POLITICS: John Masko UT Austin Strikes a Blow to Critical Theory President Jim Davis’s decision to consolidate four “studies” departments is about more than just fiscal prudence. – USSA News

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ut-austin-president-jim-davis-studies-departments

Big things are happening in higher education. Take the recent decision by Jim Davis, president of the University of Texas at Austin, to consolidate four academic departments—African and African Diaspora Studies; American Studies; Mexican American and Latina/Latino Studies; and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies—into a single new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

Davis’s move is about more than efficiency. University administrators know that the “studies” disciplines are really just one discipline—critical theory. Davis is announcing that the game is up. Other universities should follow UT Austin’s lead.

The “studies” disciplines arose in response to the demands of student protesters in the late 1960s. Their theory was that the traditional departments wouldn’t teach the histories and cultures of minority populations. Women’s and gender studies programs followed a decade later, largely for the same reason.

The new departments stuck around even as the perspectives of these activists gradually spread throughout the academy. While today, the formal minority studies programs are largely irrelevant to the modern university’s academic dynamism, they have become the center of its left-wing political radicalism.

Over the last few years, the Texas state legislature—like those of Florida and other states—has tried to return state schools’ focus to academics. Last June, the legislature passed Senate Bill 37, which granted the state-appointed Board of Regents greater say over academic decisions, while reducing the authority of faculty committees.

The Regents in turn installed Davis, the former Texas deputy attorney general, as president of UT Austin—the university’s first nonacademic presidential hire in a century. Shortly after Davis’s hiring, he convened a committee to review the departmental structure of the College of Liberal Arts. One of the review’s two recommendations was consolidation of the “studies” departments.

Faculty and students from within the departments were quick to object to these and other signs of a broader reform push. One doctoral student in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department told the Texas Tribune, “It’s hard to understand this as anything other than ideological and political.”

Of course, that’s precisely backward. The student’s department is ideological and political, as one can tell from course offerings like “Chicana Feminisms” and “Politics of Latino Identity.” But to a fish accustomed to the water of politics and ideology, it’s the air that seems political.

Texas’s consolidation reflects the fact that the “studies” disciplines are not primarily about women, African Americans, America, or whatever their prefix happens to be. Rather, they are about the application to those topics of critical theory—“a lens,” in the words of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, “that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real.”

Of course, not every student majoring in women’s studies does so to study critical theory. Some are victims of false advertising, like the student who enters the department with dreams of studying the history of female political participation in America but winds up being force-fed the works of gender theorists like bell hooks or Judith Butler instead.

In his announcement, Davis rightly notes that such students will be served just as well (if he were a bit less politic, he would have said “better”) by departments such as history and political science. Those departments are by no means free of critical theory themselves, but at least it’s not the only item on their menu.