Via Instapundit, who reviews “The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America”
I opened Brook’s book up and saw this passage:
After graduating Yale in 2003 with a double major in film studies and gender studies, Tara moved to San Francisco to pursue queer documentary filmmaking. She settled in the Castro district, the historic epicenter of American gay culture, and quickly discovered plenty of enticing projects. “There were lots of opportunities to do film and to help people with their films, but no one had any money to pay me so I did a lot of volunteering and part-time work,” she told me in a Castro coffee shop.
My goodness. What message could the market system have been trying to send?
comes a link to this gem, The Sophistry:
At the same time, however, it is an indictment of our college system that someone could graduate with a double major in film studies and gender studies. It is an indictment of Yale in particular that these programs even exist. I write this with great irony as I was in the forefront of activism as an undergrad in trying to create a Korean-American Studies department at Yale.
Now, I realize… the only academic departments that should exist are those with a distinct academic method. Chemistry, for example, has a distinct methodology and a distinct discipline by which it is advanced. That method is different from that of Physics, which has a different methodology and a different discipline. In contrast, English, Gay Studies, Gender Studies, African-American Studies, etc. etc. should no more be departments than underwater basket-weaving. They might be areas of interest to History, to Literature, to Political Science, to Sociology departments — but as departments in and of themselves? Just a sacrifice on the altar of political correctness.
I write this knowing that my daughter took (but thankfully dropped) a Women’s Studies course. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, these types of courses reduce the knowledge of those involved.