Indoctrination, Not Education: Rampant Radicalism in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

The GSEIS Professoriate - Sandra Harding

    As it happened, Dori Kozloff proved unlucky enough to cross the path of nearly all of the most notoriously extremist professors in GSEIS.  While unprompted by Dori’s particular troubles, the UCLAProfs.com site presented profiles on two of the main villains, Marxist Peter McLaren and Chicano irredentist Daniel Solorzano.  Missing from the site at that time was what we present here now – our disturbing portrait of Professor Sandra Harding, an unstable polemicist with more power than sense.

Sandra Harding

    Sandra Harding, as it happens, is a person defined by wild accusations against perceived enemies, be it a life-long anti-racist like Dori Kozloff, or (no kidding) Sir Isaac Newton.  The source of both accusations seem equally inscrutable.  Harding’s (in)famous 1991 tome “Whose Science?  Whose Knowledge” contained her famous discovery that the works of Newton contained “rape themes” and asked, “Why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s Rape Manual,’ as it is to call them ‘Newton’s Mechanics’?” [i]  In general, the 1600s earn a disproportionate share of Harding’s ire.  “The new sciences of the 17^th century,” Harding has written, “incorporated powerful democratic and bourgeois tendencies,” such as “patriarchal rape, [with] the husband as scientist forcing nature to his wishes.”[ii]

    Isaac Newton is not the only 17^th century eminence to come in for a drubbing from Harding.  She accuses Francis Bacon of perpetuating “sexist and misogynistic metaphors” which “have apparently energized generations of male science enthusiasts.”[iii]  Bacon’s particular offense came in his 1623 title “Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning” which encouraged man to not “make scruple of entering and penetrating into those holes and corners [of nature] when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.”  Harding’s hysterical denunciations of such innocent word usage habits form the backbone of her career-spanning critique of science.  To Harding’s way of thinking, science was co-opted by males for their exclusive use through their constant use of sexual imagery, supposedly to repel aspiring female scientists from joining the profession.

    Such academic histrionics earned Harding more than a few brickbats, including repeated references in Christina Hoff Sommers’ “Who Stole Feminism?”  Harding received front-and-center attention in Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book “Higher Superstition,” a title which was a major salvo in the so-called Science Wars.  Harding also merited attention from New York Law School Professor Jethro K. Lieberman (also a man, Harding would no doubt hasten to point out) who allowed that Harding’s writing was perhaps not “a good or fair example of bad writing, only bad thinking.”[iv]