Hugh Brady's reform of University College Dublin continues: the term is, I believe, streamlining. The 11 existing faculties are to be reduced to five, and 90 separate academic departments will be replaced or amalgamated into 35.
But why such a modest plan? Why not amalgamate the entire university into the already existing Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies? Let me say those words again. The Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Does anyone really know what they mean? From his distant grave comes the sound of John Henry Newman's bones stirring restlessly. Why, I even saw the former president of UCD, Paddy Masterson, on the Luas the other day, looking distracted. Was he thinking about the rising imperial power of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies? Was he inwardly cursing himself for allowing, during his otherwise splendid tenure as president, a one-roomed department of women's studies which has since mushroomed into the only Government-funded academic unit with a clear political agenda in the largest university in Ireland? Nestling somewhere within the bosom - if one can still say that word in mixed company - of FIS is WERRC: the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre. WERRC is currently advertising for students to apply for various post-graduate courses, all labelled "women's studies".
One course is an MA, the other M.Litt. Can these possibly be Master of Arts and Master of Literature? Girls, are you letting yourselves down by using the M-word of the chauvinistic patriarchy? Or have you in fact covertly inserted a politically correct academic neologism into the titles, which in their longer form stand as Ms A and Ms Litt? If you have, I don't blame you. The Irish academic world has laid down with supine abjection before the juggernaut of political correctness emanating from the US (where of course it is now just about dead, largely killed off, not by men - the lily-livered poltroons - but by intellectually rigorous women academics). Here in Ireland, however, it is still lotus-eating time for those who talk the mumbo-jumbo of the sisterhood and of related movements.
WERRC recently announced a wide range of courses "with particular strengths". One of these is "Lesbian and Queer Theory and Politics". Ah. So suddenly homosexual males are included in a "resource centre" dedicated to women's studies. Why? In what sense are homosexual men women? Who was consulted about this gender reassignment? Do the gay men of Ireland know that they have become honorary women in new UCD-speak? So, who may enrol in this course? May male heterosexuals studying "Lesbian and Queer Theory and Politics" start referring to male homosexuals as "Queers" in a way which is forbidden to the rest of the population? And how does one pronounce it so as to differentiate the word from the pejorative "queer". Do such heterosexual students then become honorary "Queers" for the duration of their course, so enabling them to use that word, which of course is only selectively authorised by the PC lobby? But presumably, once away from the aura of liberation of WERRC, they forfeit the right to say "queer", which becomes taboo again.
Does no-one in WERRC recognise how absurd such institutionalised linguistic apartheid actually is? You cannot have university courses using words which are available to the politically indoctrinated, but not to the rest of the population. This is creating an academic priesthood with its own arcane liturgy, containing a privileged vocabulary limited solely to those who have subordinated themselves to the gods of multiculturalism and interdisciplinary studies.
Another course WRRC is offering is "Feminist Research Methodologies". Have you any idea what that means? It suggests that feminists have invented some intellectual research tool which is not available to the rest of us. How very interesting. Is this methodology for all women, or is it available to feminists only? And can men who have been indoctrinated into feminism engage in these forms of research, but not women who are not feminists? However, universities do not usually allow on its syllabus any other course which is so dedicated to achieving a political or ideological goal. Could secular UCD have a course promoting "Catholic Research Methodologies"? No.
Could politically neutral UCD have a course promoting "Marxist Research Methodologies"? No. Could academically free UCD have a course promoting "Islamic Fundamentalist Research Methodologies"? No.
But the sisters are different; and they are different because intellectual woolliness and academic cowardice have allowed them to be so, within the cosy and protected world of interdisciplinary studies - of which, I confess, I know little. What are the courses available in this discipline called interdiscipline? Are there modules combining rites of Indonesian pearl-fishers, 18th-English law on tort, and metallurgy in Jane Austen? Can one study Native American burial customs, Foucault's use of the past historic tense, and the feminist movement in Ireland during the Famine in a single glorious interdiscipline? Well, in a world which promotes "Feminist Research Methodologies" and "Lesbian and Queer Theory and Politics", I don't see why not.
For WERRC is unique among university departments. It has a political goal which it declares in its own advertisements: "WERCC is one of the leading Women's Studies centres in Europe, with a commitment to making a difference through transformative feminist scholarship, research, teaching, outreach and networking activities." So the purpose of this gibberish is not academic, but to pursue a "transformative" social agenda. And most reassuringly of all, this is not coming from some privately-funded madcap university in New Hampshire, but from the largest university in Ireland, State-funded throughout. So, gentle reader, it's all WERRC while we pay. Yes, John Henry, and well may you weep.