The Grumblers – and yes, we do have membership cards – argue about when our universities began their decline. But we’re all of a mind that it began with the admission of women. Which is not to say it was caused by the admission of women. It’s just to say it can’t be said it wasn’t caused by the admission of women. It can’t be said it wasn’t because there are too many variables at play here. But there’s an intuition. And it’s not a completely unreasonable one. When the kids are fighting in the back seat, the dad wants know who started it, and he wants to know the truth about that. Mom just wants them to stop. It’s not that for her truth be damned. It’s that it’s irrelevant. So – at least according to this conjecture – what’s been happening in our universities is the age-old battle of the sexes between truth and peace. And, at least as things currently stand, the women have won out.
Could all these issues I’ve been blogging about – academic freedom, wokism, and so on – be reducible to something as simple as this? I suppose I have to say no. To keep the peace.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Viminitz is not saying anything radical here, and the feminization of the university is an issue.
See:
Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, “Sex and the Academy,” Quillette, October 8, 2022, https://quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/, accessed January 24, 2024. (August 25, 2026)
Social psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard ask how women are changing academic culture in Western liberal societies. The two conjecture that women’s and men’s evolved psychological preferences might come into conflict in the academic setting, the former tending to social justice and the latter to academic freedom. If true, then there should be predictable patterns to the influence of these different preferences on the priorities of science and higher education. The authors say we ought both to “identify and try to understand” these patterns and to “note they will lead to predictable downstream consequences.” Why? Because, as Clark and Winegard say, “A new and more female-oriented era is here for the foreseeable future.”
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