No Gender based exclusion in academia- "critique" is as androcentric as policy making

(Haithe, As If Gender Mattered: Feminism and Change in Higher Education The Journal of Higher Education,Vol. 74, No. 3 pp. 321-336 )

Feminist Critical Policy Analysis (1997) was written by academic women and published by a mainstream press. What does that tell us about common principles? It suggests, from the onset, that women do have a place in academia, at least for the time being. This does not mean, of course, that gender relations on campuses are unproblematic. We can continue to call them Unsettling Relations (1991), as Himani Bannerji and her co-authors have, but they are relations nonetheless. Like all relationships they are tenuous and contingent. As David Noble (1992) has shown, institutions of higher learning have opened and then closed their doors to women, and this has been going on for hundreds of years. We have no reason to assume, therefore, that universities in the distant future will be friendly to women. Indeed, if the recent history of faculty retrenchment in higher education offers us a lesson, it is, as Sheila Slaughter (1993) has shown, that women may be disproportionately represented among those who will be cut from the ranks of the profession. All caveats aside, however, I think that it is fair to assert that the assumptions that guided early university life in the United States have gradually been replaced by ones that are friendlier to women. Moreover, if we examine academic libraries we will find that they are increasingly populated with texts that take gender as their central focus.1 In short, feminist criticism has engendered fresh insights across the disciplines, and the scope of this particular way of seeing has been widening, not narrowing. All of which is to say that something has changed. Moreover, without these changes-without newer principles that accept women as academics, if not always on the terms they want, and newer principles that acknowledge that gender matters-a book like Marshall's (1997) would not be publishable. This does not mean, as Dale Spender (1989) has pointed out, that women's writing is always judged in the same way that men's writing is. Nor does it mean that women's writing carries the same social value. Nonetheless, given the number of academic texts that claim feminism as a subject heading, I think it is fair to say that feminist writing, however judged, has secured a place in academe. The change signified by the growth of publications written by and about women has been slow, of course, and feminists are often dismayed by this fact. Bensimon and Marshall, for example, rely on Audre Lorde's (1984) metaphor to repeatedly express their impatience with gradual change. As they passionately assert, to bring about serious change in academia means that "the master's tools must be cast aside" (p. 112). Like Lorde, Bensimon and Marshall assume that using the master's tools "to temporarily beat him at his own game" (p. 112) will never bring about genuine institutional change. From the point of view adopted here, the juxtaposition offered by Bensimon and Marshall (1997)-between those who use the master's tools and those who eschew them-is confusing. What tools would they have their followers cast aside? They mention the methods of androcentric disciplines, but what makes those disciplines and their methods androcentric? Methods, after all, are nothing more than ways of apprehending the world, and nothing is more powerful for discerning, describing, and defining the world than the vocabularies we adopt. As Bensimon and Marshall themselves suggest, language is powerful, and what disturbs them about its power is that "male dominance of language and meaning has enabled them to construct reality-history, knowledge, and laws-from their vantage point and make it look as if theirs were the view from everywhere" (p. 5). Their alternative, however, of using a feminist vocabulary to redescribe our situations and our past, is nothing more or less than an attempt to assert the power of language from another vantage point. Moreover, to gain the attention of other social scientists Bensimon and Marshall necessarily follow linguistic rules that reveal their mastery of academic ways of making meaning. They review, for example, the assumptions that guide five different feminist theoriesliberal feminism, cultural feminism, power and politics feminisms, postpositivist feminisms, and critical theory-and lay out the diverse relationships these theories have to policy analysis. Like other social scientists, Bensimon and Marshall map various theoretical perspectives so that they can show their readers where they stand. As academics they want us to know that they oppose liberal feminism because it offers strategies for change that focus on assimilating women into established structures while leaving androcentric norms, values, and conventions in tact. They advocate, instead, an interventionist strategy aimed at transforming academia. They call their position "feminist critical policy analysis" because it reflects a "combination of power and politics and postpositivist feminism with critical theory" (p. 8). When Bensimon and Marshall (1997) show their readers the feminist theories they reject, along with those they accept, they are following established academic protocols; not casting them aside. As Lyn Yates (1993) puts it, in an anthology called Gender Matters in Educational Administration and Policy, academic practice requires its adherents to "formally attend to other people's arguments" (p. 181). Academics agree to disagree, in other words, and one of the ways we do this is by discussing the theories we find disagreeable. While Bensimon and Marshall are critical toward other feminists, they are unforgiving toward a form of academic practice they call "conventional policy analysis." What makes policy analysis conventional, in their way of thinking, is that it is organized around the idea of value-neutrality. The result in higher education policy is a set of ostensibly gender-neutral norms that, in their application to academic women, are biased. The only way to undo the bias inherent in conventional policy analysis, as Bensimon and Marshall assert, is to use "the tools of critique needed to dismantle the master's house." I am all for challenging androcentric norms-telling ourselves stories about how things might get better is important work but I would like to point out that Bensimon and Marshall did not invent "the tools of critique." Instead, the tools they urge upon their readers are synonymous with the master's tools, and they were put to productive use long before women entered the academy. Moreover, what constitutes this form of criticism, what makes it recognizably academic, is that it adheres to fundamental principles that guide how academics argue (322-5)