For two decades, conservatives, traditionalists, and libertarians have criticized women’s-studies departments for being partisan, biased, and lightweight, but they haven’t done much to affect its institutional footing on campus. In Great Britain, by contrast, women’s studies is on the way out, and students are the reason. Here’s the story in The Independent.
Opening paragraphs:
Women’s studies, which came to prominence in the wake of the 1960s feminist movement, is to vanish from British universities as an undergraduate degree this summer. Dwindling interest in the subject means that the final 12 students will graduate with a BA in women’s studies from London’s Metropolitan University in July.
Universities offering the course, devised as the second wave of the women’s rights movement peaked, attracted students in their hundreds during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the mood on campuses has changed. Students, it seems, no longer want to immerse themselves in the sisterhood’s struggle for equality or the finer points of feminist history.