RUTHFULLY YOURS

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:

https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-feminization-of-the-american-university

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU’s next president.

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. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

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. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the University of California, San Diego; the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UCLA; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Maryville University in Missouri; the chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the School of Education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Kansas State University; the associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law; the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the vice president for inclusion and community impact at Herzing University in Wisconsin; the associate provost for faculty and diversity initiatives at Muhlenberg College (this associate provost also became Muhlenberg’s first chief diversity officer); the first chief officer of culture, belonging, and community building at Delta College in Michigan; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh; the vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusivity at the University of Texas, Austin (a lateral move from the position of managing director of diversity in UT’s office of the executive vice president and provost); the vice president for equity, culture, and talent at Prince George’s Community College—all are female.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-crisis-is-the-universities/

“The source of our current ills – the  lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our borders, the racist ‘equity’ policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke” derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural Marxism.”
–David Horowitz, ‘De-Fund the Universities!’

The Duke of Wellington reportedly stated that the battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton College. George Orwell countered that, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

America’s battles against foreign and domestic enemies have been lost in our ‘Etons’, our schools and universities which have turned their graduates against the country and its values.

The source of our social and political crises is the destruction of our educational institutions through a successful fifty-year effort by radical activists to purge conservatives and patriots from American academic faculties. This was followed by a massive reconstruction of the academic curriculum and the transformation of universities into one-party indoctrination and recruitment centers for the anti-American left.

We at the David Horowitz Freedom Center were among the first to confront the problem and take the battle to campuses across the country, but as the last conservative faculty are purged and conservative students are silenced, the old remedies of adversarial dialogue and debate are no longer available. Conservative speakers are violently assaulted on campuses and events are shut down. College administrators are finding ways to force out even tenured conservative faculty while mandatory anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-Asian and anti-patriotic “diversity” measures keep the doors firmly closed to conservatives and patriots.

It’s time to recognize that this is an existential threat to America and to take action against it. That’s why we’re calling for the defunding of universities.

A Survey of the Problem

Universities have become efficient indoctrination centers that couldn’t be any more destructive if they were being run by China and Russia.