Will Gretchen Carlson Give Back?

  Twenty million ain’t bad.

As we congratulate sexually harassed former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, I hope she can carve off a million or so and start a free-speaking foundation for women, or at least give a few talks at free-thinking public institutions like the City University of New York (CUNY). A foundation for the non-marginalization of women speaking freely about politics! After all, look at what the Koch brothers did with three million.

Not that there aren’t already those organizations. It’s  just they don’t seem to have much impact or many thought leaders, other than the ones who are, as they say in England, news readers — the face of the news, when women need much more to be in the news (or at least behind the scenes in the editorial rooms, deciding which pretty men to put outside to read the news), not just influence it.

Political science remains one of the most female-unfriendly disciplines in the social sciences. We’re happy to have Gretchen speak for us. I promise no “I told you so’s” if/when she addresses students at the Graduate Center of CUNY about the conservative nature of this subject (read neotribal/patriarchial, etc.). After all, we’re the only public university in town, and we happen to have more women faculty than in the discipline nationwide.

Hopefully, Gretchen won’t pick one of the old Ivies after reading Nancy Wise Malkiel’s book about higher education in the United States, appropriately titled Keep the Damned Women Out.