COVID-19 Bites Identity Politics
As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as…
Search Results for: Daphne Patai
Rampant Hypocrisy at UMass
Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with…
A Fantasy for the Sexes
…thus, at long last, the entire society moves one step closer to perfect equality. Adapted from the introduction to D. Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (1998)….
Why Campus Prejudice Favors Women
Title IX, passed in 1972, seems like a simple enough federal civil rights law. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in higher education at colleges and universities that…
The Feminist Mission to Undermine Heterosexuality
Well, it’s official: the worst aspects of feminism are winning: not the let’s all play nice kind that actually wanted equal, not special, rights and opportunities for everyone, but the…
How #MeToo Became Weaponized at NYU
When John Searle, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, was charged with sexual harassment a year ago, about 50 intellectuals and academics wrote a heated group letter insisting the charges were…
Who Needs Facts When Female Feelings Will Do?
Many able commenters on the #MeToo phenomenon and the sex wars miss the most vulnerable dimension of feminism. The underlying issue is that feminism has not consistently held itself to…
Those Darling Duke Student Protesters
Really, you must admit that student protestors are becoming ever more adorable, kind of like naughty children who first act rambunctiously and then go running back for comfort to the…
The Battle Over Pronouns Coming to a College Near You
Last year, Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, made news when he refused to use the invented pronouns of the transgender movement as prescribed by Canadian law…
Professor-Student Sex—Just a Problem of Dirty Old Men?
…Sexuality & Culture 6:2 (Spring 2002), and was reprinted in Daphne Patai, What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (2008). Image from The Human Stain, a…
‘We Made This (Harassment) Law Up From the Beginning and Now We’ve Won’
“The sexual harassment racket is over,” Peggy Noonan excitedly declared in the Wall Street Journal last week. No longer need we be stumped by conundrums based on “he said/she said.”…
How Colleges Promote Censorship and Undermine Free Speech
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes: “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant.” In his sanitized future, general happiness and social stability…
Student Grievance: Righting Imaginary Wrongs
In the persistent demands for submission to the current campus orthodoxy of verbal policing, there is evidently not a shadow of concern for the creation of ethical individuals capable of…
Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Trans?
The dislocation of reality continues apace, helped by academics who think renaming things can induce the physical world to alter its course. On the Women’s Studies List, which has existed…
How a University Moved from Diversity to Indoctrination
Academe these days is full of code words. Diversity is one of the most popular, and has increasingly become an article of faith at American colleges. Its usefulness depends on…
How Diversity Came to Mean ‘Downgrade the West’
…now explicitly critique inequalities and injustices, oppression and hegemony, in order to lead students to pursue change on behalf of “social justice,” yet another overused and vague term (see Patai…
Political Tests for Faculty?
What’s going on when a public university feels entitled to ask potential faculty members questions clearly aimed at ferreting out their political and social commitments? Such questions, reminiscent of loyalty…
Why Is It So Hard Now to Read a Book?
I was thinking about the issue of time this past week, while doing what I call cross-reading: reading items online and pausing every few minutes to look something up on…
THE NORMALIZATION OF BAD IDEAS
By Daphne Patai While American education goes further down the tubes, lame-brained notions are raised to levels of respectability in academe that should shock any halfway reasonable person. What has…
How Political Correctness Corrupted the Colleges
How can it be that, in the face of daily news of murders, grotesque punishments, and open oppression by radicals abroad, here at home American college students, who have grown…
North Korea Has Taken Over Academe
Perhaps it’s time for universities to institute a course in logic as a basic requirement for all students. Then we might encounter more rational and thoughtful protests taking place all…
College Students Now–the Good and the Bad
First, the good news: My undergraduate students here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are quite literate, contrary to all the bad press and fears. Every week I give them…
Trigger Warnings–A Ludicrous Step Toward Censorship
Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women’s studies classrooms, where female students…
How To Fix the Humanities
…one thing about the humanities, what would that change be?” Here are the answers from Stephen F. Hayward, Samuel Goldman, James Piereson, Daphne Patai, Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, and Peter…
Sexual Harassment–The Feds Go Way Too Far
…building is only part of the story. The Montana letter is a step in the long progression of feminism towards a surveillance society. Fifteen years ago Daphne Patai in her…
A First: Conservative Studies Professor at a Public University
…tokenism–the temporary founding of a one-man conservative ghetto? We have asked ten people in higher education to comment. Here are Daphne Patai, Cary Nelson, Steven Balch, Peter Lawler, Bruce Bawer,…
The Standard Authoritarian Campus
…are commonplace occurrences in today’s colleges and universities.” –Daphne Patai, professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in a fund-raising letter for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)….
Ray Bradbury Saw the PC Lunacy Coming
…in 2011 finally gave in and allowed Simon and Schuster to make Fahrenheit 451 available as an ebook. —————- Daphe Patai is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst….
Best Books of 2011
…at the University of Pennsylvania *Erin O’Connor, blogger on higher education (Critical Mass), and teacher of English at the University of Pennsylvania *Daphne Patai, a professor in the Department of…
No Time for Conservative Faculty
I’m totally baffled by the general looniness that seems to pop up when the liberal-left side talks about Republicans and the wealthy. And it all “trickles down,” so that students…