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.
Use me and my wife as an example. We both started out having real jobs - and some of those were real odd-jobs and outliers, before we got our pass into higher education and tried for academia proper.
And when you're forklift-driver (me) or a crematory oven operator's assistant (the wife) and still in your late teens, you learn darn quick that the job cannot be done by blathering, changing your analysis, or introspecting on privilege. The lorry is either loaded and ready to go at H-hour, or it is not.
I've heard from many, that the best academics in any field are the ones who /first/ had jobs, then started to study. Sadly, western education has since the 1970s been focused on and measured against, how quickly it can process how many 20-year-olds towards a degree, of any kind. Which means we now have a majority of civil servants, politicians, administrators, et cetera in private and public sectors that are the eq. of "desktop generals".
And there's no immediate incentive or gain for anyone with the power to change that, to change it.
Insightful. I took several years off before graduate school, and the difference with the other students was palpable. They'd never known anything but the classroom. I'd seen the real world. I had perspective they didn't. It made me a lot less neurotic, and a lot more focused on what actually mattered, on what was tangibly important ... and much more sensitive to bullshit.
It was also observed by many professors after 1945 when the GI Bill enabled many vets to enter the college, many the first in their families. They remarked how serious and professional the vets were compared to the students in 20s and 30s.
It’s not just the colleges that are in trouble. Boys simply have no “grooming” tradition at all for their childhood. I was an Eagle Scout when the Scouting was fast becoming uncool compared to video games.
If we take a page from Sparta, we might require the boys and girls to enter their sex-specific scouting group and be trained in PE, sport, camping, volunteering on the farms, and other stuff at age of 7. This would teach them how to cooperate and to develop skills. Then at 13, move them into more challenging tasks that prepare them for both war and peace. By 16, both sexes will work together on things like highway beautification and nursing. This enable them a chance to find mates for later. At this age, they would be entering an apprenticeship in a guild to learn how a business and trade is run and be plugging into their masters’ network of patrons, specialists, and others. By the time they enter a college, both sexes will be serious and worldly and not buying the academic BS. If they quit, they will already have the skills and contacts to create a good life.
The one thing I don't agree with there is having them work together. Teenage boys should not be forced to work as nurses.
Instead, their education should include things like dancing. Then, bring them together at dances and social events, in order to facilitate match-making.
Exact same experience we had. Doubly so the last time I went back in to get some odd course I was lacking, and could get comp'ed for taking. Most students were 20ish, I was going on 40. When I would argue points with a lecturer, it often felt like two adults in a room full of kids - no slight on the students intended, they didn't make the system.
Another idea appeared:
You know of all the "epidemics" of mental disorders seemingly hitting women these days. Isn't this true, that it is almost exclusively white western women that are hit?
My idea which came to me in my sleep, was: Western women are susceptible to the ravages of social media just as all women are more susceptible to those, but white western women seem hit much harder than any other group, including white eastern European women. Why would that be, if vulnerability to the ills of social media are tied into either sex' respective susceptibility - in plural, at that?
And it hit me: because only western women have been subjected to the self-hate ideology of feminism for 120 years in total, and only /white/ western women have been part of the 70 years of Hollywood and other assorted US-originated propaganda that white equals the root of all evil, and may be thrashed and denigrated and humiliated at will.
Small wonder it is then that the 30-and-under are so ill, so sick, and no wonder at all that their inner conditioned self-loathing comes out as aggression against the ones making them aware of it: white western men, since the latter are a-okay to hate, being the epitome of all evil.
What do you think? Is it too neat, too pat, too much an Ad Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc or some other logical snare?
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.
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!
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?
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.
But after the HR-ification of corporations in the 2000s the impact of a degree’s value evaporated. A 4.0 gpa in physics was equivalent to a 2.5 in “communications” for the right “people”.
Moreover, a generation of low interest rates has meant corporations have de-emphasized profits and focused on adding new layers of bureaucracy in the name of compliance and regulation - all of which detracts from the bottom line. Obviating the need for a competitive hiring process.
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.
You've described the female of the historical Engineering students to a T. Attending a private university in the mid-70s noted for its engineering programs, I observed no exception to the stereotypes of the time: the relatively few females were geeky, not very attractive tomboys who had their romantic choice of dozens of fellow male geeks who had no other way to relate than to do "science." My roommate was involved for a time with a fellow mechanical engineer and spent their time together designing better submarines. It can't be that different now.
Sadly, it is different now. Back then it was nerdy tomboys. Now many are there specifically out of a mission to be Women In STEM, without any genuine passion or talent for the field.
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.
WRT the dynamic, go read J.D. Unwin, "Sex and Culture," 1934. You can skip the case studies in the middle.
The current Western era of feminism isn't the first time humanity has seen feminism. It seems to emerge as an artifact of r/K selection. When resource availability goes high enough, humans flip over to r-selection. High(er) sex drive, lower investment in offspring, more offspring. This time IS different because of the pill - more sex, no offspring, akin to a plague event. Feminism is an artifact of the society reaching "effectively infinite" resources - the society flips to pursuing its eccentric vision of perfect justice, regardless of the cost. The liberation of all "suppressed" segments of society shows up, always including women.
This will continue until decadence drives the society into collapse, or until a conservative reaction shuts down the era of perfect justice in favor of a hydraulic despotism steady state. During conservative reactions, women are put back into the harems, chador, foot binding, and close male supervision.
To parallel the point made about Spengler in the article - the West's era of Kultur is already over. So the West will see no more profound cultural developments. And I'm currently thinking that the Empire of the West will encompass the Earth - the planet is too small for multiple powers after endgame is played out. That implies that an era of hydraulic despotism could last a VERY long time if we don't break out. Soon.
I think collapse is the more likely scenario whether it be by economics or nuclear war. I don't see China or Russia gladly signing on to the Empire of the West. Just one EMP bomb will kill 90% of the US population. Haven't seen the estimates for Europe but probably one more. Of course, retaliation would ensue so it is in their interest to just wait until the debt bomb detonates. It is not just the US either. France is carrying a debt load at the level that provoked intervention against the PIIGS and the government is paralyzed. Germany is deindustrializing as if the Morgenthau plan had been implemented except they are attacking agriculture too.
I would not write the West off just yet. Because Spengler said it, doesn't mean it is a prophecy. If there is any civilization that can reverse the tides of history, it's the Faustian. Shattering limits is what we're about, after all.
As to encompassing the globe, in a sense the West already does; not politically, but very nearly culturally. Simply look at the fashions that prevail in China or Russia; the kind of music they listen to; and so on. It's all derivative of the West.
But there's no reason we need to limit ourselves to one planet, either. Opening a frontier may be precisely what we need to revive ourselves or, failing that, to plant the seeds of our successors.
“ Geniuses aren’t just smart, they are weird assholes.”
This made me laugh. Newton was noted to be thinking hard while standing in a stairwell for hours on end. He was also prickly and obsessed with the biblical prophecies, which was as different from physics as one can imagine.
You said you couldn't think of a field off the top of your head that was dominated by women and then taken over later by men. Computer Science in its early years was dominated by women. That's because it involved a lot of "careful, routine, detail-orientated tasks" and was "mostly the scientific equivalent of quilting, needlework, and interior decorating." And because it started out almost entirely theoretical, it was also low status. But once it started becoming useful and more complex that's when it started to attract "the kinds of creative, intuitive leaps that shatter the old wine bottles of exhausted paradigms and lead to breakthroughs in our understanding." Also, once people started making lots of money in computers then computer science became high status and it quickly flipped over to male-dominated.
I have a computer science degree, btw. I went to college in the 90's and really wanted a physics degree but I looked around and saw there was no money to be made in physics. Computer programming on the other hand... it has done well for me, financially. I still consider my job to be soul-sucking and I can't wait to retire soon.
Also, while I don't recommend the military for everyone, I spent 4 years in the US marine corps and when I got out at the age of 22, I was HUNGRY for something else and ruthlessly disciplined in my ability and drive to get it. I hated my time in the USMC but it gave me something I wouldn't have had otherwise. I got my bachelor's degree in 3 years with a high paying tech job 2 years into that effort all while working full time (mostly nights) and raising a family with 2 very young kids and a wife who was also going to college.
Just from examining the AEI/DOE data I used in the article, comp sci doesn't seem to have ever been dominated by women; but, it was very anomalous in that it had a rapid increase in women - as with other fields - followed by a precipitous decline. I pointed this out but didn't dig into it.
My hypothesis was that in the 80s something happened to scare the hoes, which I suspect was the entry into the field of the stereotypical IT guy computer nerd. Reading around a bit, it seems the invention of the personal computer, and its early popularity amongst undersocialized autistic shutins as a hobbyist tool, led to lots of geeks enrolling ... who the girls really didn't want to be around.
All that would have been before comp sci was really high status, which really kicked in after the 90s.
Another factor is that the internal culture of comp sci was always much less academic, and more focused on real world experience. The field retains this character still: more concerned with commits than credentials. This task-centric, performance-orientated disposition probably helps to maintain it as something of a male stronghold (though that seems to have been changing over the last several years; or at least, there have been efforts to change it).
Ya, I know it's wikipedia..., but the "factual" parts of the page are consistent with what I learned in the 90's before wikipedia existed. In particular, I was thinking of the 1940s section of that page.
I'm talking about in the 1940's is when women were more numerous in computer science before it was even called computer science. At least, that was what I was taught in my comp sci classes in college which may be somewhat or completely suspect. I guess I could re-examine that history.
Yes, and that was really just an extension of their work as “computers” - grinding through tedious calculations on behalf of scientists and engineers with better things to do. That being where the word “computer” originated - the devices were an automation of a function performed by human workers. So it makes sense that many of them switched to managing punch cards and such.
I'm still digesting it and thinking about how to present it to my partner. She will argue environmental causes, though I will remind her that there has been unrelenting efforts to get women into STEM fields for at least 30 years. They are just not interested. Couldn't be more obvious.
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.....
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.
That’s what Space Moose was for lol
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.
Seems legit, as the phrase is.
Use me and my wife as an example. We both started out having real jobs - and some of those were real odd-jobs and outliers, before we got our pass into higher education and tried for academia proper.
And when you're forklift-driver (me) or a crematory oven operator's assistant (the wife) and still in your late teens, you learn darn quick that the job cannot be done by blathering, changing your analysis, or introspecting on privilege. The lorry is either loaded and ready to go at H-hour, or it is not.
I've heard from many, that the best academics in any field are the ones who /first/ had jobs, then started to study. Sadly, western education has since the 1970s been focused on and measured against, how quickly it can process how many 20-year-olds towards a degree, of any kind. Which means we now have a majority of civil servants, politicians, administrators, et cetera in private and public sectors that are the eq. of "desktop generals".
And there's no immediate incentive or gain for anyone with the power to change that, to change it.
Insightful. I took several years off before graduate school, and the difference with the other students was palpable. They'd never known anything but the classroom. I'd seen the real world. I had perspective they didn't. It made me a lot less neurotic, and a lot more focused on what actually mattered, on what was tangibly important ... and much more sensitive to bullshit.
It was also observed by many professors after 1945 when the GI Bill enabled many vets to enter the college, many the first in their families. They remarked how serious and professional the vets were compared to the students in 20s and 30s.
It’s not just the colleges that are in trouble. Boys simply have no “grooming” tradition at all for their childhood. I was an Eagle Scout when the Scouting was fast becoming uncool compared to video games.
If we take a page from Sparta, we might require the boys and girls to enter their sex-specific scouting group and be trained in PE, sport, camping, volunteering on the farms, and other stuff at age of 7. This would teach them how to cooperate and to develop skills. Then at 13, move them into more challenging tasks that prepare them for both war and peace. By 16, both sexes will work together on things like highway beautification and nursing. This enable them a chance to find mates for later. At this age, they would be entering an apprenticeship in a guild to learn how a business and trade is run and be plugging into their masters’ network of patrons, specialists, and others. By the time they enter a college, both sexes will be serious and worldly and not buying the academic BS. If they quit, they will already have the skills and contacts to create a good life.
The one thing I don't agree with there is having them work together. Teenage boys should not be forced to work as nurses.
Instead, their education should include things like dancing. Then, bring them together at dances and social events, in order to facilitate match-making.
Exact same experience we had. Doubly so the last time I went back in to get some odd course I was lacking, and could get comp'ed for taking. Most students were 20ish, I was going on 40. When I would argue points with a lecturer, it often felt like two adults in a room full of kids - no slight on the students intended, they didn't make the system.
Another idea appeared:
You know of all the "epidemics" of mental disorders seemingly hitting women these days. Isn't this true, that it is almost exclusively white western women that are hit?
My idea which came to me in my sleep, was: Western women are susceptible to the ravages of social media just as all women are more susceptible to those, but white western women seem hit much harder than any other group, including white eastern European women. Why would that be, if vulnerability to the ills of social media are tied into either sex' respective susceptibility - in plural, at that?
And it hit me: because only western women have been subjected to the self-hate ideology of feminism for 120 years in total, and only /white/ western women have been part of the 70 years of Hollywood and other assorted US-originated propaganda that white equals the root of all evil, and may be thrashed and denigrated and humiliated at will.
Small wonder it is then that the 30-and-under are so ill, so sick, and no wonder at all that their inner conditioned self-loathing comes out as aggression against the ones making them aware of it: white western men, since the latter are a-okay to hate, being the epitome of all evil.
What do you think? Is it too neat, too pat, too much an Ad Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc or some other logical snare?
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.
Remember several lecturers who induced effects akin to mild concussion for precisely that reason. It is neurocognitive hazing for the students.
Absolutely deadening, yes.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
And then employers realized that an A from McGill didn't mean what it used to, thereby devaluing everyone's degrees…
Absolutely.
But after the HR-ification of corporations in the 2000s the impact of a degree’s value evaporated. A 4.0 gpa in physics was equivalent to a 2.5 in “communications” for the right “people”.
Moreover, a generation of low interest rates has meant corporations have de-emphasized profits and focused on adding new layers of bureaucracy in the name of compliance and regulation - all of which detracts from the bottom line. Obviating the need for a competitive hiring process.
I experienced this first hand when I entered the labor market in the early 2000s with a useless physics Hon. B. Sc.
My mind is reeling from that one. Physics is peak brainpower by definition. No ifs or buts.
My favourite cab driver is an ex-physics grad who used to work as a civil servant. Always a pleasure for me but a burning indictment on my country.
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.
I have always enjoyed your articles, but this one is an absolute banger. Please keep it up.
Cheers!
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.
You've described the female of the historical Engineering students to a T. Attending a private university in the mid-70s noted for its engineering programs, I observed no exception to the stereotypes of the time: the relatively few females were geeky, not very attractive tomboys who had their romantic choice of dozens of fellow male geeks who had no other way to relate than to do "science." My roommate was involved for a time with a fellow mechanical engineer and spent their time together designing better submarines. It can't be that different now.
Sadly, it is different now. Back then it was nerdy tomboys. Now many are there specifically out of a mission to be Women In STEM, without any genuine passion or talent for the field.
It has been my experience that geniuses also HAVE weird ass holes.
Ha!
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.
WRT the dynamic, go read J.D. Unwin, "Sex and Culture," 1934. You can skip the case studies in the middle.
The current Western era of feminism isn't the first time humanity has seen feminism. It seems to emerge as an artifact of r/K selection. When resource availability goes high enough, humans flip over to r-selection. High(er) sex drive, lower investment in offspring, more offspring. This time IS different because of the pill - more sex, no offspring, akin to a plague event. Feminism is an artifact of the society reaching "effectively infinite" resources - the society flips to pursuing its eccentric vision of perfect justice, regardless of the cost. The liberation of all "suppressed" segments of society shows up, always including women.
This will continue until decadence drives the society into collapse, or until a conservative reaction shuts down the era of perfect justice in favor of a hydraulic despotism steady state. During conservative reactions, women are put back into the harems, chador, foot binding, and close male supervision.
To parallel the point made about Spengler in the article - the West's era of Kultur is already over. So the West will see no more profound cultural developments. And I'm currently thinking that the Empire of the West will encompass the Earth - the planet is too small for multiple powers after endgame is played out. That implies that an era of hydraulic despotism could last a VERY long time if we don't break out. Soon.
I think collapse is the more likely scenario whether it be by economics or nuclear war. I don't see China or Russia gladly signing on to the Empire of the West. Just one EMP bomb will kill 90% of the US population. Haven't seen the estimates for Europe but probably one more. Of course, retaliation would ensue so it is in their interest to just wait until the debt bomb detonates. It is not just the US either. France is carrying a debt load at the level that provoked intervention against the PIIGS and the government is paralyzed. Germany is deindustrializing as if the Morgenthau plan had been implemented except they are attacking agriculture too.
I would not write the West off just yet. Because Spengler said it, doesn't mean it is a prophecy. If there is any civilization that can reverse the tides of history, it's the Faustian. Shattering limits is what we're about, after all.
As to encompassing the globe, in a sense the West already does; not politically, but very nearly culturally. Simply look at the fashions that prevail in China or Russia; the kind of music they listen to; and so on. It's all derivative of the West.
But there's no reason we need to limit ourselves to one planet, either. Opening a frontier may be precisely what we need to revive ourselves or, failing that, to plant the seeds of our successors.
“ Geniuses aren’t just smart, they are weird assholes.”
This made me laugh. Newton was noted to be thinking hard while standing in a stairwell for hours on end. He was also prickly and obsessed with the biblical prophecies, which was as different from physics as one can imagine.
Newton was also infamously mean-spirited.
Many such cases.
Great article, as usual.
You said you couldn't think of a field off the top of your head that was dominated by women and then taken over later by men. Computer Science in its early years was dominated by women. That's because it involved a lot of "careful, routine, detail-orientated tasks" and was "mostly the scientific equivalent of quilting, needlework, and interior decorating." And because it started out almost entirely theoretical, it was also low status. But once it started becoming useful and more complex that's when it started to attract "the kinds of creative, intuitive leaps that shatter the old wine bottles of exhausted paradigms and lead to breakthroughs in our understanding." Also, once people started making lots of money in computers then computer science became high status and it quickly flipped over to male-dominated.
I have a computer science degree, btw. I went to college in the 90's and really wanted a physics degree but I looked around and saw there was no money to be made in physics. Computer programming on the other hand... it has done well for me, financially. I still consider my job to be soul-sucking and I can't wait to retire soon.
Also, while I don't recommend the military for everyone, I spent 4 years in the US marine corps and when I got out at the age of 22, I was HUNGRY for something else and ruthlessly disciplined in my ability and drive to get it. I hated my time in the USMC but it gave me something I wouldn't have had otherwise. I got my bachelor's degree in 3 years with a high paying tech job 2 years into that effort all while working full time (mostly nights) and raising a family with 2 very young kids and a wife who was also going to college.
Just from examining the AEI/DOE data I used in the article, comp sci doesn't seem to have ever been dominated by women; but, it was very anomalous in that it had a rapid increase in women - as with other fields - followed by a precipitous decline. I pointed this out but didn't dig into it.
My hypothesis was that in the 80s something happened to scare the hoes, which I suspect was the entry into the field of the stereotypical IT guy computer nerd. Reading around a bit, it seems the invention of the personal computer, and its early popularity amongst undersocialized autistic shutins as a hobbyist tool, led to lots of geeks enrolling ... who the girls really didn't want to be around.
All that would have been before comp sci was really high status, which really kicked in after the 90s.
Another factor is that the internal culture of comp sci was always much less academic, and more focused on real world experience. The field retains this character still: more concerned with commits than credentials. This task-centric, performance-orientated disposition probably helps to maintain it as something of a male stronghold (though that seems to have been changing over the last several years; or at least, there have been efforts to change it).
Reference this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
Ya, I know it's wikipedia..., but the "factual" parts of the page are consistent with what I learned in the 90's before wikipedia existed. In particular, I was thinking of the 1940s section of that page.
I'm talking about in the 1940's is when women were more numerous in computer science before it was even called computer science. At least, that was what I was taught in my comp sci classes in college which may be somewhat or completely suspect. I guess I could re-examine that history.
Yes, and that was really just an extension of their work as “computers” - grinding through tedious calculations on behalf of scientists and engineers with better things to do. That being where the word “computer” originated - the devices were an automation of a function performed by human workers. So it makes sense that many of them switched to managing punch cards and such.
I'm still digesting it and thinking about how to present it to my partner. She will argue environmental causes, though I will remind her that there has been unrelenting efforts to get women into STEM fields for at least 30 years. They are just not interested. Couldn't be more obvious.
They aren't interested in it for its own sake. And that's okay! People shouldn't be forced to be interested in things.
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.....
Women aren't great at spatial reasoning, therefore don't excel in the physical sciences.
As for education majors, they're the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Clearly...the best teachers our kids saw had generally majored in a real subject...
Always the case. "Education" should be banned as a program of study.