Depending on who you speak to, modern universities have vastly different purposes. Some people view universities as a place to fund various types of research. Some see college as an investment toward engaging in a more lucrative career in the future. Some see universities as centers of knowledge and an opportunity for self-improvement.
Worryingly, there are people who also view universities as way to promote their preselected ideology with which they interpret the world. You can find these people studying areas such as gender studies, sociology, women’s studies, and the rest of the so-called “grievance studies."
The term was coined by a group of three liberal academics who recently had three studies published and had four others accepted in major academic journals such as “Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy” or “Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.” The studies covered subjects such as putting white males on the floor in chains to teach them about their privilege, the claim that dog parks can be used as a case study for rape culture or even a proposition for “fat bodybuilding.”
They had been praised and received accolades. But there was a problem. The studies were fake, and obviously so. They never should have made it through peer review.
While many have criticized the hoax, there is an important lesson to learn from its success: Sections of academia have subjected themselves and their search for truth to a preordained framework to which they attempt to make the facts of reality fit. This attitude has no place in a true academic setting — which is hypothetically what universities should be. The rigor of the scientific method is meant to eliminate the introduction of preconceived bias in the search for indisputable truths. This rigor is what one should expect from the rest of academia, yet there are entire disciplines which claim that truth comes from one's bias.
There are plenty of these departments at UNC: places where a student can hear just how awful their life is or just how much resentment they should feel based on which group categories they tick. These are also known as grievance studies. Students at Chapel Hill who take these classes are coddled, allowed to believe what they previously believed without challenge. In other cases, they are exposed to a worldview that will gift them an unlimited amount of self-pity to feed their psyche with.
I’ve taken one of these classes. My TA told me that he didn’t necessarily believe a world where race no longer mattered was desirable. We spoke about environmental racism in a town which I later discovered was over 90 percent white. My first reading in the class mis-analyzed the 2014 World Cup in a brazen attempt to paint the tournament as a morally undesirable event. It was nothing short of indoctrination, a class where we were invited to avoid critical thinking or counter-arguments in favor of the blanket acceptance of what we were being taught.
This is not to say that disciplines such as women’s studies or African-American studies should be done away with. They have many valuable roles to play including the preservation of these cultures and the proclamation of the achievements of individuals from these groups. However, as constructed, UNC is funding majors that more closely resemble an institution devoted to the creation of propaganda than serious academic inquiry. The professors in these majors may speak as if they intend to conduct their classes in a way befitting a real academic process. Professors and departments with a true devotion to the academic process would introduce the prevailing arguments against the accepted wisdom of the field of study, thus challenging their students to go beyond regurgitation but push themselves into real engagement. Yet, nowhere are such efforts to be found in grievance studies.
If the University truly valued producing students who are not only more knowledgeable in their chosen field of study but also possess the ability to think, they might attempt to reform these departments. Clearly, the University does not value this. Rather, students are treated like consumers who must be kept comfortable at all times so they do not protest against perceived injustices, real or imagined. It is too clear, however, that the University will fail to do anything about the grievance studies departments since they care little for academic integrity, but only the bottom line.
