Heather Mac Donald writes about something that’s been apparent for a long time:
Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia…
These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not…
… Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.
Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma.
Not all females are that way, of course. But the tendency is there. There are probably evolutionary reasons for the greater tendency on the part of females to be worried, more easily hurt, focused on relationships, and concerned with protection. When men are mostly in charge, the emphasis is different – and, although I’m a woman, it’s an emphasis I prefer. When there is an even balance, things seem to be better, as well. But put a far greater number of women in charge – in the modern age, anyway – and a tipping point is reached, and you get the sort of thing we have now in the university.
Women versus men isn’t the only parameter in this equation, of course. There are race-based victim/accusation claims, as well, that factor in heavily. And there is no question that “woke” men are voluntarily going along with the women. In fact, one puzzlement (puzzlement to me, anyway) is that if you look back at the history of the university starting in the 1960s, it was seemingly traditional white males who gave in to special interest groups in the first place (see all my posts on what happened at Cornell in 1969 – for example, this, this, this, and this).
From an essay by Thomas Sowell on the subject of what happened at Cornell back then:
In a decade noted for its student riots, this was the most violent in the nation. In an academic world noted for its weak-kneed administrators, Cornell had the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of pious rhetoric in its president, James A. Perkins. As an assistant professor of economics at Cornell at the time, my characterization of Perkins in the media was that he was “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting cross-current of campus politics.” After thirty years, there is no need to take back any of that. However, a new book published on the anniversary of that tragic academic watershed reveals in even more painful detail how this hollow man set the stage for the betrayal of the university and his own downfall…
When James Perkins became president of Cornell in 1963, it had an almost totally white faculty and student body. When I joined the faculty two years later, I did not see another black professor anywhere on this vast campus. Perkins, like other presidents of elite colleges and universities, sought to increase minority student enrollment—and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums who terrorized other black students, in addition to provoking a racial backlash among whites.
This combustible mixture led to escalating episodes of campus disruptions and violence by black militants, each episode being rewarded by the administration, while fending off faculty demands for punishment with glib pieties and evasions.
I’m a woman – as is obvious from the photo on this blog. How did that photo come to be placed here? I originally began the blog completely anonymous and photoless, but I noticed that readers kept thinking I was a man. Over and over, I was referred to as “he.” I kept correcting them, but the corrections didn’t take, and after a few months I decided a photo was necessary. Something about my writing – or my original blogname, “neo-neocon,” seemed to “read” as male. I’m not sure what it was, but I couldn’t help but notice it.
And in life, I’ve sometimes had trouble with predominantly female institutions or groups, and that predated my political change. When I say that I had trouble, I don’t mean I didn’t have female friends, or that I disliked woman. I have female friends, and I was unaware of any particular beef I had with women in general. But in female groups – and only in female groups, at least in my experience – a sort of petty “ganging up” element sometimes emerged. It took me a while to see it, and I didn’t like to admit what was happening or that it seemed more common among females in groups than males, but I couldn’t help but notice it.
I think something like that is being accentuated in the universities today, and it is part of what’s driving the “woke” phenomenon. It seems that, if there’s a critical mass of women in charge, it remains a danger. It’s not that it’s inevitable with women in groups; I’m sure a university could be run by women who wouldn’t be acting that way. Such women exist and could easily be found. But they’re not the ones being chosen for those positions.
