In the US, the situation is similar -- men are leaving education track in droves and the undergraduate pool is now dominated by females. Besides being unhealthy for both sexes, it is a very dangerous trend for the society -- creating population of disenfranchised young men will result in social instability. Yet this topic is taboo. President of the Purdue University was raked over the coals for asking a simple question "Where are all the men?" in his state of the university address: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/17/purdue-president-missteps-comments-missing-college-men
There used to be an academic discipline called "anthropology." I was deluded into thinking that, as a serious field of study, it was a body of knowledge to be cherished and expanded. But anthropology is no more, replaced, just as men have been replaced by females as professors, the subject matter has been replaced with grievance feminism and antisemitic Palestinianism. Not only men have been replaced; the Enlightenment search for truth based on evidence has been replaced by the ideological "truths" of neo-Marxist "social justice." Our universities are now fully corrupted, especially what were the social sciences and humanities, now only ideological and activist grievance studies. Faculties of Law, Medicine, Education, and Social Work are equally corrupt, now far left activist breeding grounds intentional destroying our institutions of justice, health care, K12 schools, and social welfare programs. We have gotten to a point of social destruction that our universities need to be defunded, emptied of current employees,, and closed down entirely, opening the possibility of starting again to avoid current insanity.
I just recently discovered about such cancellation at my own university. This is extremely worrisome. Together with Evolutionary Psychology, I always found Cultural Anthropology quite fascinating.
The (current) activist nature of some branches of the university is ridiculous. For those pursuing activism, the place for them is the government (not the university). It's important that we help bolster the Social Sciences.
As you might suspect from my comment, I think it is too late to "bolster the Social Sciences." It appears to me that they have been taken over by grievance activists from "studies" departments (which were never themselves academic disciplines). Now they are all Palestinianized, heavily antisemitic and cheering for the brutal terrorists who strive to outdo the Islamic State. If you want to save the social sciences, then you must replace all current staff with new staff (not restricted to gay females of color or trans foreigners) dedicated to Enlightenment-inspired search for truth based on evidence and argument.
Perhaps one way to "immunize" these institutions against these social justice ideas is to create programs or departments of Critical Studies 𝙤𝙛 Critical Studies, or something like that. In other words, just have people whose sole job and disposition is oriented towards critiquing this woke nonsense.
All of university is supposed to be critical analysis of any ideas offered in whatever field of study. The problem is that some analyses have now been accepted as answers that must not be challenged and may only be implemented. Anyone who critiques is cancelled, punished, and excommunicated.
I would agree with this in several ways. First, these ridiculous social justice ideas and woke ideology find refuge in the softer sciences and humanities. We need to strengthen this firewall.
I am not sure where this activism should be located, if any place at all, but it probably should not be in academia, or at least "truth-oriented" institutions as Jonathan Haidt describes. It is toxic to conventional inquiry and innovation.
However, before we can "bolster" the social sciences, or any other part of academia or STEM, we need to get our own house in order. This is because we should not let our energies be dissipated in fighting in arenas in which we have no standing or competence. It would just seem like us talking down to these "lesser" disciplines, I fear.
As time progresses (as more people get educated), it's perfectly natural that there are more women employed at universities. In that sense, there is traditionally a very clear gender distinction in employment of primary and secondary schools.
However, it's a must that we bring back equality for everybody during the application processes. It's crucial that men get equal opportunity at universities (this is obviously lacking nowadays).
I was at Oxford in the 80s. I was pursuing a graduate degree in experimental cognitive psychology and it was a wonderful experience. The situation you describe sounds incredibly bleak. Looking at this from an evolutionary and ecological perspective strongly supports your concerns:
This problem was built by design to replace men with women across academia and the professions that rely on it for their future generations. Here is an example from when I was in graduate school in the 1990's. The University of New Hampshire student body then was 60% female, 40% male. The College of Science & Engineering was 75% male. This outraged the university feminists who demanded all sorts of special programming and scholarships to increase the number of women in this college. When it was pointed out that the much larger college of Liberal Arts was 14% male, 86% female and that we should also have similar programs to produce gender parity there, the response was to accuse those so advocating of misogyny and sexism. The programs for women were put in place, while those for men were not. Men got the message. We are second class citizens in this university.
More recently (2017-18), a councilor of the Geological Society of America suggested that we revise the definition of underrepresented to focus on people of color by removing white women from the preferred list of candidates. Tremendous outrage was directed at this European member of council who had correctly seen that the real beneficiery of affirmative action in geology was NOT people of color...but white women. As a GSA employee I did a study of the graduate research fellows to to see if there was a indeed a gender or race bias in need of correction. Turns out GSA's research awards for graduate researchers mirrored the racial and sexual demographics of the society's student members. GSA was NOT discriminating in awarding grants...but having a program for only non-white males, however, was introducing a racial and gender bias that was unwarranted. If white men are over-represented relative to society as a whole...so are white women and thus both should be excluded from the "diversity" scholarship. My results were NOT well received by the white women on council...the most outspoken of which continued to complain that women are underrepresented in academic geology. She was a faculty member at....the University of New Hampshire!
I remember a study some years ago that attempted to demonstrate that the main beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in the US were not minorities at all, but for the most part, white women.
I have seen that as well. On another note, the same GSA in this period accepted new members to it "Diversity" Committee. Not including people whose membership is dictated as ex officio by their status in the leadership (president, executive director) there are 9 members of the committee who serve staggered 3 year terms. In 2018 the nominations committee made selections that insured that this committee had a Native American male, an African American female and 7 white women despite multiple other minority candidates being available. When it was pointed out that maybe white women should make room for others to be represented, the importance of oppressed white women should not be minimized. At this time the President, Executive Director and majority of the employed staff were also...wait for it...white women!
Firstly, I assume the author knows all the staff in his department personally, for I am not sure how one can determine the number of women in his photo (to quote “My Cousin Vinny”) ”… by simply looking at the picture…”
Secondly, it is not clear how a “woman” is defined in this essay or in the comments, unless everyone involved (to follow a response by a recent SCOTUS nominee) is a biologist (she likely thought being an anthropologist was not enough for such a verdict).
I would presume that most if not all people commenting here on Heterodox STEM would indeed know what a woman is. The woke efforts to confuse the issue need to be thrown in the trash can. And people pushing this agenda need to be discarded as well.
On the other hand, perhaps you are trying to make a joke. If so, well-played.
When I went to undergraduate and then graduate school, in the hardest of the hard STEM areas (mathematical physics, before leaking over to applied mathematics), women were few and far between. At MIT, there were almost no women enrolled at all. There were free buses from women's colleges to MIT. However, the women routinely got off the free MIT buses to get on public transport to go down the street to Harvard.
I and my housemate asked a busload of women what they were doing. The women told us, there was no WAY they wanted to hang around with geeks and nerds at MIT. They were going to Harvard, "where the REAL men are". That is, I guess they wanted handsome jocks with trust funds and plenty of spare time since the classes were not that demanding. They wanted to get drunk, they wanted drugs, and they wanted sex; lots of it. And they got it.
There was also a very high suicide rate. Between September 1979 and April of 1980, MIT experienced 19 suicides out of 8000 students at the time (4000 undergraduates and 4000 graduate students). The administration staged numerous free parties with the hottest live bands in Boston and free soda and free beer and free pizza to try to improve the atmosphere. I walked by a few of these. The band was playing to a huge empty room, every time. Not a single MIT student showed up. There were administrative staff standing there beside stacks of pizza and beverages, ready to hand them out. There were NO takers. I have never seen anything like this before or since. And it happened repeatedly.
I remember seeing a survey of MIT graduates a couple of years ago. The results? About 70% of all MIT graduates reported still being virgins, even decades after graduation. At the time, I was in a monthly zoom call with fellow MIT former classmates, most of them women. I brought this topic up in the zoom call, and the women (now all physics professors) laughed, and said they were surprised that the figure was AS LOW as 70%. They would have expected it to be much higher.
Later, I did chastise one of these female professors, who was desperately campaigning to get all males out of STEM, for being too "woke". Either this caused the zoom call to be dissolved, or it resulted in me being dis-invited from any further discussions. Later, October 7th occurred. I wonder what this beautiful female Jewish physics professor thought of all the attacks on Jews by her fellow "woke" compatriots. I think that was a huge eye-opener for many who thought they were campaigning for "justice" and "fairness". Little did they know that the target would soon be on them, personally.
As someone quite introverted and pretty far out on the autism spectrum, I decided my only chance at female companionship was to put myself in situations where women outnumbered men 10 or 20 or 50 to one or more. I had experienced this in two summer immersion French college courses. And so, I decided to pursue studies in dance, yoga, aerobics and the like, on the side, as I studied geometrodynamics and differential geometry and PDEs and nonlinear dynamics. So for 40+ hours per week, for many years, I took dance classes, which had 50-100 women in each class and at most one or two males. At first, I felt pretty uncomfortable, but then I became accustomed to it. I met plenty of women that way, and I became more at ease around women.
So if young men were driven purely by a desire to meet young women, they would still be going to college. I think there is something else going on here. Perhaps it is the stupid "woke" ideology and ridiculous platitudes and constant insults hurled the way of all males. I still encounter this stuff, and it infuriates me.
However, I do think there is a role for both males and females in STEM. And I am working on laying the foundations for a STEM R&D enterprise. One of my goals is to make it easier for women to pursue a productive career in STEM, in spite of pressures from child-bearing and child-rearing. If we have enough resources, I hope we can experiment with some ideas that might help the situation.
Surely we are smart enough to figure out how to get the best out of both males and females, without putting undue pressure on them. At least, I am naive enough to think we can, anyway. I am willing to test out my hypotheses, in any case.
When I majored in Physics (1969-73) I was the only woman. I’m surprised to hear things have changed so much.
I have two grown children. My daughter has done very well. My son goofed around and did finally get around to finishing high school and now works in a trade. He was a lot less mature (obvious from an early age.)
1) Have there been any studies that try to break down male enrollment in college by some measure of academic performance (e.g., GPA, state tests)? The 10 highest paid careers almost all require tertiary education. I'm skeptical that the fraction of academically gifted young men who are forgoing college has substantially declined, since they would be boxing themselves out of a lot of money.
2) Has any researcher actually talked to young men about why they choose not to go to college (a qualitative version of this same question)? I'm seeing a lot of pontificating from much older people, but it would be much more interesting to interview young men with good grades/test scores who chose not to go to college about why.
Terminological comment: our university's official term is now "first years." I have been chided repeatedly by our administration for using the term "freshmen." Doubleplus ungood.
I am shocked such a ridiculous and misogynistic article was printed by Heterodox stem. So, men aren't going to college today because it has become too girlie, so simple why didn't we see it earlier. Mr. Revers is entitled to his opinions about the feminization of college life, but he isn't entitled to speak for all young men, or to project his feelings onto them.
I have been reading a lot of silly nonsense over the past few months. I think elections are a like full moons, everyone goes a little nutty.
Perhaps. But there are forces afoot to try to push males from all academic pursuits, because of their "toxicity". If you claim this is not so, then one has to explain a lot of evidence that speaks to the contrary.
You either support dei or you don’t, you can’t have it both ways. If women *currently* are on average academically superior to men (they are) then it stands to reason they’ll outnumber them in competitive academic settings (universities). We should of course seek to remedy the social ills creating this skew, just as we should for racial and class gaps, but taking the aa “shortcut” does more harm than good and is incompatible with the principles of meritocracy and equality. Academic admissions should be based *purely* an academic merit as determined by racial and gender blind means. If some demographics - racial or sexual or what have you- are over or under represented that’s not for the university to remedy at the admissions stage but for society as a whole from preschool onwards.
I have to disagree respectfully with your statement about disenfranchised young men. Actually, young men are going into STEM fields and learning trades in droves. Not disenfranchised at all. They are responding in the only way the male of the species is hard-wired to respond. Survival. Not dominance. Survival. And many, many men these days who choose this path instead of academia are finding fulfillment and purpose, instead of belittlement and indoctrination. They’re actually smarter than most give them credit for.
I would put the question raised by this essay in the same category as that posed by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard. He famously wondered in a public speech, why more women did not pursue quantitative studies in college and university and graduate school. This was a fairly innocuous topic, I thought, and interesting. But if you recall, this was the basis on which he was railroaded out of his position.
Later, I have read serious Jewish scholars from Harvard opining that the real reason Summers was fired was that he was Jewish. And they needed a convenient excuse to get a Jew out of that office (remember, there was lots of Arab oil money flowing into Harvard coffers at the time, and Jewish enrollment was dropping, potentially by design). And so, they trumped-up some accusation that Summers was a misogynist or something, based on this fairly innocent question.
After monitoring this part of Substack for a few months or more, I notice that Heterodox STEM attracts more than its fair share of "wokerati". That is, there are a lot of people, who nominally are somehow involved in STEM, who think that the woke, social justice agenda is just fine, and we need more of it. They are FRANTIC to get competence out of STEM, at all costs, because of "fairness" or "justice" or something.
I try to be kind to these characters, but if we follow their advice, STEM will inevitably disappear, as it has repeatedly from various civilizations throughout history. And if we turn our back on the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, then what follows is unlikely to be the paradise that some are expecting.
I think we still have a good number of sane people in HxA STEM, but you're entirely correct re the ruin we face if the woke triumph - total disaster. Western Civilization is a priceless gem that must be preserved.
In the US, the situation is similar -- men are leaving education track in droves and the undergraduate pool is now dominated by females. Besides being unhealthy for both sexes, it is a very dangerous trend for the society -- creating population of disenfranchised young men will result in social instability. Yet this topic is taboo. President of the Purdue University was raked over the coals for asking a simple question "Where are all the men?" in his state of the university address: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/17/purdue-president-missteps-comments-missing-college-men
There used to be an academic discipline called "anthropology." I was deluded into thinking that, as a serious field of study, it was a body of knowledge to be cherished and expanded. But anthropology is no more, replaced, just as men have been replaced by females as professors, the subject matter has been replaced with grievance feminism and antisemitic Palestinianism. Not only men have been replaced; the Enlightenment search for truth based on evidence has been replaced by the ideological "truths" of neo-Marxist "social justice." Our universities are now fully corrupted, especially what were the social sciences and humanities, now only ideological and activist grievance studies. Faculties of Law, Medicine, Education, and Social Work are equally corrupt, now far left activist breeding grounds intentional destroying our institutions of justice, health care, K12 schools, and social welfare programs. We have gotten to a point of social destruction that our universities need to be defunded, emptied of current employees,, and closed down entirely, opening the possibility of starting again to avoid current insanity.
I just recently discovered about such cancellation at my own university. This is extremely worrisome. Together with Evolutionary Psychology, I always found Cultural Anthropology quite fascinating.
The (current) activist nature of some branches of the university is ridiculous. For those pursuing activism, the place for them is the government (not the university). It's important that we help bolster the Social Sciences.
As you might suspect from my comment, I think it is too late to "bolster the Social Sciences." It appears to me that they have been taken over by grievance activists from "studies" departments (which were never themselves academic disciplines). Now they are all Palestinianized, heavily antisemitic and cheering for the brutal terrorists who strive to outdo the Islamic State. If you want to save the social sciences, then you must replace all current staff with new staff (not restricted to gay females of color or trans foreigners) dedicated to Enlightenment-inspired search for truth based on evidence and argument.
Perhaps one way to "immunize" these institutions against these social justice ideas is to create programs or departments of Critical Studies 𝙤𝙛 Critical Studies, or something like that. In other words, just have people whose sole job and disposition is oriented towards critiquing this woke nonsense.
All of university is supposed to be critical analysis of any ideas offered in whatever field of study. The problem is that some analyses have now been accepted as answers that must not be challenged and may only be implemented. Anyone who critiques is cancelled, punished, and excommunicated.
I would agree with this in several ways. First, these ridiculous social justice ideas and woke ideology find refuge in the softer sciences and humanities. We need to strengthen this firewall.
I am not sure where this activism should be located, if any place at all, but it probably should not be in academia, or at least "truth-oriented" institutions as Jonathan Haidt describes. It is toxic to conventional inquiry and innovation.
However, before we can "bolster" the social sciences, or any other part of academia or STEM, we need to get our own house in order. This is because we should not let our energies be dissipated in fighting in arenas in which we have no standing or competence. It would just seem like us talking down to these "lesser" disciplines, I fear.
As time progresses (as more people get educated), it's perfectly natural that there are more women employed at universities. In that sense, there is traditionally a very clear gender distinction in employment of primary and secondary schools.
However, it's a must that we bring back equality for everybody during the application processes. It's crucial that men get equal opportunity at universities (this is obviously lacking nowadays).
I was at Oxford in the 80s. I was pursuing a graduate degree in experimental cognitive psychology and it was a wonderful experience. The situation you describe sounds incredibly bleak. Looking at this from an evolutionary and ecological perspective strongly supports your concerns:
https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-they-is
too much intellectual grazing will undoubtedly destroy the academic landscape...
This problem was built by design to replace men with women across academia and the professions that rely on it for their future generations. Here is an example from when I was in graduate school in the 1990's. The University of New Hampshire student body then was 60% female, 40% male. The College of Science & Engineering was 75% male. This outraged the university feminists who demanded all sorts of special programming and scholarships to increase the number of women in this college. When it was pointed out that the much larger college of Liberal Arts was 14% male, 86% female and that we should also have similar programs to produce gender parity there, the response was to accuse those so advocating of misogyny and sexism. The programs for women were put in place, while those for men were not. Men got the message. We are second class citizens in this university.
More recently (2017-18), a councilor of the Geological Society of America suggested that we revise the definition of underrepresented to focus on people of color by removing white women from the preferred list of candidates. Tremendous outrage was directed at this European member of council who had correctly seen that the real beneficiery of affirmative action in geology was NOT people of color...but white women. As a GSA employee I did a study of the graduate research fellows to to see if there was a indeed a gender or race bias in need of correction. Turns out GSA's research awards for graduate researchers mirrored the racial and sexual demographics of the society's student members. GSA was NOT discriminating in awarding grants...but having a program for only non-white males, however, was introducing a racial and gender bias that was unwarranted. If white men are over-represented relative to society as a whole...so are white women and thus both should be excluded from the "diversity" scholarship. My results were NOT well received by the white women on council...the most outspoken of which continued to complain that women are underrepresented in academic geology. She was a faculty member at....the University of New Hampshire!
I remember a study some years ago that attempted to demonstrate that the main beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in the US were not minorities at all, but for the most part, white women.
I have seen that as well. On another note, the same GSA in this period accepted new members to it "Diversity" Committee. Not including people whose membership is dictated as ex officio by their status in the leadership (president, executive director) there are 9 members of the committee who serve staggered 3 year terms. In 2018 the nominations committee made selections that insured that this committee had a Native American male, an African American female and 7 white women despite multiple other minority candidates being available. When it was pointed out that maybe white women should make room for others to be represented, the importance of oppressed white women should not be minimized. At this time the President, Executive Director and majority of the employed staff were also...wait for it...white women!
Firstly, I assume the author knows all the staff in his department personally, for I am not sure how one can determine the number of women in his photo (to quote “My Cousin Vinny”) ”… by simply looking at the picture…”
Secondly, it is not clear how a “woman” is defined in this essay or in the comments, unless everyone involved (to follow a response by a recent SCOTUS nominee) is a biologist (she likely thought being an anthropologist was not enough for such a verdict).
I would presume that most if not all people commenting here on Heterodox STEM would indeed know what a woman is. The woke efforts to confuse the issue need to be thrown in the trash can. And people pushing this agenda need to be discarded as well.
On the other hand, perhaps you are trying to make a joke. If so, well-played.
I am being facetious, of course!
It's a good one, Ilya.
When I went to undergraduate and then graduate school, in the hardest of the hard STEM areas (mathematical physics, before leaking over to applied mathematics), women were few and far between. At MIT, there were almost no women enrolled at all. There were free buses from women's colleges to MIT. However, the women routinely got off the free MIT buses to get on public transport to go down the street to Harvard.
I and my housemate asked a busload of women what they were doing. The women told us, there was no WAY they wanted to hang around with geeks and nerds at MIT. They were going to Harvard, "where the REAL men are". That is, I guess they wanted handsome jocks with trust funds and plenty of spare time since the classes were not that demanding. They wanted to get drunk, they wanted drugs, and they wanted sex; lots of it. And they got it.
There was also a very high suicide rate. Between September 1979 and April of 1980, MIT experienced 19 suicides out of 8000 students at the time (4000 undergraduates and 4000 graduate students). The administration staged numerous free parties with the hottest live bands in Boston and free soda and free beer and free pizza to try to improve the atmosphere. I walked by a few of these. The band was playing to a huge empty room, every time. Not a single MIT student showed up. There were administrative staff standing there beside stacks of pizza and beverages, ready to hand them out. There were NO takers. I have never seen anything like this before or since. And it happened repeatedly.
I remember seeing a survey of MIT graduates a couple of years ago. The results? About 70% of all MIT graduates reported still being virgins, even decades after graduation. At the time, I was in a monthly zoom call with fellow MIT former classmates, most of them women. I brought this topic up in the zoom call, and the women (now all physics professors) laughed, and said they were surprised that the figure was AS LOW as 70%. They would have expected it to be much higher.
Later, I did chastise one of these female professors, who was desperately campaigning to get all males out of STEM, for being too "woke". Either this caused the zoom call to be dissolved, or it resulted in me being dis-invited from any further discussions. Later, October 7th occurred. I wonder what this beautiful female Jewish physics professor thought of all the attacks on Jews by her fellow "woke" compatriots. I think that was a huge eye-opener for many who thought they were campaigning for "justice" and "fairness". Little did they know that the target would soon be on them, personally.
As someone quite introverted and pretty far out on the autism spectrum, I decided my only chance at female companionship was to put myself in situations where women outnumbered men 10 or 20 or 50 to one or more. I had experienced this in two summer immersion French college courses. And so, I decided to pursue studies in dance, yoga, aerobics and the like, on the side, as I studied geometrodynamics and differential geometry and PDEs and nonlinear dynamics. So for 40+ hours per week, for many years, I took dance classes, which had 50-100 women in each class and at most one or two males. At first, I felt pretty uncomfortable, but then I became accustomed to it. I met plenty of women that way, and I became more at ease around women.
So if young men were driven purely by a desire to meet young women, they would still be going to college. I think there is something else going on here. Perhaps it is the stupid "woke" ideology and ridiculous platitudes and constant insults hurled the way of all males. I still encounter this stuff, and it infuriates me.
However, I do think there is a role for both males and females in STEM. And I am working on laying the foundations for a STEM R&D enterprise. One of my goals is to make it easier for women to pursue a productive career in STEM, in spite of pressures from child-bearing and child-rearing. If we have enough resources, I hope we can experiment with some ideas that might help the situation.
Surely we are smart enough to figure out how to get the best out of both males and females, without putting undue pressure on them. At least, I am naive enough to think we can, anyway. I am willing to test out my hypotheses, in any case.
When I majored in Physics (1969-73) I was the only woman. I’m surprised to hear things have changed so much.
I have two grown children. My daughter has done very well. My son goofed around and did finally get around to finishing high school and now works in a trade. He was a lot less mature (obvious from an early age.)
1) Have there been any studies that try to break down male enrollment in college by some measure of academic performance (e.g., GPA, state tests)? The 10 highest paid careers almost all require tertiary education. I'm skeptical that the fraction of academically gifted young men who are forgoing college has substantially declined, since they would be boxing themselves out of a lot of money.
2) Has any researcher actually talked to young men about why they choose not to go to college (a qualitative version of this same question)? I'm seeing a lot of pontificating from much older people, but it would be much more interesting to interview young men with good grades/test scores who chose not to go to college about why.
This is a good idea. I know how things were when I was young, but that was decades ago.
Terminological comment: our university's official term is now "first years." I have been chided repeatedly by our administration for using the term "freshmen." Doubleplus ungood.
I am shocked such a ridiculous and misogynistic article was printed by Heterodox stem. So, men aren't going to college today because it has become too girlie, so simple why didn't we see it earlier. Mr. Revers is entitled to his opinions about the feminization of college life, but he isn't entitled to speak for all young men, or to project his feelings onto them.
I have been reading a lot of silly nonsense over the past few months. I think elections are a like full moons, everyone goes a little nutty.
Perhaps. But there are forces afoot to try to push males from all academic pursuits, because of their "toxicity". If you claim this is not so, then one has to explain a lot of evidence that speaks to the contrary.
Nonsense. Nothing misogynistic about the article.
You either support dei or you don’t, you can’t have it both ways. If women *currently* are on average academically superior to men (they are) then it stands to reason they’ll outnumber them in competitive academic settings (universities). We should of course seek to remedy the social ills creating this skew, just as we should for racial and class gaps, but taking the aa “shortcut” does more harm than good and is incompatible with the principles of meritocracy and equality. Academic admissions should be based *purely* an academic merit as determined by racial and gender blind means. If some demographics - racial or sexual or what have you- are over or under represented that’s not for the university to remedy at the admissions stage but for society as a whole from preschool onwards.
I have to disagree respectfully with your statement about disenfranchised young men. Actually, young men are going into STEM fields and learning trades in droves. Not disenfranchised at all. They are responding in the only way the male of the species is hard-wired to respond. Survival. Not dominance. Survival. And many, many men these days who choose this path instead of academia are finding fulfillment and purpose, instead of belittlement and indoctrination. They’re actually smarter than most give them credit for.
Yep. One of the bad symptoms of woke ideology, with serious demographic and economic consequences.
It's sad to see Heterodox STEM moving from libertarian and conservative, albeit mirroring the left in its grievances, to ultra-right anti-feminism.
Paul Brest, Stanford University
I don’t see it as anti-feminist and I’m a woman.
Is that what this is? I have my doubts, frankly. It is merely highlighting some interesting data.
Why is it like this? That is a good question. But you cannot deny that things are headed in this direction.
I would put the question raised by this essay in the same category as that posed by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard. He famously wondered in a public speech, why more women did not pursue quantitative studies in college and university and graduate school. This was a fairly innocuous topic, I thought, and interesting. But if you recall, this was the basis on which he was railroaded out of his position.
Later, I have read serious Jewish scholars from Harvard opining that the real reason Summers was fired was that he was Jewish. And they needed a convenient excuse to get a Jew out of that office (remember, there was lots of Arab oil money flowing into Harvard coffers at the time, and Jewish enrollment was dropping, potentially by design). And so, they trumped-up some accusation that Summers was a misogynist or something, based on this fairly innocent question.
It's sad to see inane virtue-signaling hype in the comments.
And Paul Brest is the name of a Hall in Stanford. So you are obviously an anonymous troll.
After monitoring this part of Substack for a few months or more, I notice that Heterodox STEM attracts more than its fair share of "wokerati". That is, there are a lot of people, who nominally are somehow involved in STEM, who think that the woke, social justice agenda is just fine, and we need more of it. They are FRANTIC to get competence out of STEM, at all costs, because of "fairness" or "justice" or something.
I try to be kind to these characters, but if we follow their advice, STEM will inevitably disappear, as it has repeatedly from various civilizations throughout history. And if we turn our back on the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, then what follows is unlikely to be the paradise that some are expecting.
I think we still have a good number of sane people in HxA STEM, but you're entirely correct re the ruin we face if the woke triumph - total disaster. Western Civilization is a priceless gem that must be preserved.