Apparently Jerry Coyne Thinks The Problem With Women's Studies Is That They're Not Open To Male Supremacy Or Something

And I thought I was having a bad day yesterday.  I don't very often look at Jerry Coyne's blog because I get enough tantrum action in the comments I send to the Spam file here.  But after yesterday's post I went to see what Jerry has posted today.  At the top of the page is a dark, ominous warning about the dangers of Women's Studies programs in academia as the equivalent of HIV and Ebola - I'm not making this up, you know.  Go look at it if you think I am.

Jerry's concerns spring out of a tweet about the scribblings of a grand total of two authors from a journal I've got to admit I've never seen before.

Jerry's source is something called "The New Real Peer Review."  I'd never heard of that before but it it would seem to be a twitter account by some guy with infantile white male imagined aggrievement syndrome who makes fun of stuff that gets into little read journals.  I'm not really interested enough to go look for it.  If that's what it was (apparently it was shut down a while back or something) it's not surprising that Jerry Coyne would find it resonated with him.

What I found most hilarious was Jerry's high dudgeon statement in the post, about the only part of the post he wrote.

This is one area of academia, it seems, where a scholarly discipline not only has explicit political goals, and a point of view that it must inculcate into students, but makes these things public. I can’t think of any other disciples with such a nakedly obvious agenda, except other areas of “cultural studies.”

From an academic bigot like Jerry in a highly ideological field which has been highly politicized since the 1860s if not before and from someone with his public presence, that's rich.  He's always asserting that it's essential that his materialist-atheist point of view be inculcated into students, publicly and he attacks anyone who doesn't hold them.  There are no more nakedly ideologically bullied fields than the ones that promote materialist-atheist monism within academia,  many of them in the biological sciences and their allies, as well as cosmology, etc.  That comes up pretty much everywhere in academic study where atheism can slam religion.

Apparently Jerry and the jerk behind the twitter he based his screed on think Women's studies should be open to the idea that discrimination against women is good which would be about the equivalent of him wanting his own field to be open to 6-day Creationists.  Heck, he doesn't even want James Shapiro in it.   Go look around his blog, search a few names, as I advised a couple of weeks back.

I would bet you a thousand dollars (if I had it) that an atheist has more of a chance of being hired within the field of theology or generally within religious studies than someone who holds seriously unorthodox views in evolutionary studies does in the biological sciences.   I'll bet if someone were being considered for his department who had entirely orthodox views but views that were at variance with Jerry's that he'd fight tooth and nail to keep them from getting hired or tenured.

Update:  I should say that, really, what field in academia isn't highly political, highly ideological? Academic politics, often waged on the basis of ideological and intellectual partisanship, are as dirty as any politics.