From the Editors: In this essay, Dr. Franck explains the mechanics behind the breakdown of studies programs at universities and colleges - or perhaps, mainly, the introduction of questionable studies programs to begin with. Programs such as Women's studies or Middle Eastern studies suffer from lack of perspective, and breed factions that cleanse out dissent. We think that if this breakdown were played on violins, it would sound like the notes from a beautiful symphony being removed one by one until all violins played only a single, stale note. No one likes this; the best way to appreciate a note or a violin is to hear its part within the whole.
In his recent book Where Harvard Went Wrong, Harvey Mansfield collects some sixteen essays and addresses he has produced on higher education in general and Harvard in particular over the last quarter century. The seventeenth item in the book—literally its center, the ninth item in the table of contents—is titled “Harvard Faculty Speeches,” comprising twenty-three more or less extemporaneous statements Mansfield made in university faculty meetings during an earlier period, 1975 to 2006. Ranging from half a page to some four pages in length, these remarks, preserved in meeting minutes and in Mansfield’s own contemporaneous notes, address continually vexing questions in the academy: grade inflation, affirmative action, student life and conduct, dubious curricular proposals, and the university’s relation to the wider world. As the book’s subtitle indicates—Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears—Professor Mansfield broke his lance on a great many windmills in his six decades in Harvard’s government department.
Amid these wise but unavailing arguments, we find Professor Mansfield speaking in 1986 against “a proposal to established women’s studies as a field of concentration” (or as many institutions would call it, a major). From the first he minces no words, calling it “a foolish and almost pitiful surrender to feminism.” This is no mere snit of sexism on Mansfield’s part; he has two substantive objections to the proposal. The first is the obvious bias of the new major’s curricular materials, all on the side of the by-then-standard viewpoint of feminist theory. No critics on the reading list, no classic earlier sources on the relations of the sexes.
Mansfield’s second objection was “that women’s studies was not really a subject. Women naturally had certain things in common, but those things concerned men, and thus books on the list written by feminist authors were as much about men as they were about women.” This did not necessarily make such works unworthy of study—but it did call into question whether the “women’s studies” under scrutiny was really a thing at all, or was just an inward gazing at “the feminist point of view,” which returned Mansfield “to his first point about bias.”
Mansfield’s arguments here can be extended and modified to apply to other “Studies” programs in the modern university. Many such programs can be justly described as Grievance Studies, the aggrieved party lending its name to the enterprise. Or, in the alternative, certain Studies originally conceived as legitimate subject matters—say, concerning a certain part of the world—come over time to be captured by grievance-mongers. It is worth considering why this so readily happens.
In general, the modern university’s curricula can be sorted into two kinds of programs with their own dedicated faculty hired for teaching, research, and the program’s administration: Disciplines and Studies. Neither kind of program is wholly immune to the politicization and trivialization that come from a narrowing of outlook, in-group ideological reinforcement, and petty rivalries. But the Disciplines carry stronger antibodies to these pathologies than do the Studies.
There is nothing magical, or intellectually necessary, about the Disciplines. In the classical college of early American history, they did not even exist as we know them today, and a very good education can still be pursued without paying them any heed. But as the German model of the research university took hold in American higher education in the late nineteenth century, natural philosophy devolved into the separate Disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, while the rest of the classical curriculum differentiated into the humanities (history, literature, philosophy, religion or theology, classical philology, the fine arts) and the new social sciences (economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology).
What distinguished the Disciplines from one another was not certain parts of the world or classes of persons. Their distinguishing marks were perspectives on the natural world or human affairs: in the sciences, the forces and matter of physics, the elements and compounds of chemistry, the organisms of biology; and, in the humanities and social sciences, the human cultures (anthropology), social structures (sociology), patterns of change and continuity over time (history), and so on. Each of the Disciplines is at once partial and universal: all of humanity, but as seen through literature; or viewed as citizens of political orders; or understood as worshipers of some supra-human divine order.
Not so with the Studies, which partake of an altogether partial character. Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Latino Studies and similar programs limit their gaze to one subset of a larger population. Middle Eastern Studies, Southeast Asian Studies and the like confine themselves to certain peoples in certain places. The studies claim to be interdisciplinary, and there is truth in the claim. But does the interdisciplinarity bear nourishing fruit? Or does it produce instead what Justice Felix Frankfurter once called “the cross-sterilization of the social sciences”? Too readily the latter, in my view.
If the organizing principle of the Studies is the Grievance of the class that forms the subject—a class, moreover, to which the program faculty belong—then the contributions of the disciplines are corrupted by ideology from the outset. This is the bias that Mansfield immediately detected in Harvard’s proposed Women’s Studies program. If the organizing principle is simply geographic, then there is nothing inherently corrupting about the bringing together of the Disciplines to study the people and institutions of the Middle East or Latin America. Yet there is a natural formation of factions in such a Studies program.
When what unites a program is a Discipline’s perspective on the world, then the individual scholar and teacher can prove his value to his colleagues by the rigorous employment of that perspective on any number of discrete problems presenting themselves in politics, or society, the psychology of the human person, or what have you. There is always danger that in the fields and subfields of a Discipline’s subject matter, ideological factions will form that vie for the limited resources of faculty positions, publications, course offerings, and even students. But the perspective-on-the-world basis of the Disciplines makes it possible to avoid such factions or to keep their relations manageable where they emerge. If women’s history or African American literature has been neglected, a history or English department can readily supply the defect in scholarship and teaching, without the whole program’s being tilted ideologically.
In the Studies, the intense focus on the highly specific problems of a defined population or place is like a grow-light on a petri dish of factionalism, and any interdisciplinary contributions therein are necessarily tilted to the faction’s purpose. One hardly ever hears of a man employed by a Women’s Studies program, or of a woman critical of feminist pieties there for that matter. And when an Area Studies program—Asian, Middle Eastern, etc.—revolves around the peculiar difficulties confronting the peoples in those areas, the faculty in such programs will be strongly inclined to shiv each other mercilessly over their preferred solutions to those difficulties, until the program’s faculty is cleansed of dissenting points of view.
In the Studies, the intense focus on the highly specific problems of a defined population or place is like a grow-light on a petri dish of factionalism, and any interdisciplinary contributions therein are necessarily tilted to the faction’s purpose. One hardly ever hears of a man employed by a Women’s Studies program, or of a woman critical of feminist pieties there for that matter.
Martin Kramer, a longtime dissenting voice in Middle Eastern Studies, observed this pattern in his 2001 monograph on the field, Ivory Towers on Sand. Founded in the post–World War II era of government and foundation support for area studies programs, Middle Eastern Studies came to be consumed (especially after 1967) by internal strife over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When the Columbia literary scholar Edward Said, himself no expert on the region, published Orientalism in 1978, the pro-Palestine-anti-Israel faction in the field found in the book an ideological cudgel made to order, notwithstanding its factual and theoretical defects. Today the rare program with just a minority of dissenting faculty friendly to Israel, or merely lacking enthusiasm in condemning the Jewish state, is a noble exception.
The case of American Studies presents another, more meandering journey to the same sad condition of a monolithic ideological point of view. Earlier this year, Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin of the Progressive Policy Institute published “The Distortion of American Studies,” a report in which they examined all the articles published in the field’s flagship journal, American Quarterly, over the three-year period 2022–24. Of the 96 articles in those 12 issues, they classified 77 as critical of the United States, 19 as neutral in their content, and zero—no articles at all—as positive in their treatment of the U.S.A.
Kahlenberg and Lin lament the pattern they observe, but attempt no explanation of how this massive ideological bias came about in American Studies. I think I know. The field lacks the potential of a perspectival detachment that a Discipline such as history or economics has. It instead evolved relatively quickly into an interdisciplinary “problems of place or population X” field of Studies like all the others, sterilized of its fruitful disciplinary freedom by the internal pressures of factious politics among the scholars and teachers thrown together in the work.
Loyalty and betrayal, victims and villains, are the heart of the discourse in Women’s Studies, Native American Studies, and now too in the geographic Studies of areas outside the United States. When the virus of such factious discourse came to American Studies in the last several decades, the result was the same: an ideological echo chamber, endlessly repeating tales of American victimization. And once the dissenters are purged from the programs’ faculty, the internal monoculture of the Studies becomes intellectually morbid, its grim practitioners imposing a deadening conformity on one another that alienates students, not to mention their colleagues in the relatively more vibrant Disciplines. I can think of just one or two universities where American Studies is still free of this pathology.
Loyalty and betrayal, victims and villains, are the heart of the discourse in Women’s Studies, Native American Studies, and now too in the geographic Studies of areas outside the United States.
One can see much the same thing happening in the academy’s most venerable field, Classics (or as it is sometimes tellingly renamed, Classical Studies). The field’s pedigree predates the modern university’s Disciplines, let alone its Studies; it was once the heart of the old collegiate curriculum. Classics survived the emergence of the modern Disciplines by focusing on philology, a largely linguistic enterprise, but here centered on the ancient Mediterranean world.
Interdisciplinarity came naturally to Classics—the ancient world could be studied by practitioners whose work overlapped with history, literature, anthropology and archaeology, philosophy, religion, even political science. Then ideological capture came about when dubious claims arose regarding the ancient roots of a modern victims-and-villains story. First came the “Black Athena” thesis, the crackpot claim that the ancient Greeks were parasitic on the peoples of color of Africa. Then “reception studies” became a major element in Classical Studies—the examination of how classical texts and cultural legacies were “received” in far-flung times and places. Such a focus is perhaps harmless in itself, even quite interesting—but is widely undertaken with the political edge of attacking Classics’ complicity in “colonialism.” The combined effect is to give Classical Studies a with-it “relevance” about as attractive to students as bellbottoms and Flower Power. In this way Classical Studies is eagerly committing suicide as an academic field, as exemplified in the work of one of its most celebrated Young Turks.
All of the above should be reason for caution in the burgeoning new field of Civics, or Civic Studies. Now with well-funded programs at multiple flagship universities, the Civics movement represents a much-needed revival of liberal education for citizenship—though it must be said that liberal education is “for” much more than such a purpose. The new programs are resuscitating old subjects in the curriculum abandoned by both the Studies and the Disciplines—military, diplomatic, and legal history; constitutional law and political theory; moral philosophy and political economy; institutions and statesmanship. The evidence so far is that these subjects are popular with students, who weary of the stale ideological fare on offer elsewhere on campus. And Civics is injecting viewpoint diversity into the academy, cracking open the monoculture by entertaining conservative political perspectives as valid competitors with progressivism.
All this is to the good. But Civics faculty should beware the “cross-sterilization” of interdisciplinarity, the loss of that fruitful detachment that Disciplines make possible (though they by no means guarantee it). It’s a self-defeating project to gather together a faculty from multiple Disciplines in a single Studies program—even one of such open contours as Civics—if the faculty fall prey to the temptations of faction regarding what advances or retards civic flourishing, turn to internecine conflict, and cleanse their ranks of dissenters. For the long-term health of the modern university, it may be that the most fructifying effect of the Civics movement may be to recolonize languishing Disciplines, with the historians of the new programs insinuated with joint appointments into history departments, the political theorists into political science departments, the political economists into economics departments, the philosophers into philosophy departments, and so on. That way, I think, lies both civic and academic flourishing.
Matthew J. Franck is a visiting lecturer in politics at Princeton University, senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and senior contributing editor of its journal, Public Discourse, and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University.
