Feminist Professor @MarcieBianco Says Academia Discriminates Against Women

Posted on | August 22, 2016 | 2 Comments

 

Two traits are necessary to become a successful feminist:

1. Hate;
   and
2. Dishonesty.

So long as a woman (a) despises men and (b) is willing to tell shameless lies in support of feminism’s anti-male agenda, there are no limits to how far she may go, particularly in the field of journalism:

Academia is quietly and systematically
keeping its women from succeeding

That headline, by Dr. Marcie Bianco, is the perfect feminist argument, which is to say that it is the exact opposite of truth. It is men whose career opportunities are actually targeted for systematic destruction in academia, and this has been the case for more than 20 years.

Men are only 43% of U.S. college students, and in many majors (including psychology, education and English), women get more than two-thirds of bachelor’s degrees. Consider the field of sociology. In 2000, women received 70% of bachelor’s degrees, 66% of master’s degrees and 58% of doctorate degrees in sociology. In fact, women have received a majority of Ph.D.s in sociology every year for the past 25 years.

Are these disparities evidence of anti-male discrimination in academia? Some would answer “yes” (see Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War on Boys and Helen Smith’s Men on Strike for evidence of bias against males in our education system), but Dr. Bianco’s claim that women are victims of academic discrimination would seem to contradict common sense.

Of course, feminists don’t give a damn about common sense. Or facts, for that matter. Feminists only care about “social justice,” a narrative in which women are always victims and males are always oppressors, and no one in academia would dare to question the core claims of feminist ideology. In 2005, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers had the audacity to suggest that there are “innate differences” between men and women. Barely a year later, Summers was forced to resign. In 2007, Harvard named its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust.

Are women “systematically” prevented from succeeding in academia? In recent years women have been hired as presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (Amy Gutmann, hired in 2004), Rutgers University (Nancy Cantor, 2014), Amherst College (Carolyn Martin, 2011), Brown University (Christina Paxson, 2012), Swarthmore College (Valerie Smith, 2015), Case Western Reserve University (Barbara Snyder, 2007), the State University of New York (SUNY) system (Nancy L. Zimpher, 2009), the University of Virginia (Teresa Sullivan, 2010), the University of Wisconsin (Rebecca M. Blank, 2013), the University of North Carolina (Carol Folt, 2013), the University of Connecticut (Susan Herbst, 2011), the University of Arizona (Ann Weaver Hart, 2012), the University of Alabama (Judy Bonner, 2012), the University of Iowa (Sally Mason, 2007), the University of Kansas (Bernadette Gray-Little, 2009), the University of California, Davis (Linda P.B. Katehi, 2009), the University of California, Riverside (Jane C. Conoley, 2012), The University of California, San Diego (Marye Anne Fox, 2004), Michigan State University (Lou Anna Simon, 2005), Alabama State University (Gwendolyn Boyd, 2014), Tennessee State University (Glenda Baskin Glover, 2013), Appalachian State University (Sheri Noren Everts, 2014), Bowling Green State University (Mary Ellen Mazey, 2011), Sam Houston State University (Dana L. Gibson, 2010), Ball State University (Jo Ann M. Gora, 2004), the University of South Florida (Judy Genshaft, 2000), the University of West Florida (Judith A. Bense, 2008), Florida Atlantic University (Mary Jane Saunders, 2010), Florida A&M University (Elmira Mangum, 2014) and the University of Miami (Donna Shalala, 2001).

In case you lost count, that partial listing of female university presidents includes 18 hired since 2010. Three Ivy League schools (Harvard, Penn and Brown) now have female presidents, as do the flagship state universities in New York (SUNY), New Jersey (Rutgers), Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and, of course, Virginia, where UVA was the scene of an infamous 2014 fraternity gang-rape hoax. The brothers of Phi Kappa Psi might be surprised to learn that President Sullivan — who shut down all fraternity activities on campus because of the phony story Jackie Coakley told Rolling Stone — is a victim of systematic discrimination.

And of course, “Haven Monahan” could not be reached for comment.

Exactly how or why would Marcie Bianco expect anyone to believe her claim that women are “systematically” deprived of success in academia? Well, journalism (like academia) is a field where facts are considered less important than “social justice” nowadays, so none of her editors would bother to question Dr. Bianco’s distorted logic:

Statistically . . . many more women work in the humanities than in the sciences, and over 55% of female humanities faculty are adjuncts, or “contingent” workers. And so the devaluing of the humanities in higher education is bound up with our culture’s larger devaluation of women’s work.
The backlash against the humanities began in the late 1980s with the institutional recognition of women’s studies, as well as other minority-based programs such as African-American studies. . . .
The late Harvard professor Barbara Johnson explained this “self-reconstitution of patriarchal power” in her book The Feminist Difference: “[J]ust at the moment when women (and minorities) begin to have genuine power in the university, American culture responds by acting as though the university itself is of dubious value. The drain of resources away from the humanities (where women have more power) to the sciences (where women still have less power) has been rationalized in other ways, but it seems to me that sexual politics is central to this trend.”

The reader may ask, “Who was Barbara Johnson?”

Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives — including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory — into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the “Yale School” of academic literary criticism.

Johnson was a proponent of Derrida and “critical theory,” you see, part of a trend in late-20th-century academia that was more to blame for “the devaluing of the humanities” than any patriarchal “backlash.” Any reader who investigates critical theory will discover that it originated in the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. During the 1980s, while the Soviet Union was tottering toward its final catastrophic failure, this crypto-Marxist philosophy was taking over American higher education. Since the Berlin Wall collapsed, it has been remarked, there are more Marxists on U.S. university campuses than anywhere in the erstwhile “Evil Empire.” Nowadays, you’d have to go to Pyongyang, or perhaps Tehran, to find anyone who hates America more than does the typical Ivy League professor. Old-style Bolshevism, however, has been replaced by postmodern identity politics, in which hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality are used to determine who is most oppressed, and who is the most privileged. These hierarchies are the basis of who is allowed to speak (the victims of structural oppression) and who is required to be silent (the privileged beneficiaries of oppression).

The people who actually pay for higher education — students, parents, alumni, taxpayers — do not support this divisive ideology:

Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.
Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.
Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.

Will parents pay to send their kids to college to study “social justice” ideology and engage in protest politics?

After raucous protests last fall, the University of Missouri has “a dark cloud hanging over the institution — we can’t sugarcoat that,” vice chancellor of operations Gary Ward told faculty [in April].
The university’s grave outlook became clearer [May 2], as the data rolled in on freshman enrollment for the Fall 2016 semester, showing steep declines.
Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline — and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.

Declining enrollment will translate to a $32 million decrease in the budget at the University of Missouri, which has already closed two dorms. If there has been a “backlash against the humanities,” isn’t this because the humanities departments have been taken over by radical professors like Dr. Bianco who have turned their classrooms into political indoctrination seminars? Is anyone surprised that male students are only 32% of English majors, when the professors are anti-male ideologues like Dr. Bianco, who also hates Christianity and heterosexuality?

American culture is beginning to experience the ethical turn in how it understands sexuality. . . . The progressive move away from identity categories negates the need for the normative, “born this way” narrative that has been used to socially validate them. . . .
I am an atheist and harbor no religious ascetic values like shame or guilt about who I have sex with or how I have sex. . . .
Despite the necessity of identity politics in procuring equal rights, I understand sexuality to be a choice through feminism. With roots in materialist, ethical and existentialist philosophies, my feminism draws from Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre and Foucault; Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson. . . .
Feminism also influenced my sexuality through the interrogation of heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution. Adrienne Rich was just one of many lesbian radical feminists to decry heterosexuality as fundamental to women’s oppression. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” she contends, is not natural or a biological certainty, but rather a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. Her ideas cohere with those of French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig, who, in her seminal essay “One Is Not Born a Woman,” unpacks the fallacy that heterosexuality is natural, or normal. . . .
It is empowering to take possession of my identity and my acts. Women break the cycle of oppression through their sexual liberation. Our power manifests through our freedom to make choices and to take responsibility for those choices. And that includes sexuality.

Marcie Bianco graduated in 2002 from Harvard University, where she majored in government. She then attended Oxford University in England, where she got a master’s degree in Women’s Studies. She returned stateside to Rutgers, where in 2007 she got her master’s degree, and in 2012 got her Ph.D. in English (with certification in Women’s Studies). This qualifies Dr. Bianco to make declarations of Official Truth:

“Melissa Harris-Perry is undoubtedly the greatest public intellectual in contemporary America. Period. I can’t even see how this is debatable. Who else holds a candle to her?”

Thus saith Dr. Marcie Bianco, who is also a “public intellectual” because she said so, and who are we to argue with her? Ignorant plebeians like ourselves aren’t qualified to make these judgments, which is why we must depend on experts like Dr. Bianco to tell us what to think. You and I need Dr. Bianco to tell us that heterosexuality is a patriarchal institution and a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality. If we didn’t have public intellectuals to tell us these things, how could we possibly know? You and I are so vastly inferior to Dr. Bianco that we might not even recognize the greatness of Melissa Harris-Perry.

 

Dr. Marcie Bianco is not merely an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual, she is the atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual. Did I mention she’s a Democrat who supports Hillary Clinton?

#Lesbians 4 #Hillary!#LPAC #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/JixIzEcQHn

— Marcie Bianco (@MarcieBianco) June 16, 2016

You might think that being an anti-heterosexual atheist man-hater would qualify Dr. Marcie Bianco for a tenured professorship at Harvard or some other elite university, but instead she’s merely a part-time instructor at Hunter College in the City University of New York system.

As a CUNY adjunct I’ll make less
over my career than my coworker
Paul Krugman does in a year
Like over 75% of professors in America, I am an adjunct, or, in corporate-speak, “contingent” or “part-time” faculty. I have been teaching in the City University of New York (CUNY) system—in the English departments of both John Jay and Hunter Colleges—for a couple of years.
At the moment, with a few years within the CUNY system under my belt, I earn $73.53 per hour. Generally, adjuncts, unlike other faculty, are paid by the hour—and we are only paid for the hours spent in the classroom. We are not paid for class preparation, or grading papers, or email correspondence with students, or writing students letters of recommendation, or attending sometimes mandatory faculty seminars/meetings. We do not receive benefits, like health insurance. If we teach at more than one school, we are limited to teach a total of three courses a semester, which, at my current rate, means I’d earn approximately $13,200 before taxes each semester. Which is impossible, since CUNY has told me there are no courses available for the fall semester, because enrollment is down and the system, apparently, is strapped for cash. So I’ll actually be earning zero dollars. . . .

That was Dr. Bianco’s reaction to the news that CUNY had hired liberal economist Paul Krugman as a Distinguished Professor with an annual salary of $225,000. Of course, Krugman has a Nobel Prize and is a columnist for the New York Times, so that his value to CUNY in terms of prestige is not a negligible factor, but why is it that a Harvard alumna like Dr. Bianco finds herself stuck with the part-time status of adjunct?

There are Women’s Studies programs at some 700 colleges and universities in the United States, enrolling more than 90,000 students annually. Why hasn’t one of these schools hired an atheist lesbian feminist public intellectual like Dr. Marcie Bianco for a full-time job? Is there some kind of discrimination at work here? Or, as some of us ignorant plebeians might suspect, are Dr. Bianco’s problems a function of supply and demand? That is to say, in 2016, there is no shortage of atheist lesbian feminists with Ph.D.s. Really, are there any feminists with Ph.D.s in Women’s Studies who are not also atheist lesbians? Are heterosexual Christians even allowed to enroll in the Ph.D. program at Rutgers?

The supply of atheist lesbian feminists with Ph.D.s available to teach Women’s Studies, however, is far greater than the demand, with unfortunate consequences for “public intellectual” Dr. Marcie Bianco:

Student debt in America is crippling — it’s crippling students’ capacity to learn and to have the academic freedom to develop their critical mind. . . .
Meanwhile, the digital age has created a media boom that relies on freelancers and non-unionized “staff writers” who work for peanuts and beer. Now America’s predominantly corporatized universities are eradicating the professoriate in one swoop, hiring their own hordes of similarly non-unionized, part-time labor known as adjuncts. . . .
I am currently unemployed with a not too terrible $25,000 in student debt. On the other hand, one of your brothers—the dastardly middle child—did not go to college and is now earning close to six figures pushing pharmaceuticals along a conveyer belt at a plant in South Jersey. You know what he has in lieu of student debt? A house. Two cars. A boat.

Thirty-six years old, unemployed, with $25,000 in student loan debt. But she’s got her Ph.D., with plenty of hate and a talent for lying, so I predict a great future for Dr. Marcie Bianco in the world of feminism.

Yes, #HillaryClinton, an ecstatic yes. I'll be your 3am phone call. pic.twitter.com/tqLEyEwQHj

— Marcie Bianco (@MarcieBianco) September 17, 2015

 

Comments