Legendary Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield on the poor choices students make in selecting their college courses and majors:
In colleges today, choice is in and requirements are out. Only the military academies, certain Great-Books colleges and MIT (and its like) want to tell students what they must study. Most colleges offer a cornucopia of choices, and most of the choices are bad.
The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not quite at random, let’s take sociology. That great American democrat Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn’t get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.
Part of the problem is the political correctness responsible for “Gender Studies,” a politicized major that has its little echoes in many other departments, and that never fails to mislead.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:25 am
The 2 problems I have with majors like women’s studies and sociology is first that they are just about useless in getting you a job. The second is that both contain so much pseudo-science. You will never be allowed in a women’s studies class to say that there might be a difference between men and women. In sociology, you’ll never be allowed to attribute someone’s problems to themselves — it must be some external factor. A sociologist can’t ever say a person ended up badly because he or she was lazy or stupid, no matter how much evidence there is. It’s like committing blasphemy or going into a seminary class and saying there isn’t a god.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:42 am
Is he saying political science is almost as bad as sociology?
Here’s a list of the top ten college degrees in terms of expected salaries for jobs in the field:
Petroleum Engineering
Aerospace Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Nuclear Engineering
Applied Mathematics
Biomedical Engineering
Physics
Computer Engineering
Economics
Here’s the bottom of the list, in order from tenth worst to worst:
Special Education
Recreation
Theology
Paralegal Studies/Law
Horticulture
Culinary Arts
Athletic Training
Social Work
Elementary Education
Child and Family Studies
Most of the people in my field (publishing) did not get a degree in publishing (although there are some programs, is not degrees), but a college degree in something (pretty much anything) is essential for getting a job in almost any company like the one I work for. A bright young person with a degree in Gender Studies would be on pretty much an equal footing with a bright young person with a degree in Petroleum Engineering, although presumably someone with a degree in Petroleum Engineering would not be looking for a publishing job if they could get one in the petroleum industry.
It seems to me Theology would be a very bad choice from Mansfield’s perspective.
June 1st, 2011 | 1:07 pm
It’s not fair that Prof. Mansfield singled out sociology. After all, there are other social sciences.
June 1st, 2011 | 1:59 pm
@David Nickol: The plural of anecdote is not data, of course. But from my college experience (fairly recent; I started in ’98 and with many pauses finished in ’06), about half of those majors on the bottom list struck me as those often taken by—I’m grossly generalizing, of course—young women (often in sororities) whose real college plan, whether stated or not, was to find a young man, settle down, and have a family. There’s nothing new about that, naturally, and I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. All of which is to say that anything involving human beings may be at least slightly more complex than it appears on first glance.
June 1st, 2011 | 2:16 pm
Jeremy:
“You will never be allowed in a women’s studies class to say that there might be a difference between men and women. In sociology, you’ll never be allowed to attribute someone’s problems to themselves — it must be some external factor.”
Having taken both I can say that you are lying or simply making this up out of ignorance. In women studies, to my knowledge, nobody denies that there are differences between men and women. Maybe you confuse that with the point this studies make (that many of the so called differences are not innate but created by culture). In the second I honestly don´t know where you get that nonsense. Maybe you assume that some structuralists forms of socieolgy deny any value to human action independent of the context, but then I have yet to see one.
I think this whole article in general terms is just the ole same right wing tirade against feminism (since women studies are so much “politically correct, which makes them, of course, “wrong”). And that´s it.
June 1st, 2011 | 2:41 pm
I think this whole article in general terms is that the fact/value distinction is pure humebug.
June 1st, 2011 | 2:47 pm
Sergio, could you explain the need for a special discipline of “women’s studies?” Why can’t women simply be studied through the traditional disciplines of biology, psychology, or medicine? Do you think that doing so might reduce the opportunity for political indoctrination? Also, why is there no “men’s studies” major?
June 1st, 2011 | 3:27 pm
Also, why is there no “men’s studies” major?
And no white history month?
June 1st, 2011 | 3:55 pm
@Sergio:
Sorry, but Jeremy’s right. I have a Bachelor’s in Women’s Studies/Social Work, and a Master’s in Social Work.
Six years of blaming everyone else for…everything.
At least I don’t have any student debt (anymore).
June 1st, 2011 | 4:43 pm
You will never be allowed in a women’s studies class to say that there might be a difference between men and women. In sociology, you’ll never be allowed to attribute someone’s problems to themselves — it must be some external factor.
This is total baloney. Of course you’re allowed to say these things.
You will then be skinned and eaten.
June 1st, 2011 | 4:54 pm
a related item: The MCAT, that is taken by those who want to attend medical schools, is now being changed so it doesn’t measure one’s scientific knowledge…
“According to a March 31 news release from the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC, the proposed recommendations call for testing the behavioral and social sciences concepts that underlie students’ capacity to learn about the human and social issues of medicine….”
LINK
dumbing down docs one student at a time…
June 1st, 2011 | 5:41 pm
… the fact/value distinction is pure humebug.
You kant be serious.
June 1st, 2011 | 6:54 pm
What Mansfield describes is secular humanism hoisted by its own petard, and with it academic humanities. The death of the humanities follows from the death of God. If values are without divine foundation, then people will focus on facts. Secular academic humanists — in killing off God — have sawed off the branch on which they sat. If God is dead, humanity is dead. If humanity is dead, humanities are dead, and with them values as opposed to facts, meanings as opposed to measurements.
June 1st, 2011 | 9:26 pm
“Choice is king, except that there can be no king.”
A pithy sentence succinctly describing the paradox of contemporary bias. Well done!
June 1st, 2011 | 10:45 pm
What Jeremy meant, of course, was that there are differences between men and women that are to be found in every single culture that has ever existed, because the differences are based in nature, just as there are differences between stallions and mares, and between bulls and cows. With this addition: that because we are talking about human beings, those differences will be more glorious, will have a wider efflorescence, will be made manifest in more fascinating ways; there’s a thousand times greater difference between a man and a woman as there is between a male dog and a female dog.
Of course people who try to justify WMS say that the field is really diverse — sure, just as fifty shades of pink are diverse. True story: this semester, an Honors student, the brother of a couple of students I’ve had in class, took a feminist for introduction to sociology. Big mistake. He was given the assignment to oppose same-sex pseudogamy. It was supposed to be a fifteen minute debate between him and a young woman who was to take the affirmative position. Well, the young man is extremely bright — the whole family is bright (Dad’s an honors grad from Princeton). All he did was research the question. He found the studies regarding what happens to marriage rates once countries take that plunge. He looked up mountains of studies and composed them all into a coherent presentation.
Five minutes into the “debate,” it was clear that the young lady was out of her league. So the professor herself started to argue. It went on for the entire class, and the professor really did not have anything to back up her position. She went so far as to complain that he had done outside research rather than relying upon the textbook. “Why should I rely on the textbook?” he laughed. “It’s just full of left wing propaganda!” As the students were filing out of class, he stood in the doorway and called out, “If anybody wants more information on this subject, give me a holler — I have a lot more than I was able to present.”
He was totally engaged in that class — and got a B+ for his pains, the lowest grade she could get away with giving him.
Another story: A young woman in a WMS class, an intro course on fairy tales, approaches me and my colleague in the freshman Western Civ program. She’s upset. My colleague — a theologian — and I ask her what’s the matter. Well, it seems that the WMS course is not at all what she thought it was going to be. She’s upset that the professor is ruining for her all the stories she once loved as a child, in particular “Beauty and the Beast.” She said that that story was all about the patriarchy, and so forth. She wanted to drop the class.
We told her to stick it out, since it was already the middle of the term. I said, pointedly, “Some of these people who teach these things want to separate you from your father, so that they can separate you from your Father.” Well, she decided not to take our advice. She decided to drop the class.
That should have been the end of it, but wasn’t. The girl made the mistake of going to the professor to tell her her intention. The professor, shall we say, treasured this thing in her heart. So then, reel it up a year — my colleague, a married man with children, is up for promotion. The professor is on the promotion committee. She kicks up a fuss, asking about my colleague’s beliefs regarding women’s ordination. Now — note well — we are a Catholic college. Nobody in the theology department, to my knowledge (and they’re all friends of mine), believes that the Church should or even can ordain women to be priests. So this is not a big deal. But she attempted to argue that because my friend opposed women’s ordination, he would not be able to be a good advisor for female students.
That should have been laughed away, but wasn’t. He had to spend a tense hour or so justifying himself to that committee, and a tense week waiting out a very ambiguous response from the president. Of course they had absolutely no grounds for denial; he’s a popular professor and well published. That happened at my school — had it been, say, Holy Cross, he’d have been toast. Naturally, he did not say aloud that the woman had been motivated by pure revenge.
Another story: I am checking out a movie from our audio library. I get into a conversation with the students behind the counter. One of them is a senior Honors student. She says that she’s a sociology major. I must have eaten something sour that day, or some devil got into me, so I asked, “Now, in your sociology classes they don’t teach you that good and evil are mere social constructs, without genuine reality?” Waaaal, it turns out in fact that that is exactly what they were teaching, according to the Honors student’s testimony. Things went downhill from there, until finally she blurted out — when I challenged her with an example that I thought was irrefragable — “What was good for the Nazis was good for the Nazis!”
Another story: Feminist English professor, won’t teach Moby-Dick, even though it falls within the time period she is supposed to teach. Why not, you ask? It seems that all students have read MD in high school. Really? Actually, she simply does not want to go after that book — in my mind a fine candidate for greatest work of prose fiction ever. But she DOES spend three weeks on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not taking anything away from Harriet Stowe, who was a fine woman, but that is not a great novel — she was a rabblerouser, not an artist. Three weeks??
Hey, I’ve spent my adult life among these people. The difference between the typical male academic and the typical female academic is that he knows he can’t clear a field, roof a house, chop down a tree, pave a road, build a bridge, or storm an enemy encampment — and so he has still a healthy residual respect for the men who make his semi-parasitical life possible. The female academic — typically — is clueless about all that.
June 2nd, 2011 | 1:28 pm
“What Jeremy meant, of course, was that there are differences between men and women that are to be found in every single culture that has ever existed, because the differences are based in nature, just as there are differences between stallions and mares, and between bulls and cows..”
No, that is not what he meant. What he meant is that you cannot say in WMS that men and women have differences. That is a lie.
June 2nd, 2011 | 2:44 pm
This is total baloney. Of course you’re allowed to say these things.
You will then be skinned and eaten.
lol thanks for the laugh…
June 2nd, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Sergio — what you cannot say in the WMS class is that those differences are natural and help to determine what kinds of cultures human beings create, and what kinds they don’t. In other words, you cannot speak common sense.
But I’ll raise the ante here. More things you cannot say in the WMS class:
1. Children ought to be raised by a mother and a father who are married to one another; all other arrangements should be strongly discouraged.
2. It is a slander to declare that women in Christian countries were oppressed for two thousand years, when for all of that time most people were at great pains just to procure for themselves and their families the necessities of life, and organized their communities and families accordingly.
3. The marked differences between men and women in bodily strength make some division of labor a necessity. Heck, I have a LAWN that no woman in my acquaintance could mow — certainly not my wife or my daughter.
4. Boys should absolutely be trained to harness their masculine aggressiveness (sometimes expressed physically, sometimes intellectually), not to deny it; and that means that they will need, at least some of the time, to be taught by male teachers.
5. Men are made FOR women and women are made FOR men — not for themselves.
6. Masculine ingenuity is responsible for almost every practical mechanical invention in the history of the world, including those inventions that have to do with women’s work — the sewing machine, the washer, and so forth.
7. Any just society will necessarily take into account the differences between men and women, and the different roles to which husbands and wives are called. In other words, equality under the law is not the same thing as legal indifference.
8. The leaders of the anti-suffrage movement in America were overwhelmingly women, whose arguments have been ignored, and who have been belittled as not worthy of respect.
9. The feminist movement is in part responsible for violence against women, and the unnecessary deaths of women, because feminists have consistently demeaned the one institution most likely to protect a woman from felony crime — marriage, with the result that many millions of women who would otherwise marry or live at home now have put themselves in danger, living alone or living with a series of boyfriends. They have also suppressed the connection between abortion and breast cancer; just as they concocted all kinds of lies to justify abortion in the first place. (The lies are well documented; they are admitted by the perpetrators themselves.)
10. Feminists have slandered the housewife for over a hundred years. Sulamith Firestone, in the 1960′s, called what such women do “sh-twork.” Midge Decter’s book on the liberation movement documents all this. The feminist believes that anything less than a career, for an intelligent woman, means a wasted life. Therefore they join all the other great promoters of a spiritually vacuous culture, an anti-culture, wherein working at an office means something, but teaching your child about the universe, preparing healthy meals for him, and making a home for the whole family, is demoted to a mere “choice,” for people without ambition — barely tolerated.
Ten’s enough for now. I could go on.
June 2nd, 2011 | 4:12 pm
In a women’s studies course you *can* say that men and women are *different* from one another, just not that men are ever *better* than women at anything at all, as opposed to being *worse,* which is what you are *supposed* to say, *if* you want a good grade.
June 2nd, 2011 | 5:40 pm
More:
The feminists constantly complain about environments that are supposedly hostile to women (like SWAT teams, for example). Yet they themselves preside over an environment that is flagrantly hostile to men, unless of course the men check their virility at the door.
Suppose you had a Politics department that taught nothing but Communism: Communism and the Economy, Communism and the Family, Communism and World History, etc. Not much of a Politics department, right? So then, ahem, why does the study of women require Feminism? Aren’t there a hundred ways to approach the study of women?
Another story: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, of blessed memory, back when she was the head of the Women’s Studies Program at Emory — the first of its kind in the nation — made friends with Christopher Lasch, who criticized the feminist movement from the left, in Culture of Narcissism. Lasch invited her to his college in New York to give a lecture. The praetorian guard at Emory were so incensed that Betsy would have anything to do with Lasch, they organized a palace coup while she was out of town, removing her from her chairmanship.
Thought experiment: Candidate is applying for a job in WMS. Candidate says, “Actually, I believe that The Vagina Monologues is a silly and scurrilous play, and I’m glad that some campuses will have none of it.” Oops — thought experiment cannot continue — the premise is too absurd.
June 2nd, 2011 | 6:46 pm
Wow, Tony Esolen. How do you keep your skin, not to mention you’re job? I’ve spent a fair amount of time as a student at liberal secular universities, and I ‘d say everything you list is true. Education has been corrupted by nonsense. What’s a young person to do?
June 2nd, 2011 | 6:54 pm
JB in CA
” . . . the fact/value distinction is pure humebug.”
You reply: “You kant be serious.”
You have a locke on humor.
June 2nd, 2011 | 7:05 pm
If I may elaborate on a few points…..
If we wanted to, we could raise women who could mow the lawn and keep pace with the boys….I’ve met such women, with strong upper arms from many workouts….but such women would never give birth.
It is the act of giving birth that seals a woman’s fate: if she will reproduce, she must allow herself to become vulnerable. Feminists want to get rid of all vulnerability by simply legislating it away – they will be breadwinners, and hire people to raise their children, and they will pass laws forcing the state to give them what they need, instead of having to trust a man to provide for them. Hence socialism is necessary, because what they want is incompatible with a stable, trustworthy family unit.
There’s another institution, besides marriage, that protects women from violence – and that has been trashed by the ‘sexual revolution’. I am speaking of a thing called “the community”. A safe woman is a woman who lives in a community that can and will intervene to protect her – not by breaking up her marriage, but by helping to preserve it!
In a healthy community, the men teach the groom and the women teach the bride how to work things out. But in today’s culture we have severed those connections, and all the women will teach the other women is how to flee – even though that’s statistically more dangerous for a woman than staying and trying to work things out. Anger management classes work, and yet feminists still push the failed “shelter” approach – an approach that creates a revolving-door situation for the women involved. and we do not value them. Meanwhile, people pay lots of money for therapy and self-help books.
Ever wonder why they call themselves “feminists”, when they view femininity as something that a woman needs to “outgrow”?
June 2nd, 2011 | 9:48 pm
I can understand why a lot of women are scared of admitting there are differences between men and women. A lot of people think that these differences make women the inferior sex, and that a woman’s role should be strictly defined in the home and with children, and that women should be submissive. While I think there are differences between men and women, I think women deserve to go to college, be able to work or stay at home if they want, control their own reproductive rights, be able to be preachers, and have equal rights with men.
June 3rd, 2011 | 6:21 am
While I think there are differences between men and women, I think women deserve to go to college, be able to work or stay at home if they want, control their own reproductive rights, be able to be preachers, and have equal rights with men.
Men don’t have a right to control their own reproductive rights – if by control you mean “kill any babies they don’t want”.
And women can be preachers, in any system where preacher is not a gendered role. Or are you saying that there should be no such thing as gendered roles? Are you saying women have the right to be patriarchs? Do men also have the right to be mothers? Ha – thought not. Here we are again: back at the androgynous ideal – the dream of having “no gender roles” (which turns out in truth to mean that individuals within the system can appropriate the freedom to simply ignore or subvert anything they don’t like, if it happens to be gendered – which in turn tends to work out to “people should have the right to destroy any traditions they see that they don’t like, because traditions are just bad”…..)
Too bad gender roles are not a “choice”. All the pretending in the world will not change the fact that the evil patriarchal structure is inherently more stable and secure than matriarchies – for structural reasons.
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:14 am
Tony:
“what you cannot say in the WMS class is that those differences are natural and help to determine what kinds of cultures human beings create, and what kinds they don’t. In other words, you cannot speak common sense.”
Again, the problem is WHICH differences you claim are natural and which differences you claim are created by culture (apparently you don´t believe any differences are cultural). And yes, in WMS many of the pretended “natural” differences are not accepted as such. Of your list I will say 1, 2, 4, 7 are utter nonsense, and of course hardly “natural” (I wonder if 7 leads you to some orwellian nightmare where men and women are equal, but men are more equal than women). 3 is true to a certain point (especially considering that in modern services society physical labor is hardly the only form of labor), 5 I don´t know what is supposed to mean, 6 is debatable (specially the reasons that denied women a participation in scientific enterprises), 9 is ridiculous in the light of stuff like rape statistics (you knew women are more likely to be raped by their sentimental partners, husband, bf etc, than strangers?) and 10 is just a mischaracterization of feminist position and criticism of gender roles.
So, “common sense”, my….
.
June 3rd, 2011 | 11:22 am
Again, the problem is WHICH differences you claim are natural and which differences you claim are created by culture (apparently you don´t believe any differences are cultural).
In the real world, women have babies.
In the world of “Gender Studies”, it’s somehow normal and natural to pretend women don’t have babies – even if that means killing live babies and lying to cover up the evidence that women do in fact have bodies that have significant biological, physical, emotional, chemical, neurological, social, and spiritual differences from men.
June 3rd, 2011 | 2:57 pm
“Men don’t have a right to control their own reproductive rights – if by control you mean “kill any babies they don’t want”.”
I´ve posted an answer before to you Blake, but it got erased I don´t know why. Men reproductive rights don´t have anything to to do with abortion. Specially considering that the zgyote/fetus happens to be inside WOMEN bodies, not men ones. That is some real biological difference that you seem to have forgotten concerning that debate.
June 3rd, 2011 | 11:02 pm
“Men don’t have a right to control their own reproductive rights – if by control you mean “kill any babies they don’t want”.”
I´ve posted an answer before to you Blake, but it got erased I don´t know why. Men reproductive rights don´t have anything to to do with abortion.
Women want the good parts about equality, but not the responsibilities.
It’s their body, so they shouldn’t have anything they don’t want in it. Is that how the reasoning goes?
Well, it’s their body, so they should take some responsibility for not putting babies into it.
Are women grown-ups who are ready for freedom, or are they irresponsible little children who need a guardian?
June 4th, 2011 | 10:13 am
I’d like to take a moment away from the WMS debate and relate my experience from the only sociology course I took in college. In the fall semester of 1987 I took SOC 165 “Social Problems”. I could tell from the textbooks assigned that he was either a conservative, or a liberal who wanted to thrash conservative ideas. The books were; Losing Ground by Charles Murray, Crime & Public Policy by James Q. Wilson, and The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon. I did not enter the class merely to confirm my biases, I was very curious about how the class was going to be taught. Of course the content of each book was covered in time appropriate detail. I don’t remember any dramatic class arguments over the content which might be expected in this environment. In addition to addressing the texts he offered historical, philosophical, and other background information on how “problems” become identified as “social”.
I simply offer this as anecdotal evidence that that not all have been absorbed into the collective. While I have no idea my teacher has been skinned and eaten yet, I know there are those around who were trying to tenderize him!
@Tavener
Spot on: God dead=Humanity dead
Without God to guide us we are merely left to our narcissistic ruminations and identity politics. Thus is the slough of despond in the “humanities”.
June 9th, 2011 | 4:53 pm
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