The Great Feminization of the American University A response to Heather Mac Donald’s provocative new essay on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus.” Christopher F. Rufo
My Manhattan Institute colleague Heather Mac Donald has published a provocative new essay in City Journal, titled “The Great Feminization of the American University.” Mac Donald begins by pointing out that women now constitute the ruling majority on campus: 75 percent of Ivy League presidents, 66 percent of college administrators, and 58 percent of recent graduates are now female.
And the consequences, Mac Donald argues, are troubling. “Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma,” she writes. “For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus.”
In my new video essay, I analyze this cultural shift and explain how the modern university has become a “therapeutic institution,” which, according to my recent reporting on university DEI programming, is characterized by the following trends:
- The left-wing victim narrative has moved from an economic axis to a psychological axis, with “traumatizer” and “traumatized” replacing “oppressed” and “oppressed.”
- Individual pathology is valorized as a form of marginalized identity.
- This new social system incentivizes trauma, disorder, and emotional displays.
- The ideology expresses itself through a therapeutic bureaucracy that operates according to political ideology.
Listen to this video on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.
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