Dear Ms. Vickers:

I am a neighbor in the Bryn Mawr College area. I enjoy the cultural offerings at the College and have often attended lectures and readings held in the beautiful Thomas Great Hall, with great appreciation. My grandmother, who was born in Virginia in 1882, only seven years after the last Federal troops were withdrawn from that state, had hoped to attend Bryn Mawr College but her mother, a widow, was unable to afford it. This little history of poignant hope and regret was captured in a poem of mine, "Copper Beeches at Bryn Mawr College," which somehow found its way to your Alumnae Bulletin and is posted at http://www.brynmawr.edu/alumnae/bulletin/pmcopper.htm – I had sent it as a contribution to the magazine.

I saw the Bi-Co theater department’s performance of "Conquest of the Universe- When Queens Collide" in March, a dramatic production which caused me sufficient perturbation to write Mr. Mark Lord a letter, with copies sent to you and Dr. Tritton, President of Haverford. I received no response from this letter, nor any response from Mr. Lord to a subsequent e-mail, sent last week. This lack of response by the faculty and administration of any member of the Colleges was a contrast to the friendly dialogue I had with some of the students who had performed in the play. It is because of those students that I am sending you this letter today, for I am sending copies of this letter to the students in order that they may hear the expression of my concern.

May I say again it is because of the students and their hopes for the future – for indeed, they are the future – that I am sending this letter, in the hope that when you see the appended list of recipients, you will be sufficiently moved to read it. May I also express the hope that the students who receive this letter will be moved to share it with their parents. Additional material, including copies of my previous letter and e-mail, can be obtained from me by any interested person. I would appreciate a small donation for copying, postage, and handling.

Bryn Mawr College certainly seems to promote alternative sexuality. I have had to ask myself whether the College offers a liberal education or if it is in actual fact a feminist indoctrination training camp. In the cultural offerings on the Events Calendar for the last several months I noted the high proportion of offerings having to do with feminism, lesbianism, and gender (de)construction, all from the viewpoint of advocacy. I saw no indication of that there was ever an expression of a conservative or different point of view. Given the political realities of life in the USA today, not to expose the students to what millions of American voters conceive (or perhaps mis-conceive) as their agenda for social conservatism, seems not to be preparing them for an encounter with the real world. It ensures that these students’ concerns will be out of touch, ineffectual, marginalized and irrelevant to the political decisions made by the vast majority of their countrymen.

Or is there a different agenda? Is the purpose of this hothouse version of sexual redefinition to promote the interests of a governing elite whose preoccupations are in radical hostility to the customs of civilized people? By chance I happened to read the account of Gloria Steinem’s visit to the College in the fall of 2000. This was an interesting coincidence, because I had just finished reading an account of Gloria Steinem’s involvement with the CIA – an involvement exposed by a radical feminist organization called "Red Stockings" – an exposé which Gloria Steinem managed to suppress. MS. Magazine, which Steinem edited for many years, was indirectly funded by the CIA, as a part of its agenda of cultural warfare against the citizens, institutions and values of the United States on behalf of an international banking elite and New World Order global control. In this light, feminism can be seen as an important part of the agenda for social control. Divide the people, alienate them from religious teaching, confuse their moral values, create hostility and opposition between men and women, undermine the family, create a mass of rootless and confused consumers in place of freestanding and connected citizens. What a great way to turn people into sheep! What a great way to make the State more and more powerful!

There is certainly much that could be challenged in Gloria Steinem’s talk as reported on your alumnae website, but in the interests of time I skip to the present, merely noting the following sample taken from a cursory review of Bryn Mawr’s cultural listings.

~Nov 29 "Feminism Past and Present"

~Feb 10: V-Day (Vagina Monologues – performed every year on Valentine’s Day)

~Feb 24: Talk sponsored by Feminist and Gender Studies program and other entities

~Feb 25: New faculty member "who specializes in Victorian literature and queer theory"

~Feb 25: Celebrated Latina feminist

~March 17: "Tongue Smell Color" – more "body-as-metaphor" ideology

~March 31: "Stop Bitching – Start a Revolution"

~March 24: "Conquest of the Universe- When Queens Collide"

~April 7: "… Othello with a twist" – i.e. Othello as a lesbian

~April 14: Defrocked lesbian minister to speak

~April 14: Judith Butler: "Torture and the Ethics of Photography"

~April 14: Feminist poet Adrienne Rich

~April 20: Madcap Film Festival (Women’s International Film Festival)

The one individual who spoke positively of the challenges of motherhood was a new faculty member (interestingly, a woman of Asian descent) who specialized in the philosophy of perception. She described her research in a manner refreshingly free of feminist agit-prop. Otherwise, as far as I could tell from the list of cultural offerings, there was no indication that having children, which is, despite feminism, still important to many women, is an issue of any importance to a women’s college. This leads me to suspect that the heavy emphasis on lesbianism and gender deconstruction is the desperate attempt by feminists to colonize a new group of young women, since feminism no longer carries the cachet it once had. Lesbianism and queer theory thus open up new possibilities for dominating people according to an abstract ideology. Thus eliminate "motherhood," turn your students into lesbians, and you have solved the problem of how to maintain the feminist hegemony. It’s brilliant! But is it education?

That heterosexual women may be rejecting feminism is certainly understandable. More than any other single factor, feminism infantilizes women by arresting their moral development of women and teaching a false view of Western society. Indeed, the accusation of ‘patriarchal dominance’ is far more characteristic of Judaism than of the society we inherited from Western Christianity, and it is no accident that a high proportion of radical feminists have been Jewish. According to one commentator --

The aim of feminism, therefore, is to create a new kind of human being in a new form of society in which the ties among men, women and children that have always existed are to be dissolved and new ones constituted in accordance with abstract ideological demands. In place of family ties based on what seems natural and customary, and supported by upbringing and social expectation, feminism would permit only ties based on contract and idiosyncratic sentiment, with government stepping in when those prove too shaky for serious reliance. There is no reason to suppose the substitution can be made to work, let alone work well, and every reason to expect the contrary. Feminism does not care about reason, however, or even about experience of the effects of weakened family life. It is in fact ideological and radical to the core…

"The harsh things that can be said about anarchism and communism can be said with yet more force about feminism, because what the latter seeks to eliminate touches us far more deeply than private property or the state. Like the other two ideologies, feminism can be presented as a lofty and necessary ideal set up in opposition to a long history of dreadful injustice. After all, things like gender that are implicated in all social life are necessarily implicated in all social injustice. Nonetheless, the practical implementation of feminism, especially by force of law, can only lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to distinctions and patterns of authority people find natural, and like communism for ceaseless radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently for absolute bureaucratic control of everything. …

"The result of the victory of feminism has been a combination of disorder and state tyranny cascading from America throughout the world, from the most immediate personal relationships to high culture and international politics. Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing deceit, heartlessness and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak. It has meant confusion and misery for the young, who have been deprived of stable family life and concrete ideals of adulthood. It has meant the destruction of local and popular institutions by ever more powerful and irresponsible state bureaucracies. It must therefore be opposed as a destructive fanaticism based on a gross and willful misapprehension of human life."

Although I consider myself a social conservative, I am no friend of the predatory agenda now in place in American foreign (and domestic) policy. I am quite amazed that in the Bryn Mawr events calendar this past year there was no lecture or program devoted to any of the following topics: Peak Oil, the falling dollar, the outsourcing of American jobs, the decline of the middle class, the great disparities of wealth in this nation, environmental decay, the neoconservative hijacking of American foreign policy, the decline of public services (libraries, public transit) the threats to freedom of speech and civil liberties, the lack of accountability in government, the militarization of the financial sector, war profiteering – to take a few examples. It is true that Dr. Judith Butler, scholar of gender redefinition, spoke on "Abu Ghraib and the Ethics of Photography." I suppose there was some moral outrage there, although it was well hidden under the layers of rhetoric about the late Susan Sontag’s esthetic of photography.

Perhaps your students do meet to discuss these issues informally, but their absence from the official program seems to me a telling commentary on the current state of our liberal arts institutions. Watching the students of your colleges performing in "Conquest of the Universe- When Queens Collide" – watching them reciting lines and enacting gestures that are an incitement to vice and lust, darkening their minds with the extinction of reason – is this not to behold the essence of the new form of human enslavement? While "Rome" burns, American elites gaze upon their navels. Or should I say, their genitals?

It does not auger well for our future, Ms.. Vickers. What do you, as the President of Bryn Mawr, have to say about it?

Sincerely,

PS. For the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with the play "Conquest of the Universe – When Queens Collide," some of the acts portrayed on stage include: homosexual rape and copulation, anal penetration, ripping babies from the womb and killing them, urination, defecation, sexual torture, ridiculing the Last Supper and insulting the Christian religion, exalting the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the junk science of Kinseyian "sex research," and the worship of power and cruelty. The playwright, Charles Ludlam, died of AIDS in 1987.

__________________________________________________

Note (May 10, 2005): Copies of this letter were sent to all Haverford - Bryn Mawr College students who acted in the play. In addition, copies were sent to two members of the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association. 

As of this date, no one has responded - not the students, not the faculty, not the administration, and not the alumnae. Funny thing, no one in the Army or the Government has been held accountable for the sadistic-sexual prison torture scandals either. Is there any connection between the impenetrability of Academe and the impenetrability of our politics?