> That's not how I remember it. What I remember is a great upswelling of protest in the late sixties and seventies, which was ghettoized and kettled in the various "oppressed" studies departments at the universities. Something that could have coalesced in a social revolutionary movement was parcelled into various pieces of real estate whose boundaries were defended by various flavors of lexical privilege and whose survival still depended on grants and administrative forbearance. Classic divide and conquer, a process in which the beleaguered academic ghettos were structurally forced to be complicit.
I don't know how to put this gently, so I won't: this is complete bullshit. *Actual* women pushed for women's studies programs; *actual* black people insisted on black studies programs; etc. The creation of these programs was and is due to the struggle of many subaltern people to find a place in the university and have it recognized, meaning they were also struggles against racism, sexism, and the like on the social level. Certainly they've been used by elites to corral and demobilize, but your breezy history does no justice to the (provocative, dangerous) actions people took create these programs.
I'm amazed that some leftists seem to think that politics ceases to apply once one enters the ivy walls.