In an effort to restore curricular and administrative sanity to university education, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have passed legislation to abolish Gender Studies as an area of official study. Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.” linkAn ideology, nothing more.
Thursday, January 09, 2020
Makes Sense To Me
Even a country as large as the United States truly needs only one or two such programs:
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3 comments:
I must admit that reading that article was pleasing -- the Hungarians seem to get it. Perhaps all those years under the thumb of the USSR has shown something to them that we in the USA just don't get.
I'm not sure that the USA actually "needs" one or two such programs -- those are boutique degrees, like many degrees are, meant for people who do not try to (or do not need to) make a living with them.
But we know how it happens -- a few PhDs publish "groundbreaking" new work and win the lottery of tenured professorship at BigNameIvy University. Then they teach people the thing they dedicated their life to, and those students then graduate, and get hired by StateUni.
Not long after, every academy realizes that to be taken seriously, like BigNameIvy, they need to have those same programs. And the number of GrievanceStudies programs starts to snowball, producing a crop of snowflakes who have nowhere else to go but into Diversity Administration.
So it's all about academic job security rather than the actual world needing people who have expertise in these narrow, politically progressive furrow of study (not a field, since a field is wider).
It might be interesting to learn some of the things they might find *if* their study is rigorous and not just academic fluff. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I certainly wasn't giving them the benefit of the doubt! ;-)
It's academic fluff, all the way down, with a permanent leftward spiral.
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