Some 800 university-employed savants from inside and outside Romania have just sent a petition to the Romanian Constitutional Court complaining about a law that prohibits gender studies dogma in the Romanian universities.  Is this supposed to impress anyone?  Far from carrying any intellectual authority, this action simply demonstrates the extreme degeneration of the Western academic oligarchy – currently notorious for major scandals involving mass censorship.  

Romania has rich traditions of university learning and research that will be thrown away if Romanians allow themselves to be intimidated by fashionable parlor intellectuals.  Romanians should trust their own instincts, honor their own traditions and history of world class scholarship, and make sure that the neo-Communist ideology of "gender studies” has no place in its universities.  

First, gender studies is not scholarship at all but political ideology.  It does not further the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.  Its sole purpose is to advance a feminist and homosexualist political agenda.  It is akin to totalitarian Communist ideology that has already wreaked such destruction on Romania and its neighbors.  This is self-evident and was already recognized last year when the Hungarian government refused to financially support the gender studies program at the Central European University, precipitating the departure of the CEU from Budapest.

 

In fact, gender studies is so fundamentally ideological that it hardly needs to be argued.  Scholars barely disguise that they promote what they should be studying with critical detachment:  "Women’s studies . . . is equipping women to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression . . . a force which furthers the realization of feminist aims,” claims one manifesto.  Panels at a conference of the National Women’s Studies Association include, "Feminist Activism from the Inside Out: Connecting Campus to Community,” and "How Feminist Pedagogy can Teach Resistance.”

It is difficult to see how people who present themselves as serious scholars could possibly endorse such political propaganda as equivalent to long-accepted fields of reputable scholarship.  University rectors who have succumbed to pressure to jump on this bandwagon should be thoroughly ashamed of their cowardice for debasing the traditions they have inherited and betraying the trust reposed in them.

 

Further, gender studies will poison the Romanian institutions with ideology and purges.  Though the scholars profess to be defending "academic freedom,” their agenda will do the opposite: destroy it and drive reputable scholars from the universities – as it has already done in the west.  That so many university professors can send such a letter is not testimony to the intellectual authority of gender studies.  Instead it demonstrates that scholars who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of gender studies as an academic discipline are quickly purged from their jobs.   

 

I have documented this irrefutably in the Introduction to my book on Sexual Politics.  

 

Today, virtually no scholar at any university in the Western world today conducts research involving a critical analysis or detached appraisal of sexual ideology.  "In 2014, there were more than 200 chairs for gender/queer studies, nearly all held by women, and around thirty interdisciplinary gender institutes,” writes Gabriele Kuby.  But hardly a single academic scholar has produced any systematic critique that fundamentally challenges the truth or integrity of these ideological fields. (Scott Yenor of Boise State University may be one exception, and K.C. Johnson of Brooklyn College possibly another.)   All have been removed or intimidated.  I know this, because I myself was essentially the last, before being dismissed from my college lectureship when I wrote books and articles describing the dangers of sexual politics.  Terrified of criticism, even private, conservative, and Christian-affiliated universities are now purging their teaching staff of any professors who refuse to endorse radical sexual ideology.  Gender studies is now immune from criticism within the universities.  

 

In other words, we are being asked to believe that there is 100% unanimity in academia that feminist and homosexualist political agendas are simply matters of factual knowledge, equivalent to Byzantine history or organic chemistry. Scholars who suggest otherwise are all forced to work and publish outside the universities, where many recent books indicate that something is wrong with this dogma that the academies refuse to confront:  Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (2015); Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims (2015); Wendy McElroy, Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women (2016); Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why It Matters (2013); K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities (2017).  Within the academies, everyone knows that such publications would be career suicide and punished with dismissal.

An exception that proves the rule is Laura Kipnis, whose Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017) became the object of a federal suit with pressure to dismiss her from Northwestern University. We have yet to see the response to Yenor’s new book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies (2020). My own book, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power (2017) was possible only because I worked in a college that was not government funded, though eventually they too succumbed and broke my contract. "Professors watch as colleagues are terminated,” observes McElroy.  "They self-censor to avoid a similar fate . . .  Professors do not listen to logic but to the inner voice of caution about their own job security.”

Jay Belsky was driven from Pennsylvania State University when he began to dissent from feminist orthodoxy over the effects of institutionalized day care on children.  Edward Green went from hero to villain at the Harvard School of Health when he transgressed the AIDS establishment’s orthodoxy by demonstrating that condoms have proven much less effective than campaigns encouraging sexual restraint.  He himself explains his treatment ideologically:  "The quickest way to kill criticism of condoms has been to suggest that religious belief, conservatism, bigotry, patriarchy, homophobia, or sexism has polluted the dissenter’s thinking.”

 

Here too, the exceptions starkly demonstrate the rule, because the few scholars bold enough to challenge or any item on the radical sexual agenda feel they must first register their party affiliation and ideologically correct opinions, so toxic is it for any career to become visible on the wrong side.

 

"The author fully supports gender equality in all aspects of life,” announces one scholar in introducing his critique of the feminist rape industry in an ostensibly dispassionate law journal, imploring that his findings "not be confused with a lack of concern for the feminist ideals.”  He knows his work will be vetted ideologically: "Those who might be inclined to dismiss the author’s viewpoint or the remedy he advocates as insensitive to the needs of rape survivors or somehow anti-feminist should keep an open mind as they read.”

 

In no other field of inquiry must scholars proclaim, at the outset of supposedly detached and apolitical works of scientific research, that they hold certain political opinions or subscribe to a particular political ideology in order to publish their professional research. 

 

"For the record,

I am a lifelong, outspoken liberal-progressive leftist,” writes Green in his critique of gay-and feminist-dominated AIDS policy. "I have always supported reproductive rights and sexual freedom, and I spent many years working in contraception, family planning, and condom marketing. I am not an active adherent of any sect, denomination, or religion.”  Green is appropriately ashamed for this verbal self-flagellation and admits, "I shouldn’t have to say these things, but such is the level of argument that some people judge one’s findings by one’s politics and vice versa.”

In short, gender studies and related fields have already curtailed academic freedom in Western universities.  When Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge interviewed academic scholars for their critique of women’s studies programs, "Nearly every woman . . . requested that her name, affiliation and other identifying features be disguised.”

 

In short, the signatories of this letter are not authentic scholars, and they have not achieved their positions by merit.  They owe their jobs to purges of real scholars and their replacement by a nomenklatura of ideological sycophants.

 

This will happen to the Romanian universities if this is not stopped.  Indeed, it is already happening, as evidenced by the fact that many signatories are Romanians enrolled in gender studies programs in Western universities.  

Incidentally, this advocacy is funded by governments with a vested interest in increasing their own power.  The agenda rationalizes government intervention into the private lives of non-criminal people who have no comparable platform to defend themselves from the measures being promoted by government-bankrolled scholars, institutions, and publications that readily describe themselves as players in a competitive game of "power.”

 

Gender studies provides ideological training for social workers, who are now the shock troops for sexual bolshevism.  Social workers have become plainclothes gendarmes who are unconstrained by the normal safeguards required of police.  They routinely violate the basic civil liberties of innocent, law-abiding citizens – above all parents.  As Romanians discovered with the infamous Bodnariu case, social workers routinely remove innocent children from their families and from parents who are guilty of no legal transgression.  

 

In that case, Romanians provided worldwide leadership. It is again time for Romanians to show the world that they cannot be intimidated by pretentious faux scholars.  

 

The Czech, Hungarian, and Polish governments have already refused to fund this neo-bolshevism, and now Romania is following suit.  Today, it is the democratically elected governments that are truly the protectors of academic freedom – and freedom generally –and the government-funded pseudo-scholars that seek to curtail it.