David Horowitz's campaign against 'Indoctrination' hits a little snag

[ck4829]

As part of his ongoing campaign against “liberal bias” on college and university campuses, FrontPageMag.com founder David Horowitz frequently takes aim at Humanities departments and their supposed “indoctrination.” Today, Horowitz sets his sights on Women’s Studies:

"A year ago the biggest issue in education after budgets was whether “Intelligent Design” should be taught in the nation’s schools. Opponents called it a form of “creationism” and the press dubbed the ensuing legal battle as the biggest clash between faith and science since the Scopes Monkey Trial. In a stinging rebuke to the religious right, a Pennsylvania judge ruled that “Intelligent Design” had no place in classrooms because it was “a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” thus violating the separation of church and state.

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days.

The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States."

Discussion of the ways gender roles are constructed by society, according to Horowitz, contravenes biological evidence that men and women are different. Therefore, the argument goes, those who think “Intelligent Design” creationism has “no place in classrooms” ought to think the same about this feminist theory. Of course, there’s a problem with this analogy: the question is whether “Intelligent Design” creationism should be taught in high school science classes as fact, as the judge Horowitz cites made clear.

Horowitz, the author of “Indoctrination U” and “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” ominously cites the catalog of Kansas State University, where Women’s Studies majors are required to “have demonstrated their familiarity with key Women’s Studies concepts such as the social construction of gender.” Horowitz translates this to mean that “In other words, a student cannot graduate from the Kansas State Women’s Studies program unless they believe in the ideology that makes up its core, and demonstrate that they do believe in it.”

For Horowitz, who lobbies state legislatures pass his bill to limit “controversial matter” in college classrooms, being familiar with ideas is the same as believing them. What does he think about Kansas State’s Center for the Understanding of Origins, which has exposed students to the “Intelligent Design” debate?

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2007/03/david_horowitzs.html

[no_hypocrisy]

1. HIStory: good. HERstory: bad as per Horowitz.

What's wrong with a major with the other side of (generic) history? It adds to perspective and the universality of knowledge.

[Solo_in_MD]

3. You are aware that the term HERSTORY is a fraud

since the term HIStory has nothing to do with gender


I'm feeling a little pendantic today...

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Yes. I chose my wording for the sake of rhetoric. n/t

[rfranklin]

2. He's an idiot, pure and simple...

But, in a free society, we have to tolerate such nonsense.

[Jade Fox]

4. How, exactly, does discussing.....

the ways gender roles are constructed by society automatically deny biological differences between men and women (about which there is much disagreement)?

Typical of conservatives, Horowitz must have it one way or another, furious that others have the ability to think complexly.

[tishaLA]

6. He'd really be pissed by the chair of a major Women's Studies Dept

who argues that Women's Studies Departments/Programs should be renamed "feminist studies" because, insofar as as women's studies has become as much about gender and sexuality as it is about "women" as such, it is best for programs and departments to reflect a disciplinary ideology rather than a series of endlessly shifting referents associated with the discipline (i.e., Gender Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies, etc.)

[Nikki Stone1]

7. Horowitz is conflating "gender" with "biological sex"

Women studies classes see biological sex as what you're born with physically but see gender as a social constructions. All babies are born able to cry, for example, regardless of biological sex, but social gender construction teaches that "Boys don't cry", and boys are expectd to fit into this gender role, regardless of what they were born with. Women's Studies (or Critical Gender Studies) examines gender construction, which differs from one society to another and at different times in society. They would never deny that biological differences exist; they judge the social construction to be far more limiting and worthy of intense critique.

Horowitz is deliberately being confusing here, since most of his audience is not intelligent enough to understand the distinction between biology and social training.