The Academic War on Facts

By E. M. Cadwaladr

When I was in college back in the 1980s, a couple of new degree programs, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, were starting to gain in popularity. The purpose of these programs, everyone knew perfectly well, was to advance the cause of political activism for these two demographic groups. Activism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Without a doubt, there really had been barriers to women’s advancement, more social than legal, but by the 1980s these were clearly fading -- more as the result of the huge number of women advancing themselves than as the result of the efforts of radical feminists.

Similarly, there had also been genuinely oppressive Jim Crow laws constraining black Americans, but those laws had been almost entirely knocked down in the 1950s and 60s. America of the 1980s was not a perfectly gender-blind or color-blind society, but we were clearly on the right track. True sexism and racism were well on the decline. But along with the real progress there came a class of professional progressive activists. Their more courageous predecessors having all but won the war, this new generation of reformers established permanent institutions in academia to refight it. Never mind the notable lack of sexist or racist stalwarts in authority to oppose. If an activist runs out of enemies, it is no great challenge to reinvent them.....What’s the American Cancer Society without cancer? And what’s an activist without a cause?.....

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