe this professor — or anyone teaching women’s studies, gender studies, or queer theory — has much of a clue about the times we live in now.
According to the Texas Tribune, Texas A&M offered both a BA and a BS in women’s and gender studies as well as a minor, and a graduate certificate. A total of 56 students were enrolled in the program — that’s 56 out of 74,707 students on the flagship campus at College Station.
Leaders at Texas A&M are clearly right to shut down this low-enrollment, ideologically driven program and they are also right to continue to examine and eliminate classes that are similarly built on ideology and anti-American, anti-Western activism.
Texas public universities were built by and are paid for by the people of Texas. Hysterical faculty members at Texas A&M might want to pay a bit more attention to those people and their “core values.”
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.o discuss the issue of what the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and others are doing to destabilize Texas and dismantle Western culture next Tuesday. CLICK HERE for more information.
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
You can also listen to the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple or Spotify.
