"The Great Feminization of the American University"

My colleague Heather Mac Donald has published a provocative new essay in City Journal, titled “The Great Feminization of the American University.” Mac Donald points out that women now constitute the ruling majority on campus: 75 percent of Ivy League presidents, 66 percent of college administrators, and 58 percent of recent graduates are now female.

And the consequences, Mac Donald argues, are troubling. “Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma,” she writes. “For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus.”

In my new video essay, I analyze this cultural shift and explain how the modern university has become a “therapeutic institution,” characterized by the following trends:

-The left-wing victim narrative has moved from an economic axis to a psychological axis, with “traumatizer” and “traumatized” replacing “oppressed” and “oppressed” -Individual pathology is valorized as a form of marginalized identity -This new social system incentivizes trauma, disorder, and emotional displays -The university has created a therapeutic bureaucracy that operates on political ideology

This video program is sponsored by Manhattan Institute.
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