Posted on October 19, 2012

Book: Rise of Gender and Ethnic Studies Programs Helped Bring About Decline of Modern Academia

Jamie Weinstein, Daily Caller, October 18, 2012

Modern academia has gone astray and identity studies programs are in large part the culprit, argues author and poet Bruce Bawer in his new book ”The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.”

“Identity studies sum up everything that’s wrong with the humanities today,” Bawer told The Daily Caller. “They’re about nothing other than group identity, group oppression, and group grievance. Instead of engaging in objective scholarly study of, say, black American history or women’s literature, these departments are boosters for everything having to do with the group in question. It’s all slogans. Kids don’t learn anything other than to think of themselves as having been wronged by capitalism, by the West, by America, by white men.”

Bawer says that this has consequences beyond the classroom.

“Young people who have been brainwashed in college by all this groupthink head out into the world and are constantly on the alert for ‘racism’ and ‘sexism,’” he told TheDC.

“And they find these things everywhere, just as they were trained to. If they hear a white person criticizing President Obama — boom! Racist. If a man has something negative to say about Hillary Clinton — boom! Sexist. It’s simple as that. These kinds of knee-jerk reactions are daily fare nowadays. It’s the only way the products of these cockamamie programs have learned how to think about anything. They make these facile, baseless charges and actually think they’re making insightful moral judgments. It doesn’t bode well for America’s future.”

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[Editor’s Note: An interview with Mr. Bawer is available at the original article link below.]