Auditorium in an abandoned university

It is often posited that the abysmal state of Western (and especially American) higher education is the result of the leftist subversion of these institutions. Though there is much truth in this explanation, it is only part of the story. Feminization, or the high rate of female enrollment, employment in academic roles, and influence within academia has played a critical role in this debacle. In fact, without feminization it would be difficult to envision how the universities could have ventured from being places of intellectual inquiry to wastelands of thought where students are coddled, not challenged. The atmosphere of these decadent institutions is not that of the stern command of a Soviet premier—it is instead that of the self-absorption of an overprotective mother. Owing to the success of “conservative” feminism, it is understandable that the mainstream Right will ignore this truth; but where these bourgeois rightists have willingly blinded themselves, those who wish to conserve the traditions of our civilization instead of Liberal-Marxism ought to sound the alarm.

The problem at hand is neither mere conjecture nor anecdote. Even the admittedly secular humanist Australian online magazine Quillette has given attention to it in their article “Sex and the Academy”, and despite their attempt to ultimately support the status quo in covering the issue, the data they have gathered leads to quite the opposite interpretation.

Among the statistics presented by the authors, the most relevant to this examination are the following.

Of 2,300 American adults in a 2017 YouGov survey:¹

58 percent of men opposed a confidential reporting system at colleges which students could use to report offensive comments; 54 percent of women supported it.

65 percent of men believed that supporting the right to make an argument is not the same as endorsing it; 51 percent of women disagreed.

Of 3,772 academics and PhD students at universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada, surveyed in 2021 by the Center of the Study of Partisanship and Ideology:

66–76 percent of men support intellectually foundational texts above diversity quotas on reading lists; 44–66 percent of women support diversity quotas above foundational texts.

Female academics report a greater willingness than their male counterparts to support dismissal campaigns against a colleague who has conducted research that reached a controversial conclusion.

In a 2021 paper by Zhang and colleagues that perused through 1,193 abstracts and surveyed 2,587 European researchers across three disciplines, the authors of this paper came to the following conclusions:

Male researchers were more likely to specify scientific progress/the advancement of knowledge as the aim of their research; female researchers were more likely to specify societal progress/external usefulness as the aim of their research.

Female scholars were more likely than their male counterparts to report that “creating a better society” inspires their work and to place higher value on research that has benefited society.

Thus the tendency is that women in academia prefer reforming higher education to serve the ends of political activism and restricting the flow of knowledge they perceive as offensive. It follows from the reality that female reasoning is more emotional in nature than logical, while male reasoning is more logical than emotional. That is why women in academia express greater concerns about suppressing “dangerous ideas” and advancing “societal progress” than their male counterparts. And given the political bias of most Western universities, the activism and censorship they are advocating for derives from a Liberal-Marxist worldview—a worldview that advances nothing positive, because it is founded upon the resentment of goodness, beauty, and truth. The involvement of these women then cannot be said to be conducive to the nature of the university, as they overwhelmingly promote a set of arbitrary values that undermine the venerable tradition of Christian Classicism which created that institution. Observe the words of Cardinal Newman, who, in his monumental defense of that tradition, stated that at its very foundation the university is “a place of teaching universal knowledge.”² It is the corpse of the modern university, therefore, that ought to be termed antiversity. For the modern university, governed and populated by legions of feminist philistines, is against (anti) the very idea that truth can be one (uni), for it rejects the standards of God for the opinions of charlatans and perverts. How then can its faculty and students claim to be defenders of truth (veritas)?

As objective morality cannot but emanate from a higher source than that of man, whose beliefs can change with the passing of mere minutes, by what authority can they censor anyone? Should it be any surprise that these types, who have boasted America to be a “stolen land”, have in fact gleefully pirated the name of university while desecrating its essence? These philistines imagine themselves judges worthy of sentencing others who, in their eyes, have committed the crime of “anti-intellectualism”; in reality, they stand before the bar more guilty than those they have accused. How else can one reasonably assess the matter?

Look at what they believe, and the miserable impact it has wrought upon themselves and their students. Instead of adhering to the hallowed doctrines of the Church, these academic women insist upon the doctrines of Sodom and Gommorah; instead of edifying their male peers, they seem intent upon outdoing them in scandal; instead of debating in good faith, they banish and slander their opposition—and then declare themselves victims. In short, well could the admonition of the prophet Isaias apply to them: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (Isaias 5:20).

The authors of the Quillette article attempt to find the answer for this gynocratic despotism by means of the pseudoscience of “Evolutionary Psychology”—an unsatisfactory answer. For if Darwinism cannot even account for the origin of language, how can it account for the origin of behavioral differences between men and women? Fallen nature, on the other hand, addresses the matter plainly: the craze of the feminist-dominated university is the result of a perverse maternalism. A mother is supposed to use her emotional reasoning to protect her children, but sin perverts the caress into an oppressive smothering.

Modern universities in the United States have institutionalized this spirit for over the past decade; in the wake of Trump’s re-election, many more occurrences came about. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. If classes were not canceled in the name of mental health, professors turned them into “trauma-dumping” sessions. Campuses, once places of serious intellectual debate, saw the arrival of therapy dogs and the convocation of “destress sessions” to shelter students from political reality.³

Another grave error of this article is that it blatantly misrepresents the history of women in Western higher education. For, as was explained by Dr. James Walsh over a century ago in his fascinating lecture “Cycles of Feminine Education and Influence”, the twentieth century was not the first time that the gentler sex took an active role in academic affairs. After expounding how the histories of both Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy demonstrate recurring cycles of female involvement and influence in intellectual life, Walsh proposed the following interpretation of this trend:⁴

What has apparently happened, then, in the history of feminine education and influence is that, whenever women became occupied with such modes of education, or the cultivation of phases of feminine influence that took them out of their houses, away from family life and far from the hearthstone, the particular classes of women who thus became interested did not propagate themselves, or propagated themselves to such a limited degree that, after a time, their kind disappeared to a great extent. The domestic woman with tendencies to care much more for her maternal duties than for any extra-domiciliary successes propagated herself, raised her children with her ideals, cultivated domesticity and consciously or unconsciously fostered the mother idea as the main feature of woman’s life and her principal source not only of occupation, but of joy in the living, of consolation and of genuine accomplishment. The tendency, as can readily be seen in our own time, of the other class of woman is largely to foster, often unconsciously, but of course often consciously also, the opposite notions. She talks of the slavery of child-raising, the limitations of the home woman, the drudgery of domestic life, forgetting that life is work and that the only happiness in life is to have work that you want to do, whatever it may be, but all this talk has its inevitable effect upon all but the born mother woman, and the result is the fad for public occupation instead of domestic life.

(Walsh 262-263)

Undoubtedly there is much wisdom in these words; but, it ought to be clarified that as the Liberal-Marxist ideology of feminism did not yet exist in those previous eras, to see these recurrences as proto-feminist waves would be an anachronism. Rather, it must be realized that the “other class of woman”—the intellectual type—has always been around, but it was feminism’s sinister strategy to weaponize her against society. And how did it weaponize her? By the adoption of the liberal absurdity of the “equality” of all men to her sex—the most horrific doctrine in history, and one that was alien both to the West of the Renaissance and Antiquity. It is a doctrine which has bathed—and continues to bathe—entire continents in blood. The French Revolution bathed the streets of Paris and the fields of the Vendée in blood; as a result of the Sexual Revolution, the blood of countless innocents annihilated in their mother’s wombs cry out to God for vengeance. The latter catastrophe, in which feminism played no small part, shows the diabolical fruit of this diseased ideology, which would have been utterly reprehensible to the previous generations of intellectual women. Feminized academia is moreover involved in a symbiotic relationship with this abhorrent crime, for it inculcates both the values and teachings of feminism as well as its practical application.

While the Classics departments are increasingly shuttered, the actually worthless Gender Studies departments and other such cults of grievance are given expansion and funding. And even if one does not take courses in those “studies”, their doctrines inevitability bleed into the required classes, especially if one’s chosen major falls within the humanities. Outside of the classrooms, contraceptives are made readily available to students and “safe sex” events are hosted—as if to tell them to go sin and go sin boldly! Such decisions ultimately stem from the feminist-inspired decision to not only comfort students in their sin, but to convince them that they are not behaving immorally at all. That is why they brutally oppose the presence of those who would tell them otherwise.

This ideological hegemony and its related acts evidently entail dire demographic consequences. However, the cost of time is perhaps even greater than the intellectual and monetary costs of this crippled higher education. The mere eye of reason can plainly see that one of the great contributors to the present Western birth crisis derives from the artificial extension of young adulthood by means of encouraging all young people to attend university. The average young woman loses three to five years of her most valuable child-bearing years to higher education, though much of this “education” today is more so preparation for work with the veneer of a liberal arts education. She is torn between a future as a wife or a future as an employee; nature pushes her to nurture, while the system pushes her to consume. Where feminism seeks to destroy the uniqueness of these two kinds and mix them together to create the worst of both, the Church elevates each kind wonderfully. For she raises the dignity of the learned woman through the convent and the single state, and the domestic woman through matrimony. Though the Church does not ispo facto excommunicate the woman who works outside the home, she rightly asserts that it cannot be done without due economic reasons. Moreover, she would have women understand that, owing to the constraints of academic life and full-time employment outside of the home, it is desirable for the woman who wishes to embrace the domestic path to avoid these altogether that she may not be stuck between being either a bad mother or a bad professional.⁵

It must be emphatically stated, then, that the “educated woman” of our day is typically a moral and intellectual trainwreck totally unworthy of imitation; the little knowledge she has obtained has served only to puff her up. She has neither the virtuous erudition of a St. Hildegard nor even the simplicity of a Socrates. Dominated by such characters, it is obvious that the Liberal-Marxist universities are incapable of being reformed from within.

In lieu then of a reform supported from outside of academia, men must encourage a brain drain of this hopelessly corrupt system and build refuges of true learning. Let us restore Catholic patriarchy in all things, and let the liberal-marxists fall upon their own sword. The Ahabs and Jezebels of these intellectual wastelands are due for a great reckoning—and one mainly of their own causing—for as Dr. Walsh stated, these cycle of feminine influence tend to last “four or five generations”⁶ until a masculine reaction asserts itself. At present, signs are already indicating that this shift is upon us. But for now, if you, young man, cannot attend a true university, go then to the antiversity if you must—but do so for your future employment, not for your learning. Self-educate yourself in your free time, for what Newman wrote of utilitarian education could well be applied to the universities of today:⁷

Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel.

(Newman 148)

1. 
   Clark, Cory, and Bo Winegard. “Sex and the Academy.” Quillette. 8 October 2022. quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/.

2. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Basil Montagu Pickering. 1873. ix.

   https://archive.org/details/a677040500newmuoft/page/n13/mode/2up.

3. 
   Costescu, Jessica, and Lexi Boccuzzi. “Canceled Classes, Rescheduled Midterms, and Stress Baking: How Elite Universities Are Coddling Students Grieving Over Trump’s Victory.” Washington Free Beacon. 8 November 2024. freebeacon.com/campus/canceled-classes-rescheduled-midterms-and-stress-baking-how-elite-universities-are-coddling-students-grieving-over-trumps-victory/.

4. Walsh, James. Education: How Old the New. Fordham University Press. 1911. pp. 262-263.

5. See for reference:

   “The same false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity do not scruple to do away with the honorable and trusting obedience which the woman owes to the man. Many of them even go further and assert that such a subjection of one party to the other is unworthy of human dignity, that the rights of husband and wife are equal; wherefore, they boldly proclaim the emancipation of women has been or ought to be effected. This emancipation in their ideas must be threefold, in the ruling of the domestic society, in the administration of family affairs and in the rearing of the children. It must be social, economic, physiological: – physiological, that is to say, the woman is to be freed at her own good pleasure from the burdensome duties properly belonging to a wife as companion and mother (We have already said that this is not an emancipation but a crime); social, inasmuch as the wife being freed from the cares of children and family, should, to the neglect of these, be able to follow her own bent and devote herself to business and even public affairs; finally economic, whereby the woman even without the knowledge and against the wish of her husband may be at liberty to conduct and administer her own affairs, giving her attention chiefly to these rather than to children, husband and family.”

   Pope Pius XI. “Casti Connubi.” (December 31, 1930). §74.

   https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html.

6. Walsh, James. Education: How Old the New. Fordham University Press. 1911. p. 264.

7. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Basil Montagu Pickering. 1873. p. 148.

   https://archive.org/details/a677040500newmuoft/page/n13/mode/2up.