Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE FEMINIST CLASSROOM 109days to get a powerful administrator behind you. For them it is away to make a name for themselves in college administration. Theycan say they initiated a new women's program.Many students resent women's studies. They want less ideology andmore objective content in their courses. One would think that the collegeadministrations would be sympathetic to their complaints. But administrationshave changed a lot in the last two decades. We now find deansand college presidents admonishing students not to be taken in by claimsof objectivity and the allegedly disinterested scholarship of pedagogueswho are fixed in the earlier phases of an untransformed curriculum. Themore enlightened administrators preach the virtues of a new pedagogythat impugns all objectivity, even that of science. In a convocation address,Donald Harward, then vice president of academic affairs at theCollege of Wooster, said, "A major intellectual revolution has occurred.Within the last two decades the . . . effort 'to objectify' fields of inquiryhas been called into question by a challenge to the objectivity of science—the preeminent prototype." 38Invoking the authority of the feminist epistemologist Sandra Harding,among others, Dr. Harward informed the students that "there is no objectivity,even in science." He then confided that "the new view of science,and thereby the new view of any field of intellectual inquiry, is only awhisker from irrationality and total skepticism. But fine lines are important."By the end of his address, the students were ready for the upliftingmessage that "learning and teaching have less to do with truth, reality,and objectivity than we had assumed."Transformationists cannot always rely on a sympathetic faculty, butthey can generally count on administrative support in furthering theirprojects. Schuster and Van Dyne, the Smith College transformation team,report that "informed administrators" are more likely than professors toacknowledge the need for curricular transformation. 39At Wooster Collegeit was Harward who initiated the policy of having students evaluate theirteachers on their sensitivity to gender issues. He has since gone on tobecome president of Bates College in Maine.Students who have been successfully trained in the feminist classroomto "become agents of change" may embarrass their mentors by practicingwhat they have learned right on the campus. At Simon's Rock of BardCollege in Barrington, Massachusetts, twenty students who were not satisfiedthat the formal procedures of the university adequately protected