This is a tour de force. You've hit every nail squre on the head. The male-status-as-signifier point isn't stressed enough imho, given that it's the source of the asymmetry in mate selection criteria. The in-group affinity without out-group antipathy is a brilliant insight over the Schelling segregation that needs more amplification.
Ultimately your conclusions are very strong. The academy will crumble, though not without taking down large parts of society. Men will find other ways to compete, and will likely find other ways to advance hard (and soft) disciplines.
I was a physics major in Soviet C(an)uckistan in the 90s and your observations really rang true. As I'm arguing elsewhere, status competition finds its truest form in the Indo-European male. I think this augurs positively for longer-termism, especially if space colonization opens up. Without new frontiers as an outlet for competition we will be Neolithic longhouse farmers until protons decay.
Hey, another Canadian physics major! Similar era too.
The opening of the high frontier is extremely hopeful; much more so than the alternative, which is herding men into the hallucinatory competitions of video games.
You've written extensively on the topic of space frontiers as well - which I've enjoyed considerably. I'm hoping to add something to that topic myself soon.
Yes, I missed Elon at Queens by just a handful of years. Those were probably the last "good" years before the longhouse subsumed campus.
Insomnia plays merry Heck with my synapses, but still, this is the stuff they should have as part of gender studies; arguements based in reality.
Only then can we argue ideology and envisioned outcomes from various policies, with any chance of thinking up something useful.
As my wife has sometimes lamented, she went into Women's Studies precisely to try and find how are we different, in what ways; what is biology and what is sociology and what is psychology and what is on the individual level and what is on group level and how does all this interact, overlap and intersect.
But no. It was all "white men evil, women good" all the way. Plus bullying, blacklisting and backstabbing of anyone questioning dogma and the Matriarchs. Whereas over at the Pol Sci/Econ-anthill, you could find professors going at each other about whether or not Keynes had copied Wigforss, or how Friedman and Hayek had neglected the role of culture, or the difference between how Smith was taught and what he actually wrote - all very heated, voices raised, knuckles firmly planted on the desktop.
And then the white middle-aged men arguing went out for lunch as good friends. Or not-white in the case of foreign professors. Still male though. To a casual observer it would seem as men can have a difference of opinion without it needing to affect their respect or friendship, whereas women cannot have differences of opinion without it immediately becoming a personal and emotional issue.
On the other hand, women working real jobs rarely if ever confuse personal and professional in my experience. Perhaps there is a class background angle to all this too? Certainly, housewives and working class women overall seem more levelheaded and less prone to mental disorders or neuroses, than does the middle class.
I think the easiest is often the best, and the hardest to effect, as to most of normal intelligence (normal in functioning and process, not any imaginary numerical designation such as IQ) there seems to be an allure to equal complex and complicated with good and right. Nowhere is this as obvious as in law. What is embezzlement, really? Stealing, but it is stealing when done by a better class of people than a commoner so we must have different names, different requirements for proof and different statutes for punishment as well as different prisons. But stealing is stealing no matter semantics: why not just have the crime "theft" and let the rest be variations in method employed?
Because that would be too easy, too simple, and too egalitarian. Same thing with Academia. Instead of one application process, equal for all, we have oodles with thresholds and quotas and categories and whatnot, so the game instead becomes find the right path of loopholes to slither through.
And yet conservatives, radicals, feminists, capitalists, communists, atheists, religious, and so on - all fervently oppose anything resembling equality before the law, and no privileged positions for anyone, because they all would rather cling to mother's skirts (mother being whatever the ruling authority may be at the time, than trust in their own ideals to manifest as real and true under their own power, or not.
In Academia manifested as a most vehement opposition to blind testing, to anonymous written exams corrected by tutors who have zero connection to the students, and to the simple principle of "everyone gets to step up to bat, that's all".
The brass-band orchestra of Midnight migraines waking me up is making my prose even more purple than usual it seems. I shall retreat bedways, ere I devolve into Nadsat entire.
I think one reason why women in the workplace can separate the personal from the professional when it comes to professional differences is that they aren't emotionally invested in their work - it's just work. This is very different for academics, who identify with their work very strongly. Even for men it takes an effort of will not to take criticism personally; however, part of the education process is - or used to be - an annealing process in which the hide was toughened via regular exposure to savages critique, until it left the spirit unmoved.
Bold sir, bold. I bet this one ruffles a few feathers. The blurb in the middle caught me a little off guard, yet did not cause a pang of guilt; praise!
The Academy's prestige is likely to dwindle further over the coming decades, I agree. It'll be interesting to see how it is tackled, but it's hard to have much faith in Western universities: they've made their bed and it may just be time to lie in it.
Taking the really long view - over centuries - there is an ebb and flow to these things. Believe it or not, Cambridge and Oxford went through an extended hiatus as sleepy intellectual backwaters due to their embrace of stultifying church dogmatism. Yet, eventually, they revived themselves.
It was not so much the dogmatism as disinterest. The faculty were clergymen in name only, mostly interested in getting drunk and getting laid. The Scientific Revolution was infused with justified contempt for formal academic life.
Oxbridge picked up only after intense pressure from small colleges operated by Dissenters who were not allowed in. These Dissenter institutions had a big impact on engineering etc. They picked up further once Prussia industrialised and geopolitical pressure grew too great.
Useful to note that industry patronised specialist colleges of their own. The East India Company had its own outstanding college.
Real change unlikely till Russia or China kicks Uncle Samantha's ass. Sputnik moment imminent perhaps?
Dogmatism and disinterest go hand in hand. When everyone knows what will be said because there is only one permissable thing to say, it becomes very boring to listen to. Attention naturally shifts to more interesting things, such as booze. Witness the contemporary academy. Few academics take much interest in discourse, including in their own subjects.
Indeed. There is an ebb and flow to all these things, a cyclical nature to them even as time relentlessly churns forward. Let us hope there is still a positive outlook on a revival for the future; it's probably too early to tell - technology adds a great deal of chaos and uncertainty to the situation.
This brought back unhappy memories. Higher education is a dismal subject. The sector needs to be burnt to the ground. There is no way to reform it. None, none, none. Educational reform is an industry in itself that thrives on its own failures. Starving the beast of attention, resources, respect is essential.
High tech companies, local and state governments need to finance and organise their own networked solutions to ensure that suitable young men receive the tuition, mentoring and support needed to raise the next generation of scientists on scale. These solutions should focus on the students, never the institution. They should start at grade school level. Organised activities outside of higher education will help: maths camp, competitions etc. Math and chess clubs that meet outside of schools, awayy from Longhouse policing. Also employers can and should develop their own transparent means of identifying and certifying ability: independtly managed competitive exams without so called race-norming or DEI bullshit.
We also need to finance overseas study at elite universities in China and Russia. A year or two at a non-Western university would be instructive. It will start small, very small, perhaps microscopically so. But developing new models is essential.
Finally, don't bank on the birth dearth in the West crippling the higher education sector. Any shortfall in domestic student demand is going to be met by increasing access to overseas students. We can expect a tsunami of overseas students in the coming years. Their presence will be rationalised by the need for skilled labour.
Institutional capture, institutional failure defines our era. It cannot be resolved by rival institutions, it can only be resolved by slowly enabling people to develop alternatives that suit their own needs.
Regarding foreign students, in Canada this is already happening at scale. The result is exactly what you'd expect: a flood of semi-literate Punjabis abusing the student visa system to get into the country and start driving Uber or whatever. Those who actually do study only drag down the quality of the student body even further, leading to even more rapid degradation of the reputation and prestige of Canadian universities.
Meanwhile, Canadians see full well what's going on. They don't want these Indians around. Many will ask, if the only thing these places are doing is paying “professors” to pretend to teach Indians running student visa scams, well then do we really need these universities at all?
Could discuss at length but for professional reasons cannot. Let's just say I once wrote something on this decades ago. The shamelessnesss of the trade in credentials puts people trafficking in the shade.
Canada once had some truly exceptional universities. The Boomers fouled everything.
Many of them are now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Donations are down. Tuition is down. Government is going broke so little hope for them there.
In a few years it might be possible to start picking up facilities in real estate at very reasonable prices.
It's funny. I remember McGill's did this when I was in my second year of law school. They ushered in all these foreign students to cash in on the foreign tuition, inadvertently importing a bunch of low IQ dunces. The first year it happened they pretended like they were surprised and still graded them to scale - it was hilarious watching these kids get Cs and Ds. Of course the administration quickly gave faculty new marching orders and "grades" swiftly rose. Good times.
Once again, JC of B, you revel in the role of the young boy who told the adoring crowd that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. And how dare you support all that misogynistic drivel with inconvenient, unassailable fact?! Heaven forfend! 😆😅🤣😂
Keep it up ... I eagerly await the scorched earth on your next target of opportunity...🤪
I hope and pray that our society goes for the Henry VIII “loot the monasteries” option. Otherwise I relish watching the implosion of the worthless left dominated higher indoctrination system!
You make a convincing case that this is how it ends but how did it start. Within living memory (mine) academia was male dominated. Women were starting to show up as students but the faculty was heavily male (teachers, colleges excepted). Given faculty ruled the universities and selected their own successors, it must have been them. But why. Weak men make hard times? They didn't seem weak but what did I know as an undergraduate. Later, I had a mentor that was quiet about it, yet I knew he was a double ace and had led a storming party into Manila City Hall, hosing a Japanese soldier with a SMG after he had a grenade explode in front of his face. He also fled Stalin by walking out across Siberia with his family at age 8. Not a man that any sane person would define as weak.
You can apply the same logic to women's suffrage. It had to have been done by men but why. What was the dynamic. Aristophanes wrote a play about one scenario but it was a comedy.
Surveying the ancient world as I am wont to do, women were all but invisible except for one place. There they could own property and were highly influential, informally, in politics including matters of war and peace. The first female participant in the Olympics, as an owner/trainer in equestrian events, came from there. That place was Sparta, home of the hardest men who ever lived.
Talk to men who were professors in the 50s and 60s, and in candid moments they'll tell you they were getting laid. A lot. Profs were the local alphas, and enjoyed the privileges that come with rank.
Men enjoy the company of women, for very obvious reasons. High-ranking men particularly have an incentive to defect - to allow women into male spaces. Thus, male spaces are an unstable equilibrium.
There were some who were uncomfortable with sexual aggression from students. Especially if it was transactional. Different era. Now the discomfort would have a different cause. I had to deal with a number of sexual harassment cases as a supervisor. The bulk of them were consensual relationships gone bad
Title IX is education specific. I recognize that the original post was about education but every place is like that now. Remember the rocket scientist who wore an "inappropriate" T-shirt that looked like one of your illustrations.
In all cultures, despite outward appearances to the contrary, women rule by ruling men. I'll use a local mikro-level example:
Here, the village is built on a lake. There are many place you can go swimming, clothed or nude. But the lake bottom is all natural. Either rocks and gravel, or decomposing sludge, or full of dead trees, or any combination thereof. Not a problem for most, as you go /swimming/ so you only touch bottom when you get in/out.
But: some women here come from The City. They are used to artificial council-made and tax-money paid for makeshift beeches. Where they can let their kids run wild will they sit around talking or reading ladies' magazines or such. This, they cannot do next to an all-natural lakeside. They have to be on their toes, and they have to listen to their spoiled spawn whine about the bottom.
So: what did the women do, pertinent to your musings? They started convincing each other that a beach was a good idea. And where it should go to. and that it was no problem. And inexpensive. And the men can do it because all the machinery is already here. And so on.
And all these they then started, each in their own home, rattling off to their husband, father, brother, son. And lo and behold, about half a year layer, most men had realised that a beech was a good idea, why hadn't they thought of that before.
That's my long-winded way of trying to explain the "Why?" you posit. Wrap it up in academia-jargon and you have a thesis-paper ready to go.
Certainly - I've long toyed with the idea that somehow "capping" cities to 15 000 inhabitants (all ages) and instead have more such townships - say 10-20 km apart or so - would do wonders overall.
But getting there without invoking Central Planning and all its attendant problems, just to try out an idea?
Dangerous is the theoretician who get to wield real power with no personal cost.
Norman Spinrad wrote a novel on this subject way back in 1979: "A World Between." If you haven't read it yet, get to it. Spinrad is one of the tiny number of true wordsmiths in the science fiction world.
An interstellar society with time consuming star travel. Two factions are spreading their ideologies across the human realm: the male dominated Society of Transcendental Science and Femocracy, a doctrine that arose in on Earth due to atomic war. Femocrats believe that men should be kept around for breeding purposes only, but should otherwise be restrained, as they are too dangerous.
The action take place on a media world, known for its Godzilla movies using local fauna that resemble Godzilla. Spaceships from both factions arrive and make their respective pitches.
I will take issue on the idea that excelling in a male dominated field as the way to attracting the ladies. While taking a women's studies course is a bad strategy, dance or theater can be winning. Back when I was an undergrad, the alpha theater guy -- who kind of resembled Doof in Hypergamouse -- was dating a jaw dropping ten. My status as the alpha physics guy was a liability if anything.
This is the general Hollywood stereotype as well. Techies don't get the arm candy generally.
The better eugenics strategy would be to have universities which have both male dominated and girl friendly majors available and take measures to get the students to mix across fields now and then.
Obviously, there's a fair bit of nuance there, and not every status hierarchy is created equal (which actually I did point out, obliquely).
Sometimes the male instinct to excel can "misfire" by attraction to a field that that doesn't actually confer high status - video games, for example.
Performing arts could well be a special case because the necessities of drama mandate a certain fraction of men; the techniques of drama develop charisma; and the pressures of the stage mean that handsome men will tend to be preferred. So you'd expect those guys to do well.
For the record, I have found status when doing politics to be much more useful than academic status -- even status within the nerdy Libertarian Party. There is a magic to taking the stage -- even without a guitar.
Things get better if one modifies one's politics to be female compatible -- either family friendly or slut friendly. Take your pick. Consider this to be motivation to get out there and do some politicking. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/act-now-and-get-a-wife
The problem with status within fields such as physics is that it provides relatively little opportunity to put on public performances.
Same with being a writer btw - worse, probably.
Doesn't help that physicists by and large neglect their physical appearance - very few hit the gym. Just because appearance isn't the only thing that matters doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Then, as a very cerebral, unemotional, object-oriented field, it provides little for women to latch onto. Thus athletics, music, politics tend to yield better romantic payoffs.
Depending on when and where you choose to look. Plus, what was written about these arts were almost exclusively the upper classes' perspective on them, and also the upper classes' versions of same.
Great piece! I would add, from my own research on The College Board site, that much of this is explained by the fact that females consistently score well below males on the Math portion of the SAT...about 40 points lower on average...Another consistent fact is that Education majors score far below other professions on the Graduate Record Exams, about 100 points lower...This explains why the Clintons found, after requiring teachers take a general knowledge test, that more than 1/3 scored at the 3d grade level or lower in Arkansas.....
Fantastic explanation John! I just separated from my work after several years. My direct supervisors were women. There were other reasons I left but I took notice of something which kept a lid on my attitude. I hated pushing back on them lol. It just never felt right and so I avoided it at all costs. I believe my lack of enthusiasm played a key role in my performance.
Had a colleague who did just that. He was doing quite well and still got let go. To be fair that guy was a fucking jerk and everyone knew it. I really need to make sure that hitting quota is not such a huge deal if I am going to have professional women as bosses.
That is what I have learned from my experience and I shall keep it under my hat 🤫
This is a tour de force. You've hit every nail squre on the head. The male-status-as-signifier point isn't stressed enough imho, given that it's the source of the asymmetry in mate selection criteria. The in-group affinity without out-group antipathy is a brilliant insight over the Schelling segregation that needs more amplification.
Ultimately your conclusions are very strong. The academy will crumble, though not without taking down large parts of society. Men will find other ways to compete, and will likely find other ways to advance hard (and soft) disciplines.
I was a physics major in Soviet C(an)uckistan in the 90s and your observations really rang true. As I'm arguing elsewhere, status competition finds its truest form in the Indo-European male. I think this augurs positively for longer-termism, especially if space colonization opens up. Without new frontiers as an outlet for competition we will be Neolithic longhouse farmers until protons decay.
A.J.R. Klopp
https://13fathers.com/
Hey, another Canadian physics major! Similar era too.
The opening of the high frontier is extremely hopeful; much more so than the alternative, which is herding men into the hallucinatory competitions of video games.
You've written extensively on the topic of space frontiers as well - which I've enjoyed considerably. I'm hoping to add something to that topic myself soon.
Yes, I missed Elon at Queens by just a handful of years. Those were probably the last "good" years before the longhouse subsumed campus.
I've got another essay about space knocking around in the back of my head.
And yeah, the 90s were very good on campus, though even then you could see signs of the rot setting in.
Looking forward to reading it when it comes out. Cheers.
A.J.R. Klopp
Insomnia plays merry Heck with my synapses, but still, this is the stuff they should have as part of gender studies; arguements based in reality.
Only then can we argue ideology and envisioned outcomes from various policies, with any chance of thinking up something useful.
As my wife has sometimes lamented, she went into Women's Studies precisely to try and find how are we different, in what ways; what is biology and what is sociology and what is psychology and what is on the individual level and what is on group level and how does all this interact, overlap and intersect.
But no. It was all "white men evil, women good" all the way. Plus bullying, blacklisting and backstabbing of anyone questioning dogma and the Matriarchs. Whereas over at the Pol Sci/Econ-anthill, you could find professors going at each other about whether or not Keynes had copied Wigforss, or how Friedman and Hayek had neglected the role of culture, or the difference between how Smith was taught and what he actually wrote - all very heated, voices raised, knuckles firmly planted on the desktop.
And then the white middle-aged men arguing went out for lunch as good friends. Or not-white in the case of foreign professors. Still male though. To a casual observer it would seem as men can have a difference of opinion without it needing to affect their respect or friendship, whereas women cannot have differences of opinion without it immediately becoming a personal and emotional issue.
On the other hand, women working real jobs rarely if ever confuse personal and professional in my experience. Perhaps there is a class background angle to all this too? Certainly, housewives and working class women overall seem more levelheaded and less prone to mental disorders or neuroses, than does the middle class.
I think the easiest is often the best, and the hardest to effect, as to most of normal intelligence (normal in functioning and process, not any imaginary numerical designation such as IQ) there seems to be an allure to equal complex and complicated with good and right. Nowhere is this as obvious as in law. What is embezzlement, really? Stealing, but it is stealing when done by a better class of people than a commoner so we must have different names, different requirements for proof and different statutes for punishment as well as different prisons. But stealing is stealing no matter semantics: why not just have the crime "theft" and let the rest be variations in method employed?
Because that would be too easy, too simple, and too egalitarian. Same thing with Academia. Instead of one application process, equal for all, we have oodles with thresholds and quotas and categories and whatnot, so the game instead becomes find the right path of loopholes to slither through.
And yet conservatives, radicals, feminists, capitalists, communists, atheists, religious, and so on - all fervently oppose anything resembling equality before the law, and no privileged positions for anyone, because they all would rather cling to mother's skirts (mother being whatever the ruling authority may be at the time, than trust in their own ideals to manifest as real and true under their own power, or not.
In Academia manifested as a most vehement opposition to blind testing, to anonymous written exams corrected by tutors who have zero connection to the students, and to the simple principle of "everyone gets to step up to bat, that's all".
The brass-band orchestra of Midnight migraines waking me up is making my prose even more purple than usual it seems. I shall retreat bedways, ere I devolve into Nadsat entire.
I think one reason why women in the workplace can separate the personal from the professional when it comes to professional differences is that they aren't emotionally invested in their work - it's just work. This is very different for academics, who identify with their work very strongly. Even for men it takes an effort of will not to take criticism personally; however, part of the education process is - or used to be - an annealing process in which the hide was toughened via regular exposure to savages critique, until it left the spirit unmoved.
Bold sir, bold. I bet this one ruffles a few feathers. The blurb in the middle caught me a little off guard, yet did not cause a pang of guilt; praise!
The Academy's prestige is likely to dwindle further over the coming decades, I agree. It'll be interesting to see how it is tackled, but it's hard to have much faith in Western universities: they've made their bed and it may just be time to lie in it.
A pity, really.
Taking the really long view - over centuries - there is an ebb and flow to these things. Believe it or not, Cambridge and Oxford went through an extended hiatus as sleepy intellectual backwaters due to their embrace of stultifying church dogmatism. Yet, eventually, they revived themselves.
It was not so much the dogmatism as disinterest. The faculty were clergymen in name only, mostly interested in getting drunk and getting laid. The Scientific Revolution was infused with justified contempt for formal academic life.
Oxbridge picked up only after intense pressure from small colleges operated by Dissenters who were not allowed in. These Dissenter institutions had a big impact on engineering etc. They picked up further once Prussia industrialised and geopolitical pressure grew too great.
Useful to note that industry patronised specialist colleges of their own. The East India Company had its own outstanding college.
Real change unlikely till Russia or China kicks Uncle Samantha's ass. Sputnik moment imminent perhaps?
Of historic interest. https://www.abebooks.com/9784871876995/What-Ivan-Knows-Johnny-Trace-4871876993/plp
Dogmatism and disinterest go hand in hand. When everyone knows what will be said because there is only one permissable thing to say, it becomes very boring to listen to. Attention naturally shifts to more interesting things, such as booze. Witness the contemporary academy. Few academics take much interest in discourse, including in their own subjects.
Indeed. There is an ebb and flow to all these things, a cyclical nature to them even as time relentlessly churns forward. Let us hope there is still a positive outlook on a revival for the future; it's probably too early to tell - technology adds a great deal of chaos and uncertainty to the situation.
I have always enjoyed your articles, but this one is an absolute banger. Please keep it up.
Cheers!
Great piece! Well worth the time. And today, Vox Day celebrated it: https://voxday.net/2024/10/17/the-mediocre-death-spiral/ Hope that brings more men to your writing. We need more good men reading you, John.
Yes, I just noticed that Vox linked it when I glanced at traffic sources. Pretty thrilled about that!
This brought back unhappy memories. Higher education is a dismal subject. The sector needs to be burnt to the ground. There is no way to reform it. None, none, none. Educational reform is an industry in itself that thrives on its own failures. Starving the beast of attention, resources, respect is essential.
High tech companies, local and state governments need to finance and organise their own networked solutions to ensure that suitable young men receive the tuition, mentoring and support needed to raise the next generation of scientists on scale. These solutions should focus on the students, never the institution. They should start at grade school level. Organised activities outside of higher education will help: maths camp, competitions etc. Math and chess clubs that meet outside of schools, awayy from Longhouse policing. Also employers can and should develop their own transparent means of identifying and certifying ability: independtly managed competitive exams without so called race-norming or DEI bullshit.
We also need to finance overseas study at elite universities in China and Russia. A year or two at a non-Western university would be instructive. It will start small, very small, perhaps microscopically so. But developing new models is essential.
Finally, don't bank on the birth dearth in the West crippling the higher education sector. Any shortfall in domestic student demand is going to be met by increasing access to overseas students. We can expect a tsunami of overseas students in the coming years. Their presence will be rationalised by the need for skilled labour.
Institutional capture, institutional failure defines our era. It cannot be resolved by rival institutions, it can only be resolved by slowly enabling people to develop alternatives that suit their own needs.
Regarding foreign students, in Canada this is already happening at scale. The result is exactly what you'd expect: a flood of semi-literate Punjabis abusing the student visa system to get into the country and start driving Uber or whatever. Those who actually do study only drag down the quality of the student body even further, leading to even more rapid degradation of the reputation and prestige of Canadian universities.
Meanwhile, Canadians see full well what's going on. They don't want these Indians around. Many will ask, if the only thing these places are doing is paying “professors” to pretend to teach Indians running student visa scams, well then do we really need these universities at all?
Could discuss at length but for professional reasons cannot. Let's just say I once wrote something on this decades ago. The shamelessnesss of the trade in credentials puts people trafficking in the shade.
Canada once had some truly exceptional universities. The Boomers fouled everything.
Many of them are now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Donations are down. Tuition is down. Government is going broke so little hope for them there.
In a few years it might be possible to start picking up facilities in real estate at very reasonable prices.
It's funny. I remember McGill's did this when I was in my second year of law school. They ushered in all these foreign students to cash in on the foreign tuition, inadvertently importing a bunch of low IQ dunces. The first year it happened they pretended like they were surprised and still graded them to scale - it was hilarious watching these kids get Cs and Ds. Of course the administration quickly gave faculty new marching orders and "grades" swiftly rose. Good times.
Once again, JC of B, you revel in the role of the young boy who told the adoring crowd that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. And how dare you support all that misogynistic drivel with inconvenient, unassailable fact?! Heaven forfend! 😆😅🤣😂
Keep it up ... I eagerly await the scorched earth on your next target of opportunity...🤪
Facts are almost invariably bigotry of some kind in the contemporary academy.
It has been my experience that geniuses also HAVE weird ass holes.
Ha!
I hope and pray that our society goes for the Henry VIII “loot the monasteries” option. Otherwise I relish watching the implosion of the worthless left dominated higher indoctrination system!
It seems historically almost inevitable that this will happen. A Red Caesar would be foolish not to do so.
You make a convincing case that this is how it ends but how did it start. Within living memory (mine) academia was male dominated. Women were starting to show up as students but the faculty was heavily male (teachers, colleges excepted). Given faculty ruled the universities and selected their own successors, it must have been them. But why. Weak men make hard times? They didn't seem weak but what did I know as an undergraduate. Later, I had a mentor that was quiet about it, yet I knew he was a double ace and had led a storming party into Manila City Hall, hosing a Japanese soldier with a SMG after he had a grenade explode in front of his face. He also fled Stalin by walking out across Siberia with his family at age 8. Not a man that any sane person would define as weak.
You can apply the same logic to women's suffrage. It had to have been done by men but why. What was the dynamic. Aristophanes wrote a play about one scenario but it was a comedy.
Surveying the ancient world as I am wont to do, women were all but invisible except for one place. There they could own property and were highly influential, informally, in politics including matters of war and peace. The first female participant in the Olympics, as an owner/trainer in equestrian events, came from there. That place was Sparta, home of the hardest men who ever lived.
Talk to men who were professors in the 50s and 60s, and in candid moments they'll tell you they were getting laid. A lot. Profs were the local alphas, and enjoyed the privileges that come with rank.
Men enjoy the company of women, for very obvious reasons. High-ranking men particularly have an incentive to defect - to allow women into male spaces. Thus, male spaces are an unstable equilibrium.
I did observe that. Classic case of short term thinking
Hard to say no to free candy.
There were some who were uncomfortable with sexual aggression from students. Especially if it was transactional. Different era. Now the discomfort would have a different cause. I had to deal with a number of sexual harassment cases as a supervisor. The bulk of them were consensual relationships gone bad
Title IX put an end to those days, and created a mine field instead.
Title IX is education specific. I recognize that the original post was about education but every place is like that now. Remember the rocket scientist who wore an "inappropriate" T-shirt that looked like one of your illustrations.
About the dynamic:
In all cultures, despite outward appearances to the contrary, women rule by ruling men. I'll use a local mikro-level example:
Here, the village is built on a lake. There are many place you can go swimming, clothed or nude. But the lake bottom is all natural. Either rocks and gravel, or decomposing sludge, or full of dead trees, or any combination thereof. Not a problem for most, as you go /swimming/ so you only touch bottom when you get in/out.
But: some women here come from The City. They are used to artificial council-made and tax-money paid for makeshift beeches. Where they can let their kids run wild will they sit around talking or reading ladies' magazines or such. This, they cannot do next to an all-natural lakeside. They have to be on their toes, and they have to listen to their spoiled spawn whine about the bottom.
So: what did the women do, pertinent to your musings? They started convincing each other that a beach was a good idea. And where it should go to. and that it was no problem. And inexpensive. And the men can do it because all the machinery is already here. And so on.
And all these they then started, each in their own home, rattling off to their husband, father, brother, son. And lo and behold, about half a year layer, most men had realised that a beech was a good idea, why hadn't they thought of that before.
That's my long-winded way of trying to explain the "Why?" you posit. Wrap it up in academia-jargon and you have a thesis-paper ready to go.
The operative word in your example is City
Certainly - I've long toyed with the idea that somehow "capping" cities to 15 000 inhabitants (all ages) and instead have more such townships - say 10-20 km apart or so - would do wonders overall.
But getting there without invoking Central Planning and all its attendant problems, just to try out an idea?
Dangerous is the theoretician who get to wield real power with no personal cost.
My solution is to redraw the map and put the cities in a different country.
Norman Spinrad wrote a novel on this subject way back in 1979: "A World Between." If you haven't read it yet, get to it. Spinrad is one of the tiny number of true wordsmiths in the science fiction world.
What's it about?
An interstellar society with time consuming star travel. Two factions are spreading their ideologies across the human realm: the male dominated Society of Transcendental Science and Femocracy, a doctrine that arose in on Earth due to atomic war. Femocrats believe that men should be kept around for breeding purposes only, but should otherwise be restrained, as they are too dangerous.
The action take place on a media world, known for its Godzilla movies using local fauna that resemble Godzilla. Spaceships from both factions arrive and make their respective pitches.
Fascinating concept.
Brilliant article, as always John!
Thank you!
There is a mistake in your article, you said men were meaner than women, that is not at all true- women are far meaner than men.
This is certainly true.
I will take issue on the idea that excelling in a male dominated field as the way to attracting the ladies. While taking a women's studies course is a bad strategy, dance or theater can be winning. Back when I was an undergrad, the alpha theater guy -- who kind of resembled Doof in Hypergamouse -- was dating a jaw dropping ten. My status as the alpha physics guy was a liability if anything.
This is the general Hollywood stereotype as well. Techies don't get the arm candy generally.
The better eugenics strategy would be to have universities which have both male dominated and girl friendly majors available and take measures to get the students to mix across fields now and then.
Obviously, there's a fair bit of nuance there, and not every status hierarchy is created equal (which actually I did point out, obliquely).
Sometimes the male instinct to excel can "misfire" by attraction to a field that that doesn't actually confer high status - video games, for example.
Performing arts could well be a special case because the necessities of drama mandate a certain fraction of men; the techniques of drama develop charisma; and the pressures of the stage mean that handsome men will tend to be preferred. So you'd expect those guys to do well.
For the record, I have found status when doing politics to be much more useful than academic status -- even status within the nerdy Libertarian Party. There is a magic to taking the stage -- even without a guitar.
Things get better if one modifies one's politics to be female compatible -- either family friendly or slut friendly. Take your pick. Consider this to be motivation to get out there and do some politicking. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/act-now-and-get-a-wife
The problem with status within fields such as physics is that it provides relatively little opportunity to put on public performances.
Same with being a writer btw - worse, probably.
Doesn't help that physicists by and large neglect their physical appearance - very few hit the gym. Just because appearance isn't the only thing that matters doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Then, as a very cerebral, unemotional, object-oriented field, it provides little for women to latch onto. Thus athletics, music, politics tend to yield better romantic payoffs.
All that said Feynman still cleaned up.
In fairness, dance, theater, poetry were all historically exclusively male professions (even if not always looked highly upon).
Compulsory-obligatory nitpick:
Depending on when and where you choose to look. Plus, what was written about these arts were almost exclusively the upper classes' perspective on them, and also the upper classes' versions of same.
Great piece! I would add, from my own research on The College Board site, that much of this is explained by the fact that females consistently score well below males on the Math portion of the SAT...about 40 points lower on average...Another consistent fact is that Education majors score far below other professions on the Graduate Record Exams, about 100 points lower...This explains why the Clintons found, after requiring teachers take a general knowledge test, that more than 1/3 scored at the 3d grade level or lower in Arkansas.....
Fantastic explanation John! I just separated from my work after several years. My direct supervisors were women. There were other reasons I left but I took notice of something which kept a lid on my attitude. I hated pushing back on them lol. It just never felt right and so I avoided it at all costs. I believe my lack of enthusiasm played a key role in my performance.
Had a colleague who did just that. He was doing quite well and still got let go. To be fair that guy was a fucking jerk and everyone knew it. I really need to make sure that hitting quota is not such a huge deal if I am going to have professional women as bosses.
That is what I have learned from my experience and I shall keep it under my hat 🤫