By Catherine Salgado
July 29th 2023
Sam Houston State University offers degrees in “Victim Studies.” To many of us, that might sound like a joke. To some, it sounds like a legitimate branch of “criminal justice.” So what exactly is “Victim Studies”? And how does it illustrate how thoroughly socialist buzzwords and viewpoints have infiltrated our education system?
To begin with, let’s take a look at the description on the university website:
“The Department of Victim Studies is the very first in the nation! In this department, students have the opportunity to work with faculty who are passionate about issues pertaining to victimization and care about sharing that interest and their knowledge with students. Students in both the undergraduate and graduate program will take courses that directly relate to victims. Students also have the opportunity to participate in research with faculty, become involved in the community through civic engagement projects in courses and participate in events through the student organization housed in the department, the Crime Victim Services Alliance (CVSA).”
The website adds that this department works with the Crime Victim’s Institute (CVI) to research “victimization.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me awfully like a glorified course in leftist social justice activism.
First of all, I don’t believe even legitimate work with victims should be a college degree. Colleges have become akin to uber-expensive trade schools, where people spend many thousands of dollars and four years getting training that would be much better and more cheaply taught on the job or in apprenticeships or internships. Journalism is another example of this. Journalists were better writers 100 years ago when most of them did not have college degrees. Since college degrees were required for journalists, and since Journalism became a college major, journalists are more dishonest, less trusted, and worse writers than ever. Clearly college isn’t the answer to everything.
The increase in jobs requiring college degrees is also unjust. According to Statista, as of 2022, 39% of women and 36.2% of men had completed four years or more of college. That means almost two-thirds of U.S. adults are automatically ineligible for many jobs, regardless of their qualifications, simply because they don’t have college degrees. Considering how many idiotic college-educated politicians and media figures there are, I think we can agree a college degree is no guarantee of competence or intelligence.
Secondly, the buzzwords indicate a fundamental problem with the program’s worldview or underlying philosophy. “Victimization” and “victim studies” are terms that, a century ago, only socialists or Communists would use—no self-respecting conservative would have accepted “victimization” as a serious topic of academic study. This does not imply a hatred for victims or disdain for work with victims of abuse and crime. It is a recognition that academic subjects and research rarely translate into widespread real-world change—and that college is not the best place to train those who work with victims, which is something that ought to be done largely hands-on, on the job.
What is the proof that this program is valuable? If it’s as successful at helping victims as Gender Studies is at helping women (who are suffering record levels of depression), maybe the program needs rethinking. After all, the program is part of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, and, despite years of criminal justice, crime has risen and the justice system is more biased and broken than ever.
The university website says the Victim Studies Department works with “local law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, rape crisis and domestic violence shelters.” The problem is that those most fitted to help abuse victims are not college students who spent four years in socialist-influenced courses, just as Gender Studies graduates mostly aren’t doing great work to help women. It’s all jargon. If you really want to help victims, go work in law enforcement or at a shelter. Don’t go into massive debt listening to college lectures sprinkled with leftist buzzwords.
Indeed, acceptance and justification of “victimization” by conservatives only shows how pervasive and long-term the socialist takeover of the universities has been. Communists have been infiltrating universities since before the mid-1900s, and they have been normalizing pseudo-socialist words in the lexicon for many years. Clarence Thomas found decades ago that the field of criminal justice was turning already into a field of leftist activism.
To give another example. “Gender” and “sex” are totally different things, one a grammatical construct and the other a biological reality. Yet even most conservatives use the words as interchangeable now, after years of conditioning. We accepted the equivalence of a subjective grammatical concept with a biological reality, and used gender-neutral replacements like “flight attendant” for “stewardess,” or dropped the female specific altogether (e.g. actress and authoress), and echoed the lie that men and women can and should do all the same things. And then we wondered why young children might think they could alter their sexes to “identify” as the opposite “gender”!
The language war matters terribly. The words we use inform how we see the world, how we perceive reality. If we accept “victimization” as a branch of study, if we accept the concept that victims are a sort of group or class (there’s the Communism again) which needs its own branch of study, the socialists are controlling our thoughts without our realizing it. If we say gender instead of sex, we will have a hard time explaining why a person can’t change his sex.
We must fight the socialist poison and refuse to allow ourselves to legitimize socialist concepts. “Victim Studies” should have no place in our American universities.
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