ACTA's Must-Reads
« What's good for the goose... | Main | Liability, professionalism, and academic freedom »
Hate studies 101
One of the more pressing curricular issues in American higher education has to do with the place of those highly specialized, expressly politicized emergent fields known as "area studies." Women's studies, Middle East studies, African-American studies, Latino studies, peace studies, and a host of similar fields have emerged in recent decades as splinter disciplines dedicated to promoting a more or less explicitly left-wing agenda in the classroom, in scholarship, and in institutional administration. Though the intellectual ethics of such programs are questionable in their tendency to conflate indoctrination and education, they have enjoyed real success as niche disciplines built on the premise that left-oriented activism is a legitimate scholarly pursuit. As such, they have also paved the way for new area studies oriented around perceived political problems. Last weekend, at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, for example, a group of panelists discussed the merits of introducing "hate studies" as a distinct academic discipline that would seek to understand intolerance and to conceptualize an "effective response" to that controversial criminal category, the hate crime. Read a summary of the panel at InsideHigherEd.com, where a telling article title-- "Majoring in Hate"--registers the distinct possibility that "hate studies" may do more to create hatred than to eliminate it.
Posted by acta online at June 6, 2005 08:47 AM
Comments
Why is it that when we see something with which we disagree we automatically label it as being part of the "left wing agenda"? Would it not be more constructive to omit the labels of "left wing" or "right wing" because the labels themselves are politicaly charged and remove authenticity from the discussion by automatically pushing the issue into the political arena? Would it not be more meaningful to the academy to discuss the issue at hand, pointing out the flaws that you perceive in the reasoning, and putting forth what you feel would be the best alternative?
My sincere hope is that the ACTA can rise aboved the political arena and model how an effective academic discourse can take place rather than attempt to push its own politcal agenda on others, making us no better than those with whom we choose to disagree.
Posted by: Bruce Saulnier at June 7, 2005 09:16 AM
Saulnier has a point. I've never seen ACTA decry the creation of non-academic programs such as "hospitality studies," even though that is far more removed from liberal arts than any of the area studies. One could speculate that it is devoted to teaching new managers how to exploit illegal immigrants. That would be rash speculation, but so is this entry.
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at June 20, 2005 11:45 PM