I voted to abolish the gender studies program at New College of Florida. Critics of the decision to eliminate gender studies have since labeled it an attack on education itself. But as a matter of academic integrity and intellectual honesty, the board has a firm basis to remove gender studies as an area of concentration at the state’s liberal arts honors college.
Science Versus Self-Identity
Gender studies is not a science. Pretenses of legitimacy obscure its lack of scientific rigor and replicable research. When pressed on biological facts (such as male and female differences in genetics, hormones, anatomy, and neurochemistry), the answer is that what leftists call “gender” is socially constructed and not a matter of natural science, something even the World Health Organization admits.
“Neither gender difference nor gender inequality is inevitable in the nature of things nor, more specifically, in the nature of our bodies,” a highly acclaimed gender studies textbook argues. Indeed, gender theorists deem the scientific method sexist because it focuses on the facts of nature rather than claims of personal self-identity.
Political Doctrine, Not Academic Discipline
At the same time, the tendentious character of gender studies makes it more of a political movement for social change than the proper subject of an academic discipline. It does not stem from the liberal arts and falls well outside a humanities focus. Though it is hailed as an interdisciplinary field, gender studies doesn’t do justice to the disciplines with which it engages; instead, it subverts them by cherry-picking whatever advances
