Daft Spunk

Why are men ignoring university? Let’s take a wild stab in the dark. When women are eclipsing men even in the traditionally male subjects, there is no place left for them to go.

Now that the first month of the Fall term at our esteemed, taxpayer-funded universities has come to a close, if you are one of the many proud parents of young freshmen — I refuse to say freshwomen; and freshpeople are right out — you might be wondering how life is unfolding for your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young intellectual ingenues, now smoothly installed into their rigorous routines of lectures, assignments and weekly office interviews with their professors overlooking the grassy campuses as the leaves turn.

The Visitation and Surrender of Syon Nunnery by Paul Falconer Poole (c.1846).

The vision we all picture in our minds, especially those of us lucky enough to have experienced university ourselves, is a balmy pastiche of uncynical friendships made, wide-eyed academic revelations and inebriated sexual adventures, palpitating anxieties and self-examinations, and long nights hunched over textbooks and essays into the small hours, spiked by Americanos and Red Bull. For many it is an ice-water plunge into adult life, full of diversity and opportunity and ambition; and of love, of course, lest we forget.

My best friend at Oxford—now a man of leisure and retiree from the London banking community at age 51—met his future wife during our time there. He was reading History at Lincoln; she was reading Modern Languages at Jesus. They were introduced at the Film Foundation, one of the very many self-important student clubs, and one that I happened to serve as the president that year. I went to the wedding; we danced to Talking Heads. There was champagne in abundance. The stage had been set by the fickle whims and chances of our university lives. The opportunity had arisen, paths had intersected; and for a modern world suffering today from an earth-shattering and unprecedented decline in fertility rates, we should not dismiss the importance of star-crossed coupling across campuses in the West.

Yet, today, in September 2024, the prospect of meeting a future spouse of the opposite sex among the quadrangles during one’s salad days is becoming vanishingly small. Why is that, then? For the simple reason that the entire university project has become a new bastion for a single sex, the academic feminine. We already know that twice as many women as men now pull the levers of power across this continent’s university administrations, but that is not the end of the story. In the U.S., women have long been outpacing men in college graduation, with the proportion of 25-34 year old females holding a bachelor’s degree eclipsing males in the same age category as far back as the mid-1990s. For the academic year that began in Fall of 2021, Statistics Canada recently reported that enrolment of women was a full 18 percentage points — almost a whole quintile — ahead of men.

More than ever, women outnumber men among today’s university student bodies. Take for example, the returning and incoming graduate class of my own department, the Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI), where a recent post on their X account points to almost three-quarters women among the 36 students pictured. That’s 50% more females enrolled in this class than one would normally expect if the gender distribution reflected the national average for 18-24 year-olds. Of course, you could argue that much as nursing appeals predominately to females and, conversely, engineering to males, there are gender-linked personality traits that attract men and women to different professions. But management and innovation? Surely one would expect much the opposite. But then again, down with the patriarchy! IMI’s director, one Professor Shauna Brail, would likely remind us that it is high time the male aspects of innovation were subverted and replaced. As Hamlet says in exasperation to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell!”

New and returning graduates of the Institute for Management & Innovation at the University of Toronto, September, 2024. Image courtesy of X.

What is abundantly clear and indisputable is that men are staying clear of university programs, even in the traditionally masculine subject areas; and I don’t blame them. In conversation with my new chair in the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences, Professor Claudiu Gradinaru, I was told that even physics now was showing close to a 50:50 gender split. Women, thankfully, are no longer ashamed to split the atom.

But let me venture a reason for this widespread masculine detoxification of our universities. The pervasive and now deeply entrenched culture of kindness, empathy and academic limp-wristedness, the same culture that has led to almost a fifth of students receiving accommodations for any number of largely imagined mental ailments—anxiety is part and parcel of university life, and should not be ameliorated on a whim to satisfy the luxury beliefs of virtue-signalling middle-class head-nodders—is anathema to the young, testosterone-charged male psyche, governed as it is by genetically embedded tendencies for boundary-pushing and risk-taking.

Men are just fed up with these prospects and are bootstrapping their own careers. They recognise that universities are, in the memorable words of philosopher Peter Boghossian, merely “ideology mills” that imprint a deranged set of values on young and impressionable minds; and they want nothing to do with it.

Recently, an instructor friend of mine, and fellow Brit—someone with a wicked sense of humour in the classroom—alerted me to a situation in which a young woman insisted she be assigned to a project group that was all-female. This is tantamount to a demand for the return of gender segregation in our universities. Motivated by a natural British contrarian nature, the lecturer in question decided to bounce the request up to the University of Toronto’s commissars in charge of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), with the goal of soliciting a suitable ruling on the matter. After a ten-day hiatus, the response from on high was to delegate down to the departmental level, the decision falling into the lap to IMI’s diretcor, Professor Brail. Now to be sure, here is a woman of fine moral virtue. Someone who declared to me in a meeting that “IMI has no ideological position,” a person of self-declared Jewish heritage who irreproachably and impassively stood by as Jews on campus complained vehemently, to me personally and to the university at large, against antisemitic fundraising efforts championed in their classrooms by one of their professors—one Ann Armstrong. The latter professor is now retired, and I won’t embarrass her by elaborating further. You can use your imagination.

With this in mind, I do not expect a prompt and clear-sighted resolution to this can of worms. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of Möbius strip dilemma that these six-figure-salary administrative types, proudly bedecked in their Robyn DiAngelo White Fragility mind-set, have been long dreading. What next? I can imagine any number of neo-apartheid scenarios. Gay students demanding they team up exclusively with fellow same-sex attracted individuals? That’s not the kind of social ‘progressivism’ I’m calling for here, because—well, it would be monstrously regressive.

If all of this nonsense demonstrates anything whatsoever, it is that the dedicated ministrations of every one of those DEI clerics employed by my university are utterly failing to have the desired impact — assuming, of course, that the declared aim is to map the broader gender and cultural distributions onto the student body. If they were, the returning classes this year would reflect a 52% male composition (men outnumber women in the 18-24 age bracket); and they patently do not. Hence, these people are failing in their high-paid jobs and should be promptly dismissed. I’m sure they will be, once fresh, conservative-minded governmental pressures come to bear.

Canada’s impending population collapse, augured by recent Statistics Canada data showing women reproducing at the rate of 1.26 children each on average — well below the UN’s replacement rate, which stands at 2.1 children per woman — will take a generation or more to materialise, partially camouflaged by mass immigration under current government directives. One thing we absolutely can do right away is to look seriously towards rehabilitating men’s access to a university education. Romantic partners typically seek out those with equivalent levels of education— what they call socioeconomic homogamy. At its present pace, by 2040, half as many more young women will have a bachelor’s degree than men in the same age category, meaning that one in three of these aspirational women will be forced to compromise in the dating pool. And yet the universities sit by unperturbed and spout their empty mantras of equity, diversity and inclusion. What rot. In truth, tertiary education has become a matriarchal enterprise run by women for women, in pursuit of retribution for the academic patriarchy of the past, and to their own suicidal detriment. Only twelve more months left to go before Canadians go to the polls; the clock is ticking, and the universities should, with wise alacrity, spy the reckoning that is coming for them.