RALEIGH- In recent days several professors have disparaged the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and its research. One paper in particular came under fire from Catherine Warren, head of the Women’s and Gender Studies and North Carolina State University. According to a press report, Dr. Warren called it “inane crap” and said it was riddled with inaccuracies.
The Pope Center stands by its study, “A Room of One’s Own,” by Melana Zyla Vickers. “The paper is a careful analysis of the women’s studies programs at the five campuses offering these programs,” says Jane S. Shaw, executive vice president of the Pope Center. The paper, originally issued March 30, 2005, is available here.
“Perhaps the most important finding is that women’s studies programs produce few students,” said Shaw. “In addition, the report notes that women’s studies programs are paid for mostly by taxpayer dollars, with little or no private support.
“The reason for this lack of enthusiasm is probably the content. Women’s studies programs in North Carolina tend to be doctrinaire, polemical, outdated, and use materials that lean toward Marxist theory.”
The findings are backed up by statistics on the number of students,financial information, descriptions of the courses offered, and discussions of four books used by women’s studies programs in the university system, according to Shaw.
“Their [the programs’] sickly state can be measured in a variety of ways,” wrote Vickers in her report, “ranging from the fact that these programs have sought and attracted very little independent funding and are on life-support from taxpayer-backed university operations budgets, to the intellectually biased and repetitive material presented in their courses, to the negligible and ever-declining number of students interested in actually majoring or minoring in women’s studies.”
None of the five campuses attracted more than 12 majors during the period Vickers studied them (2003 for four campuses and 2004 for one; the different years reflect the data available at the time of her study).
The author of the study, Melana Zyla Vickers, is a former member of the USA Today editorial board. She has worked at the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the Globe and Mail, where she covered subjects ranging from business to women’s issues. She has a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Vickers has offered to come to North Carolina to participate in a forum on the merits of the University of North Carolina women’s studies programs.