Universities used to be elite ivory towers
which provided knowledge -- though with religious, class and other biases,
of course. Now they are generally too easy to enter to be elite, and
they have a heavy Left-wing political bias that taints the knowledge
that they produce. It may seem admirable to have Women's Studies departments
and Maori Studies departments, etc., but unless those departments are
balanced by their counterparts (Men's Studies, etc.), they act as centres
of activism and tilt the whole university to the Left.
There's no point saying that the mainstream departments provide a balance,
because they don't. The same political correctness that brought about
the Women's Studies and Maori Studies departments also influences what
it is permissible to say in mainstream departments, such as Law faculties.
Sociology departments (with a few exceptions) are routinely Leftist.
Until universities start to fear that there might be a cost associated
with this bias, it will persist.
In the Law faculty where I am studying, there is an organisation of
female staff and students called (I think) "Women in Law".
This organisation gets its announcements broadcast to entire lecture-halls
of students -- both male and female. The students mostly come straight
from high school -- in other words (from my point of view as a mature
student), they know virtually nothing about the World. Worse than that
-- they know less than nothing, because they have been brainwashed by
Feminist high school teachers.
I was a high school teacher, and I found the union (the PPTA) to be
run by a grossly hypocritical, manipulative, and totalitarian bunch
of Leftist activists. Using members' fees, they produce a women's newsletter
called "Neo", in which the explicitly broadcast arguments
to (try to) prove that women are disadvantaged, relative to men. This
had nothing to do with education, and everything to do with an abuse
of union power. Naturally, this propaganda is passed on to students
-- directly or indirectly.
In Law school, one compulsory course involved watching an emotive Women's
Refuge propaganda video (one hour long) and listening to a couple of
Rape Crisis activists lecture us on their
simplistic ideas and incompetent research. No opposing point of view
to Rape Crisis or to the Women's Refuge movement was given equal free
speech in that course.
Intellectually, it was really slumming! To demonstrate that in the
case of the Women's Refuge video, I'd have to go through the transcript
in detail, but it is quite easy to show that for the Rape Crisis presentation.
The presenters called ideas that they didn't like "myths",
without (for the most part) presenting any evidence. The evidence that
they did present was based on statistics gathered from women who had
come to Rape Crisis centres. Assuming that the subjects had told the
truth and that Rape Crisis had not doctored the results (both very dubious
assumptions, anyway), the statistics were meaningless, because the sample
was a self-selected sample, rather than a random sample. In terms of
Professor Janet Hoek's article "Surveys in the Dock" ("Massey"
magazine Issue 15, November 2003), this was an instance of "Coverage
Error".
Most of the Law students students there obviously didn't have a clue
about surveys or statistics. I asked the presenters if I could see the
statistics, and I was told I could see them after the lecture. After
the lecture, I went to see them but I was told I would have to go to
their website to see them. At home, I went to their website, but the
statistics weren't there either !
During the lecture, I cast doubt on the reliability of Feminist statistics,
since (for one reason) I knew of:
Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994): "Who Stole Feminism ? How Women Have
Betrayed Women" New York:Simon and Schuster.
and
Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994): Figuring Out Feminism. in "National
Review" magazine, June 27, 1994.
But the massed phalanx of Feminazi students shouted me down -- so I
gave them a mini-lecture about free speech. It is hard to know whether
to be more appalled at their stupidity or at their Fascism.
In a Public Law lecture, I corrected the (young, Maori, female) lecturer
about the meaning of the term contra proferentem (which she
had misspelled on the blackboard, anyway). She said I was wrong, and
a small group of (male and female) students burst out laughing at my
having (supposedly) been caught out. But then another mature student,
sitting in the front row, spoke to the lecturer, and the lecturer then
called out to me that I had been right, after all ! There is obviously
a vast amount of stupidity and fascism amongst Law students -- just
waiting to get out into the real world and run the legal system on our
behalf !
I am writing this to let people -- especially in the Men's and Fathers'
Movement -- know what we are up against. Generations of people like
this have no doubt already graduated and are now running legal systems
all around the Western World. Lawyers and judges
of this type have no doubt actually been given preferential promotion,
on the grounds that they are women ! They may even be at the head of
our highest courts ! If that is Democracy,
can Revolution be far away ?
