Inside Higher Ed has an interview today with Alice E. Ginsberg, editor of a new book about the evolution of women’s studies. I was floored, though I probably shouldn’t have been, by this comment:

The whole idea of women’s studies is to make visible what has been invisible and to make conscious what has been overlooked or silenced. Moreover, feminist pedagogy — which suggests social change and action are implicit in any kind of learning — will always run counter to the “objective,” “rational” way in which the University traditionally looks at research and knowledge.

It’s amazing to see an academic explicitly disavow the academic method of examining the world. Though I suppose you have to see objectivity and rationality as scare-quote-ready concepts to refer to “the fact that gender is a socially constructed category.”

Also, Ginsberg is refreshingly frank in admitting the political ideology behind “women’s studies,” tying it closely to “feminist pedagogy.”