How many feminists does it take to ruin a philosophy course?
Oxford University will be letting you know shortly, once it has got the results of its latest politically correct academic experiment.
From now on, Oxford’s philosophy faculty has decreed, 40 percent of the recommended authors on its departmental reading lists must be female.
Also, academic staff have been asked to use philosophers’ first names rather than their initials when compiling reading lists, to make it clearer to undergraduates which ones are female.
This is great news for Barbara Socrates, Mandy Aristotle, Seraphina Wittgenstein, Nancy Descartes, Fifi Trixibelle Locke, Suzi Nietzsche, Bobbi Confucius, Ermintrude Plato, and Petronella Hume, to name but a few of the awesome female philosophical intellects who have been cruelly neglected by history because sexism, misogyny, and the oppressive phallocentric hegemony.
No, not really – I jest. In fact every one on the list of great philosophers I have named was a bloke.
So too were: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Diderot, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Mill, de Tocqueville, and Voltaire.
After you enter the 20th century, a few female names start creeping onto the list – Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Mary Warnock etc – but they are still the exception rather than the rule.
How then is this new gender quota going to improve standards on the philosophy course at Oxford – formerly (till it became irredeemably SJW converged) one of the world’s better universities?
Short answer: it won’t.
As with artists, composers, writers, musicians, and pretty much every creative or intellectual endeavour you can name, so it is with philosophers: the vast majority of the really great ones were men and the vast majority – for obvious reasons which need not detain us here – always will be men, regardless of how many female contenders get overpromoted thanks to the current fad for enforced gender justice.
So by encouraging students to break down their reading lists according to this ridiculous, politically correct 60:40 gender quota, all the philosophy faculty is doing is promoting dross at the expense of bullion.
Graduates of the philosophy course at Oxford will no longer plausibly be able to claim that they have been properly grounded in the canon because, inevitably, there will be gaps in their knowledge created by the time they’ve wasted on Germaine Greer when they could have been reading someone proper.
This is where Oxford is going unfortunately. And also where Cambridge is going, where Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are going, where most of our great seats of learning are going, in fact.
I keep hoping the backlash is going to start somewhere – Durham? – but I don’t see much sign of it yet. The twin curses of postmodernism and cultural Marxism have so corrupted academe that even the best universities now prize social justice more highly than intellectual excellence – and aren’t even embarrassed to boast about it. They actually think that gender quotas are a sign of progress.
Western civilization really doesn’t have much longer, does it?