I would have thought that one of the primary jobs of our universities would be to conserve and explore the great works of Western Civilization, and, further, to introduce these great works to students. But five decades of teaching and research at one of North America’s great universities have disabused me of such imaginings.
Western universities, in North America, Britain, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, have all committed to destroying Western Civilization, allegedly for good reasons. How on earth has this travesty of education happened? Several forces working together have accomplished this destruction.
The counterculture of the 1960s was a rebellion against affluent materialism and the “rat race” of working. The rebels joined communes, took up subsistence farming, and became anti-war activists. After the communes broke up, the subsistence farming failed, and the war continued in spite of all the sincere demonstrations, the rebels went to graduate school and found jobs as professors for the baby boomers who were flooding campuses. These rebels brought with them their rejectionist spirit and the half-baked Marxism that had inspired them.
At the same time, feminism had a modern rebirth following the arrival of the birth control pill. “The Women’s Movement” demanded “equality,” which was rapidly replaced by “The Feminist Movement,” which demanded female supremacy and domination. How often have you heard men referred to by feminists as “toxic”? How often have you been told that “the future is female”?
But perhaps the most influential view of feminists, that has gone far toward reshaping Western society and culture, is the Marxist concept of class struggle between the oppressors, the “Patriarchy,” and its innocent victims, females. North Americans never fell for the Marxist economic class struggle between bourgeois and proletariat. But they embraced with enthusiasm the gender class struggle between male “oppressors” and female “victims.”
[RELATED: Western Civilization May Not Survive—But Must Be Defended]
Feminists quickly demanded and established “Feminist Studies” or “Gender Studies” in universities, to spread the “truth” of female oppression and to recruit more feminists. But feminists were not isolated in their particular grievance studies units, but infiltrated sociology, anthropology, political science, and all of the social sciences, as well as English, history—oops, herstory—philosophy, and all of the humanities.
Feminists took a dim view of “Western Civilization,” which was seen as dominated by the “Patriarchy” that was an advocate for it. The great accomplishments of the West—in governance, science, technology, architecture, literature, art, music, and entertainment—were rejected, because they were accomplished almost exclusively by men! The demand of the feminists was that none of the history or achievements of the West must be taught in university, because it was all the work of the Patriarchy and thus sexism. Universities should rather teach only the works and accomplishments of women.
Feminist academics strive to reshape academia in the feminist image. Admissions, hiring, funding, and awards must favor females, which they do. Two-thirds of university staff and administration are female. Females are now 60 percent of undergraduates and more of the graduate students. Although they dominate most disciplines and departments, they lobby to ensure that the few male-dominated fields, only Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, favor female applicants so that females can also dominate these fields.
I have directly encountered feminist interference in scholarship. Two examples: An anthropology article claimed that in a particular African society, women did all of the work and men just lounged around. This conclusion was achieved by comparing the elders with their wives in this gerontocracy. What was left out of the discussion was the young men who were off in the countryside doing most of the productive labor, as well as disregarding planning and administration as work. So, I wrote a rebuttal and submitted it to the journal. Because it was about gender, they sent it for peer review to “gender specialists,” that is, feminists. The feminist reviewers liked the conclusion of the article I was critiquing, so they turned my response down, and it was never published.
The other case was a lengthy review article I wrote for an Oxford University Press encyclopedia. One reviewer complained that I had not cited an equal number of female authors to the number of male authors cited. In fact, I had cited a number of female authors whose excellent work I was proud to credit. But as the preponderance of work in the topic I was covering had been done by men, the demand of the reviewer seemed absurd to me. My reply to OUP was that that reviewer should not be used again, as they were injecting non-academic criteria into the assessment. My article was duly published, as I wrote it, by OUP.
Feminism is, however, far from the only anti-academic movement contaminating our universities. People with grievances, real or imagined, managed to establish themselves in special “studies” programs in universities, there to campaign against other categories of people, against Western society and culture, and against Western civilization. Blacks, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and non-heterosexuals of many varieties (LGBTQ2S++ ad infinitum) formed their programs, infiltrated into what were once academic programs in the social sciences and humanities, as well as into the administrations.
To be fair, much has been inspired from the top of society’s power structure. The U.S. President Joe Biden and the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both declared that their societies were “systemically racist” and had to implement extreme measures to expunge the evil.
The U.S.’s original sin was slavery, the implication being that America had invented slavery and was the only country ever to have it. The original sin of Canada was its “genocide” of indigenous natives, also known as “first nations.” Trudeau emphasized that Canadians other than indigenous were “colonial settlers,” no matter how long past the arrival of their ancestors and how many generations their families have lived in and contributed to Canada.
Measures were taken that had immeasurable consequences for “higher education.” The “marginalized and underserved” minorities were designated protected classes, and were to receive special preferences in admissions, hiring, funding, awards, and facilities. They were to be considered, along with females, victims of oppression.
White people and “white adjacent” Asians, and Jews were deemed oppressors who must be sidelined and excluded, demeaned and re-educated. (Asians and Jews had committed the unforgivable sin of being successful minorities.) Merit was regarded as a “white supremacist” concept. An entire new wing of university bureaucracy was invented, the “diversity” political commissars, to ensure that no one deviated from the now official “truth.”
But that’s not all. According to the new dispensation, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it,” as Karl Marx put it. That is because the truth about the world is already understood—systemic sexism, racism, etc.—so the job of the university is now to change the world to bring “social justice” to the world. Social justice is defined by absolute equality of everyone and every outcome, officially called “equity,” the West finally conquered by the central goal of communism.
[RELATED: Colleges Give Up on Western Civilization]
Just a few examples of “social justice” in action:
- A study finds that the tail ends of the distribution of mathematical abilities are populated by men. This study is denounced by female mathematicians and publishers are forced to retract it.
- A study finds that the flood of teenage female sex transitioners, people who have no history of discontent, is the result of social contagion. This study is denounced by trans activists and the publisher requires radical rewriting.
- A black classics professor denounces classics and says it should be banned. Its sin? Greeks are white. Romans too. However, he missed the opportunity to denounce them as societies with slavery, perhaps because their slaves were not black.
- Then there are the education and mathematics professors who say there is no right answer in mathematics, that thinking that there is a correct answer is a fetish of whiteness. (Thankfully, no engineering professors were saying this.)
- Some black studies professors claim that everything important in the world was initially invented in Africa.
Of course, the examples are endless, our universities having been thoroughly corrupted by woke Marxist ideology.
It used to be that people who were alarmed at communists under every bed were seen as far right wackos. But with so many university professors declaring themselves opposed to capitalism and devoted to bringing down the American system, and with Democrat members of Congress formally stating that they are members of the far left ‘Democratic’ Socialist Party, and our much beloved and very well-funded Black Lives Matter declaring that they are “trained Marxists,” it might make you wonder if the Marxist march through the institutions has not succeeded. In Canada, until recently, the explicitly socialist New Democrat Party was part of the Trudeau government.
The U.S. public sees socialism creeping into our institutions and has, according to opinion polls, lost faith in Congress, especially the Democrat Party, in the “mainstream” media that spews far-left propaganda, and in universities. The Marxist-Leninist theories of class conflict, of oppression and victimhood, and of imperialist, colonial settlers have been made central in university teaching, research, and activism, and the students who have imbibed these teachings now man, but mainly woman government, the press, and universities.
Universities no longer search for truth but instead put their faith in Marxism-Leninism.
Image: “Escuela de Atenas” by Jorge Valenzuela A on Wikimedia Commons
Universities endlessly bring in foreigners to make way more money than on domestic students. They have to then be multicultural over time to a fault. It’s a cycle spiraling out of control and there’s no easy fix.
I’m not sure that universities actually make more money on foreign students — they don’t on graduate students because most of them get tuition waivers. Undergrads, possibly.
As to the purgatorial cesspool, it is way more complicated than just this.
There are a lot of White American-born females who support all of this because they benefit from it as well, and Maine is a good case study because the state (until recently) was almost entirely White. So you had 50 years of militant feminism running amuck and now they are being challenged by a coalition of gay males.
That’s what is really behind the tranny athlete issue — three of the most powerful positions in the state (house speaker, house majority leader, and governor’s chief of staff) are held by gay men and they (personally) are the ones really pushing this issue.
See: https://www.themainewire.com/2025/03/maine-democrats-once-again-gag-disenfranchise-gop-rep-over-social-media-post-exposing-civil-rights-violation/
“At the same time, feminism had a modern rebirth following the arrival of the birth control pill.”
I’d argue abortion instead of the birth control pill because (a) it wasn’t the first means of avoiding pregnancy and (b) it had to be taken regularly, which required some responsibility.
Abortion was the ultimate “get out of jail free” card, and permitted nonchalant abandonment of all responsibility. It’s surprising how many women have two (or more) abortions in their four undergraduate years — after the first one, you’d kinds think…..
But even more than this, it was two aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” — legitimization of single motherhood and the state becoming a better provider than any husband could ever be.
Yes, there were a lot of pregnant brides in decades past, with a lot of wedding gowns selected to more conceal the bride’s bulging belly than anything else. But prior to the 1960s, it was expected that marriage would precede childbirth. But now we have a White illegitimacy rate higher than the Black one that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about in his 1965 report, and a Black illegitimacy rate today in the neighborhood of 76%. Yes, more than three out of four!
And this is in part because of the other thing that the Great Society did — making the government into a better provider than any husband ever could be. Women have a financial incentive to get rid of their husbands, without them, and with at least one child, they are entitled to all kinds of assistance which would come to about $40,000 if you had to pay for it yourself — except that you’d have to gross $60,000 (or more) in order to net the $40,000.
And then in the upper income brackets, we have no fault divorce, alimony and child support — women have gone from “starter houses” to “starter marriages.”
It’s not that women didn’t “need” men as much as the government gave them a better deal. And things went downhill from there….
” the rebels went to graduate school and found jobs as professors for the baby boomers who were flooding campuses.”
No.
To understand why, you need to look at the demographics — 1948 was the absolute peak of the baby boom, with the birth rate then dropping slightly but remaining steady through 1958, and then dropping significantly. By 1967 it had dropped below what it had been in the depths of the Depression, before this had all started.
Hence you have a massive expansion of the 18-year-old cadre in 1966, that remaining level through 1976, and then significant annual decline until — by 1985 — there were fewer 18 year olds than there had been in 1952. This means that a lot more professors would have been needed to teach the arriving Baby Bloomers in 1966, but once they were hired, they would be there to teach the rest of the Baby Boomers through 1976, and then the number of professors needed would decline through the 1980s.
The exception to this is that a larger percentage of younger Baby Boomers attended college, in part because there were more college seats for them to fill. Let’s pick 1972 as the date when the expansion ended — I think it’s fair as 1973 was when the Arab Oil Embargo tanked the US economy and started Stagflation, but it also makes the math easier — if you figure 21 years to a BA and 5 more to a PhD, to have been on the job market in 1972, one would have had to have been born in 1946 (or earlier).
QED the “rebels of the 1960s” — the Baby Boomers — weren’t old enough to have their doctorates in time to get hired to teach the Baby Boomers. The jobs were already taken.
The only exceptions would be (a) replacements for professors who were retiring, and (b) in the newly-created “studies” programs. Otherwise, all of the jobs that the expansion had created were filled by 1972, most before that as classes needed to be taught.
The professors who taught the Baby Boomers were largely male veterans of either WW-II or Korea, men who often had used their GI Bill Benefits to go to graduate school and earn their doctorates. Yes there were WW-II veterans such as George McGovern who definitely leaned left (he lost to Nixon in 1972) but McGovern also was a decorated B-24 pilot who had flown 35 missions over Europe — and also a history professor before he entered politics.
Like most adults of that generation, they’d grown up in the Depression and then seen the horrors of a terrible war — and in 1942 it wasn’t exactly clear that we were going to win that terrible war. My mother told me stories about flashes of light on the horizon and bodies washing ashore along the Maine coastline from the Battle of the Atlantic, this was not a war distant from our shores.
Like most adults of that generation, they let young people get away with a lot of things they ought not have because they wanted to give them something they hadn’t had — a happy childhood. Perhaps because they’d seen the consequences of intolerance, the faculty of that era were more tolerant than they ought to have been.
I’m more inclined to blame the Russians for the communism….
Joe McCarthy was drunk — he was a hopeless alcoholic in an era when everyone drank like a fish, and it would kill him a few years later. But he wasn’t wrong — the Soviets were very good and they had infiltrated a lot of places. They had at least two spies inside the Manhattan Project — Stalin knew that the atomic bomb had worked before Truman did, and Truman shut down the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) because it was so hopelessly infiltrated by the Soviets.
We know that the Soviets spent a great deal of time and effort trying to influence American higher education in the 1960s and 1970s — we know this because during the brief period where we had access to the KGB archives, there reportedly was a study that discovered and documented exactly what they had done. A study which then-President Clinton then classified so that we don’t have access to it.
The Vietnam war was fought — and won — on American college campi. I don’t think that the Hamas Fan Club, which I believe to be indirectly funded by Iran, is really anything new. The Soviets sought to subvert us, we know that they were involved in our universities, and even though the Soviet Union imploded 35 years ago, it lives on in our academic institutions.
Now who was it that actually won the Cold War????
Ironically, much of the negative trends in the practice of natural sciences and their governance are now far stripped in pace of destruction during the Trump administration — by a factor of 100 in rate, I’d estimate.
The Trump people have the silly idea that the way to get at the radicals in the academy is to hold hostage, and probably permanently damage, the natural sciences. Which is precisely what the radicals want, if they bother to think about it.
It is unfortunate, I have to say, the National Association of Scholars have fallen for this trap of the radicals as well.
If this is the best Western Civilization can do, perhaps it deserves to die.
I hope, if this keeps up much longer, that the natural sciences will find welcoming home in the non-Anglo world. Asia and Europe and other places that are still interested in the future of the world.
OK, what is your annual salary?
If you look at the history of the natural sciences before the Higher Ed Act of 1965, you will find scientists either toiling in poverty or living off money which was either inherited or which they had made via other means.
Ben Franklin was a successful printer who also printed his own content (e.g. newspaper) which gave him two revenue streams. Issac Newton made his fortune in the British mint, using his knowledge of science to make the mint more efficient and accurate, and getting his commission on every coin made.
It’s only in recent decades that faculty members have been well paid — past generations of scientists accepted that they wouldn’t be and viewed this as the price they paid to be allowed to pursue their research. And colleges were shoestring operations because otherwise they would price themselves out of business, and they knew this.
You say that The Evil Orange Man will drive natural science elsewhere. Well, answer two questions — first, even with The Evil Orange Man, name one country that is anywhere near as tolerant of dissidents as the US. Sure, you can go to Qatar and chant “Israel Sucks”, but try “Mohamed was a Child Molester” and tell me how that works out. (And also true, his third wife Aisha was 6 or 7 years old when he married her.)
China? Are you serious?!?
India has free speech with the exceptions of anything affecting the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency and morality, contempt of court, defamation, incitement to an offence, and sovereignty and integrity of India.
And you’re complaining about the Evil Orange Man? Do you not realize that you couldn’t even call him that in India?!?
And more importantly,/b>, if AmeriKKKa sucks so much, why is the rest of the world coming here? How many WASP graduate students do you have? Does your program have? Your entire university have?
And how many were born here? How many have at least one parent (or grandparent) who was a US Citizen in 1980?
I ask because if they could do science in their own country, and receive the compensation that they do here, don’t you think they would be? As Fatima Rahman believes that Tufts University is “discrediting and disregarding its students who practice the ideals of critical thinking, intellectual exchange and civic engagement”, I’m sure she will be much happier home attending a Turkish university, in a country that is known for its defense of free speech.
Yes, American Science could possibly go elsewhere — and the country could be taken out by a meteorite. My money is on the meteorite….
” An anthropology article claimed that in a particular African society, women did all of the work and men just lounged around. This conclusion was achieved by comparing the elders with their wives in this gerontocracy. What was left out of the discussion was the young men who were off in the countryside doing most of the productive labor, as well as disregarding planning and administration as work.”
I presume pre-industrial and without access to 21st Century medical care and medicines.
It’d be real interesting to do full-body MRIs on those older men and see how many are disabled. Hard physical labor does this, even without injuries you get joint degeneration and the rest.
And them there’s the Testosterone/Estrogen ratio and the interesting fact that postmenopausal woman have a higher *ratio* of Testosterone to Estrogen than men her age do.
With the American Indians it was Female roles (agriculture) replacing male ones (hunting), but even there, I wonder how much it was disabilities. And ignoring the disabled is a thoughtcrime… 🙂