I confess, I did spend some time last week reading through the various Men's Rights forums that were reacting to my appearance on the Glenn Sacks show.   Obviously, there was much written that was hurtful, much that was venomous, and a little that was genuinely interesting.  Dear Ampersand of Alas, a Blog, ventured into the Stand Your Ground forum, and more than held his own.  What I wanted to focus on today was this page of the thread from that forum, on the validity of degrees in women's studies.  A couple of samples:

He is an archtypical Women's Studies professor, which is to say, a person endowed with an academic title that for most part seems completely undeserved. I work at a major research university so I have contact with all kinds of professionals, and I'm here to tell you that among faculty who are honest about the subject, women's studies departments and the people who work in them are not considered legitimate from an academic perspective. Women's studies wonks may do a lot of things, but legitimate scholarship ain't one of them.

Someone else added on:

I don't want to get started on that - and it's probably a topic for a different thread - but the amount of work that you have to do for a doctoral degree in molecular biology, or physics, or any of a number of other "real" degrees absolutely dwarfs "writing about your feelings" and the like in some areas.

I guess if you get a doctoral degree in electrical engineering, you earn a salary at a company and really produce something computer-wise for society.

But if you get a "doctoral degree" in interdisciplinary studies with a major in sex and gay relations, you go on Oprah, write a book that nitwits read, and earn far more.

The quoted remarks are typical of the tired old canards that have benn thrown for decades at those who work in Gender Studies.  I'm not interested in refuting all of the groundless charges in these comments -- it would take too long.  First quick point:  at most colleges and universities in the USA, professors who teach gender studies also teach in other disciplines, like history, psychology, sociology,and literature.  (Here's a list of many of the programs.)   Relatively few universities have "free-standing" departments of Women's Studies staffed by faculty who do not teach outside that department.   Second quick point:  dissertations in gender studies are never about how one "feels".  If you want to find out what most dissertations in the field are written about, I suggest you go here and type in women's studies or gender studies.  Not a lot of fluff will come up -- but a lot of world-class scholarship will!

Of course, I don't have a doctoral degree in gender studies.  Indeed, my Ph.D. is in English Medieval History, with an emphasis on ecclesiastical and political affairs.  Here's the link to the abstract of my doctoral dissertation at UCLA: Arms and the Bishop: the Anglo-Scottish War and the Northeastern Episcopate, 1296-1357.  Hint, folks: it's not a page turner.  But if you like lengthy footnotes in Latin and Norman French, you're in luck.  (I'm not sure I can read Norman French anymore, but in the early to mid-90s, I sure had to learn how.)