As far as I can tell, much what is mocked here on Phi Beta Cons is not risible because it is Left-wing. Rather, it is ridiculed because it is very profoundly stupid: research into the “bourgeois fecal habitus” of medieval France, to choose merely one example. And no where is this truer than in identity-based “studies.”

Ms. Maltz has a point. “Studies” just means that a field is interdisciplinary. But, then, when you use the lens of “women” or “Latinos” to hold together a jumble of disciplines, well — the sad reality is that you generally get grad students not intelligent enough to enter mainstream fields taking on an intellectual project that is, theoretically, more demanding. If the “Studies” were to live up to the expectations laid out for them, you’d need to have a thorough understanding of the fields of history, political science, anthropology, and literary criticism. All this, merely to be a “Women’s Studies” lecturer.

This, of course, is not the case. Rather than broadening minds like “interdisciplinary” implies, it tends to operate within a strange, cloistered rhetoric of its own: almost like one current of theory trumps all of the factual contingencies, and all the many disciplines which implicate, the object of study. This is why most people — including most scholars — begin to tune out when they hear the “buzzwords” typical of postmodern theorizing. I know my own interest in a lecture exists in inverse proportion to the number of times the vacuous term “interstitial space” is used.

This, in turn, is why “Studies” have a distinctly Left-wing gloss. Harvey Mansfield, despite a mastery of all the classical fields above and writing on gender, is no one’s idea of a “gender theorist,” although I hear he appreciates the label ironically. Indeed, classes that he offers with titles like “Manliness” are not even listed in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard.

I do agree with Ms. Maltz that conservatives should be about building up, not tearing down academia. My impression of what conservatives are demanding is, in a word, rigor. But that can occur only by exposing the silliness that currently has a home in academia.