The Anti-PC police are at it again! They are massing a ferocious attack on Vision 2000, a new set of goals for gender equity on college campuses. Articles in the national press imply it is a plot by Women's Studies programs to control the curriculum and stifle academic freedom. But the Christina Hoff Sommers article in The Boston Globe, like most conspiracy theories, doesn't even get the facts straight. Vision 2000 did not originate from the schemes of sixty feminist academics, but is a response to the American Council on Education Commission on Women in Higher Education--comprised of Presidents and Chancellors from eighteen colleges and universities--which recommended each campus develop an agenda for women. Vision 2000 was created by the Council of New England Land Grant Women, not all feminist academics, but representatives of women's centers and commissions, and women's studies programs at the six New England land grant universities.

So what is all the fuss about? Vision 2000's gender equity goals include: faculty and administrative accountability for gender equity in curriculum and pedagogy, diversity initiatives, family-friendly policies, women's academic and career development, strong women's centers, and no sexual harassment, violence against women or inequities in hiring, promotion, tenure, compensation and working conditions for women employees. One commentator said, "These are about as radical as baked bread!"

Critics like Hoff Sommers advance paranoid interpretations of Vision 2000. She takes a statement intended to suggest Women's Studies scholars be tapped as resources in eliminating biases in the curriculum to mean that Women's Studies faculty will impose their gender imperatives on recalcitrant faculty! This distorted reading is used in a carefully orchestrated right wing attack on small but successful Women's Studies programs. UMass/Amherst Women's Studies, targeted by Sommers, has only six core faculty and over one hundred forty student majors and minors. These students win a disproportionate number of university academic awards each year, including the prestigious Alumni of the Year award last year. Yet she reduces our pedagogy to "touchy-feely" sharing of experiences and feminist indoctrination, ignoring the critical thinking skills we teach.

Vision 2000 opponents use academic freedom as a rallying cry against any attempt to rethink the curriculum with respect to gender issues. But this is only a foil for their attacks against feminist academics, for they don't discuss in depth the rationale behind academic freedom, which is to broaden the marketplace of ideas. As a result they do not concern themselves with access to academic freedom for students. Women's Studies and Racial/Ethnic Studies programs have tried for years to broaden the canon of works at universities to be more inclusive of underrepresented groups. But much more needs to be done within the traditional disciplines to add excluded voices to the academic disciplines. Only in this way can all students be free to engage in any area of knowledge. The academy must encourage new information related to gender to change the curriculum. A good example is a recent conference at UMass/Amherst presenting the ideas of little known women philosophers in the history of philosophy. With this new knowledge, faculty can have the option to add them to courses in the history of philosophy, in no way violating their academic freedom.

Sommers uses simplistic arguments: women's greater numbers on campuses and higher grades compared to men do not indicate gender equity! For she doesn't ask why more women are in the less well paid career tracks connected to Humanities, Nursing, Consumer Studies and Education and less in the Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Engineering. Is this partly due to a non-gender inclusive curriculum and lack of sufficient women faculty mentors in these fields? For example, at UMass/Amherst only 27.3% of the faculty are female; only 5.3% women faculty in Engineering; 13.6% in Natural Sciences, and 19% in the School of Management. Yet hiring pools of available qualified women exist for 34 of the 72 academic departments which underrepresent women faculty, suggesting institutional gender inequity. Public universities, particularly land grant universities, have as part of their mission creating equal access to higher education. This can best be achieved by thought-provoking calls to vision and action like Vision 2000 and not by mean-spirited, ad hominem and distorted attacks on such projects like those of Christina Hoff Sommers.