Daphne Patai (born 1943, daughter of Raphael Patai) is a feminist scholar and author. She is a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction. She is a leading critic of the politicization of education, in particular of the decline of free speech on college campuses as programs conform to pressures from feminists and other identity groups.
After spending ten years with a joint appointment in women's studies and in Portuguese, Patai became highly critical of what she saw as the imposition of a political agenda on educational programs. In Patai's view, this politicization not only debases education, but also threatens the integrity of education generally. Having done, earlier in her career, a good deal of research using personal interview techniques, she drew on these techniques in her book Professing Feminism (1994, written with philosophy of science professor and novelist Noretta Koertge). Their research included personal interviews with feminist professors who had become disillusioned with feminist initiatives in education. Drawing on these interviews and on materials defining and defending women's studies programs, the book analyzed practices within women's studies that the authors felt were incompatible with serious education and scholarship — above all, the explicit subservience of educational to political aims.
A recent enlarged edition of this book provided extensive documentation from current feminist writings of the continuation, and indeed exacerbation, of these practices. Routinely challenged by feminists who declare that "all education is political," Patai has responded with the claim that this view is simplistic. She argues that a significant difference exists between the reality that education may have political implications and the intentional use of education to indoctrinate. The latter, she argues, is no more acceptable when done by feminists than when done by fundamentalists.
Patai's thesis is that a failure to defend the integrity of education, and a habit of dismissing knowledge and research on political grounds, not only seriously hurts our students but also leaves feminists helpless in trying to defend education against other ideological incursions (such as intelligent design). Only positive knowledge, respect for logic, evidence, and scrupulous scholarship not held to political standards, Patai contends, can lead to a better future. Twentieth-century examples of contrary educational practices have a sordid history, one that has hardly promoted women's rights (or any other human rights).
Prominent among Patai's concerns are what she sees as draconian sexual harassment regulations as implemented in the academic world. She argues that contemporary feminism is poisoned by a strong element of "heterophobia": a pronounced hostility to sexual interaction between men and women and an effort to suppress it through micromanagement of everyday relations. This thesis is developed at length in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Patai has also written about the negative impact of Theory on the study of literature. Together with Will H. Corral she edited Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia University Press), a collection of essays by fifty scholars taking issue with Theory orthodoxies of the past few decades. Here, Patai critiques postmodernist attacks on notions of logic, reason, and evidence.
Although considered an enemy by some feminists, Patai insists that to criticize feminism and women's studies is not to seek to turn the clock back. From her perspective, she is still addressing her critiques to other feminists, especially to educators, in the hope that they will see the importance of defending education from those who want to force it into a particular political mould.
In addition to her work on women's studies and feminism, she continues to write about utopian studies, oral history, Brazilian literature and culture, translation studies and literary theory. Many of her opinion pieces have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE; at [1]), a non-profit organization devoted to protecting First Amendment rights on college campuses. Patai's most recent book is What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) -- which brings together her writing on the culture wars of the past two decades and also includes a few new pieces.
