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

A BUREAUCRACY OF ONE'S OWN 125Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), they "deconstructed"the offending passage:A feminist analysis of this rhetoric reveals ... an analogy betweenknowledge and sexual subjugation . . . , an idea of learning as masteryor control. Clearly embedded ... are unconscious androcentricassumptions of dominance and subordination between the knowerand the known, assumptions that too readily bring to mind thetraditional relationship of men to women; of the colonizers to thecolonized; indeed, of the masters to the slaves. Such phallocentricmetaphors . . . [are not] the accidental usage of one report; theyreplicate the dominant discourses of Western empiricism that women'sstudies . . . critiques. 16The AAC is not likely to offend again. Even as it was being so sharplyrebuked, the AAC was targeted for a gender feminist makeover. Thesedays, it is an important resource for transformationists, and Caryn Mc-Tighe Musil is one of its senior fellows. She and Johnnella Butler, thefeminist scholar from Washington University, are playing a principal rolein the newly inaugurated $4.5 million AAC transformationist project. 17As for Ms. Schmitz, she is now a senior associate for the CulturalPluralism Project at the Washington Center at Evergreen State College,where, amply funded by the Ford Foundation and the state government,she oversees the transformation project in several universities and collegesin the state. She, too, has recently served as a senior fellow at the AAC.The AAC is not the only such organization to have caught the transformationistfever. Groups like the American Association of UniversityWomen and the prestigious American Council on Education now take itfor granted that American education must be radically transformed. Consider,for example, this programmatic statement in a report sponsored bythe American Council on Education entitled "The New Agenda of Womenfor Higher Education":What has yet to happen on all of our campuses is the transformationof knowledge and, therefore, of the curriculum demanded by thisexplosion of new information, and by challenges to conventionalways of thinking and knowing. Women's studies, the new scholarshipon women, or transformation of the curriculum projects—thenames vary according to campus and culture—should be goals ofthe faculty and academic administration on every campus. 18