How Gender Studies Broke the University

‘Like academics in other identity studies fields, women’s and gender studies scholars have long seen ourselves as activists as well as scholars. From the beginning, we gave ourselves the charge to change the world and not just interpret it. As time went on, I couldn’t help seeing ways in which the ethos of activism can come into conflict with the ethos of scholarship. Unless we’re willing to presumptively declare that careful observation and analysis of data will always yield results that serve particular political agendas, how could they not conflict? When confronted with even the possibility that there may be a conflict between what activism requires of us and what scholarship requires of us, academic progressives deny that there can be such a conflict. And they wonder why anyone would raise the question unless they were harboring right-wing impulses in their heart. [….] Whether you’re an orthodox Christian or an academic progressive, if you believe that you and those who agree with you have the only answer to every contentious question—that you understand what is at stake morally and politically, and your opponents are dreadfully, even wickedly, wrong—you will embrace, and demand that others embrace, “rigid orthodoxies.” You will not consider it a matter of “moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.” Inevitably, some progressive academics publicly divulge how to use their positions as scholars to advance political goals, also known as saying the quiet part out loud. One of these is the English professor Julie Stone Peters, whose reflections on how to think about the political goals of instruction couldn’t be clearer. Not all of our students will be original thinkers, nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché? …. Maybe we should … strive to send our students forth — and ourselves too — armed with clichés for political change. Peters’ examples of academic clichés that do “real political work,” “chang[ing] how people see, what they think, and, ever-so-slowly, what they do,” are “performativity” and “genderqueer.”In this startlingly cynical vision of education, we pretend to help students learn to think while they do the grunt work of spreading our political ideas. And they pay us for the privilege. Is this a great country, or what? In addition to holding the view that there’s no conflict between activism and scholarship, my colleagues instruct their students that this is so. Because to acknowledge that such a distinction—even contradiction—might exist is to open the larger enterprise of academic progressivism to criticisms we’re unwilling to entertain.’

— Prof Ian Pace (@drianpace) October 4, 2026