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
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