Leigh Revers: The dark side of the feminization of higher education

Universities are matriarchal enterprise run by women for women, in pursuit of retribution for the patriarchy of the past

Published Oct 14, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  6 minute read

Students participate in a graduation ceremony at the University of New Brunswick in May. Photo by Hadeel Ibrahim/The Daily Gleaner

Now that the first month of the fall term at our esteemed, taxpayer-funded universities has come to a close, if you are among the many proud parents of young freshmen — I refuse to say “freshwomen”; and, well, “freshpeople” is right out — you might be wondering how life is unfolding for your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young intellectual ingenues.

The vision we all picture in our minds, especially those of us lucky enough to have experienced university ourselves, is a balmy pastiche of uncynical friendships made, wide-eyed academic revelations, inebriated sexual adventures, palpitating anxieties and self-examinations, alongside long nights hunched over textbooks and essays, fuelled by americanos and Red Bull. For many, it is a plunge into adult life, full of diversity, opportunity, ambition and, lest we forget, love.

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My best friend at Oxford — now a man of leisure, having retired from the British banking industry at age 51 — met his future wife during our collective time there. He was studying history at Lincoln College; she, modern languages at Jesus College. They were introduced at the Film Foundation, one of the very many self-important student clubs, and one that I happened to serve as the president for that year. I went to their wedding. We danced to Talking Heads. There was champagne in abundance. And the whole stage had been set by the fickle whims and chances of our university lives.

In the modern world, which is suffering from an unprecedented decline in fertility rates, we should not dismiss the importance of star-crossed coupling across campuses in the West. Yet, today, the prospect of meeting a future spouse of the opposite sex among the quadrangles during a young person’s salad days is becoming vanishingly small, for the simple reason that the entire university project has become a new bastion for a single sex — females.

In the United States, women have long been outpacing men in college graduation, with the proportion of 25-34 year old females holding a bachelor’s degree eclipsing males in the same age category as far back as the mid-1990s. For the academic year that began in the fall of 2021, Statistics Canada reported that enrolment of women was a full 18 percentage points — almost a whole quintile — ahead of men.

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More than ever, women outnumber men among today’s university student bodies. Take, for example, the current crop of students in my own department, the Institute for Management and Innovation (IMI) at the University of Toronto, where a recent post on its X account shows that of the 36 students pictured, almost three-quarters are women. That’s 50 per cent more females enrolled in this class than one would normally expect if the gender distribution reflected the national average for 18-24 year olds.

Of course, you could argue that much as nursing appeals predominately to females and, conversely, engineering to males, there are gender-linked personality traits that attract men and women to different professions. But management and innovation? Surely one would expect much the opposite. Then again, down with the patriarchy! IMI’s director, Prof. Shauna Brail, would likely remind us that it is high time the male aspects of innovation were subverted and replaced. As Hamlet says in exasperation to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell.”

What is abundantly clear is that men are steering clear of university programs, even in the traditionally masculine subject areas — and I don’t blame them. In conversation with my new chair in the department of chemical and physical sciences, Prof. Claudiu Gradinaru, I was told that even physics is now showing close to a 50-50 gender split. Women, thankfully, are no longer ashamed to split the atom.

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But let me venture a reason for this widespread masculine detoxification of our universities. The pervasive and now deeply entrenched culture of kindness, empathy and academic limp-wristedness, the same culture that has led to so many students receiving accommodations for any number of largely imagined mental ailments, is anathema to the young, testosterone-charged male psyche, governed as it is by genetically embedded tendencies for boundary-pushing and risk-taking.

Men are simply fed up with the current state of higher education and are bootstrapping their own careers instead. They recognize that universities are, in the memorable words of philosopher Peter Boghossian, merely “ideology mills” that imprint a deranged set of values on young and impressionable minds, and they want nothing to do with it.

Recently, an instructor friend of mine alerted me to a situation in which a young woman insisted she be assigned to an all-female project group. This is tantamount to a demand for the return of gender segregation in our universities. Motivated by a certain contrarian nature, he decided to bounce the request up to U of T’s commissars in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), with the goal of soliciting a suitable ruling on the matter.

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The response from on high was to delegate down to the departmental level, putting the decision in the hands of Prof. Brail. Now, to be sure, she is a woman of fine moral virtue. This is the person who told me that “IMI has no ideological position,” a woman of self-declared Jewish heritage who irreproachably remained neutral and stood by as Jews on campus complained vehemently, to me personally and to the university at large, about pro-Palestinian fundraising efforts presided over in their classrooms by one of their professors — one Prof. Ann Armstrong. (Armstrong is now retired, and I won’t embarrass her by elaborating further. You can use your imagination.)

With this in mind, I do not expect a prompt and clear-sighted resolution to this particular can of worms. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of Moebius strip dilemma that these six-figure-salary administrative types, proudly bedecked in their “white fragility” mindset, have long been dreading. What’s next: gay students demanding they team up exclusively with fellow same-sex attracted individuals? That’s not the kind of social “progressivism” I’m calling for here, because, well, it would be monstrously regressive.

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If all this nonsense demonstrates anything whatsoever, it’s that the dedicated ministrations of every one of the DEI clerics employed by my university are utterly failing to have the desired impact — assuming, of course, that the aim is to map society’s broader gender and cultural distributions onto the student body. If they were, the returning classes this year would be around 52 per cent male (men outnumber women in the 18-24 age bracket), and they patently do not. Hence, these people are utterly failing in their high-paid jobs and should be promptly dismissed. I’m sure they will be, once fresh, conservative-minded governmental pressures come to bear.

Canada’s impending population collapse, augured by recent Statistics Canada data showing women reproducing at the rate of 1.26 children each on average — well below the global replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman — will take a generation or more to materialize, partially camouflaged by mass immigration under current government directives. One thing we absolutely can do right away is to start rehabilitating men’s access to a university education.

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Romantic partners typically seek out those with equivalent levels of education — what’s called socioeconomic homogamy. In the coming decades, we will face a situation in which many more young women hold a bachelor’s degree than men, meaning that a large number of them will be forced to compromise in the dating pool. And yet, university administrators sit by unperturbed and spout their empty DEI mantras. What rot.

In truth, tertiary education is increasingly becoming a matriarchal enterprise run by women for women, in pursuit of retribution for the academic patriarchy of the past and, ultimately, to their own suicidal detriment. There’s only 12 more months left to go before Canadians go to the polls. The clock is ticking, and universities should, with wise alacrity, spy the reckoning that is coming for them.

National Post

Leigh Revers is associate professor with the Institute for Management and Innovation at the University of Toronto.

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