Who ever thought all toxicity was masculine?

The empathetic traits traditionally associated with feminine behaviours have upset the balance and tenor of governance within higher education.

Perhaps the single most arresting observation that occurred to anyone while watching the academic car-crash that was the House Education & Workforce Committee hearing last December, apart from the unavoidable, spirit-sapping internal groan that accompanied the phrase, “it depends on the context”—that wholly flaccid response parroted by a trio of top-tier administrators asked whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews broke their institutions’ codes of conduct—was surely that the three university presidents assembled in front of Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik were all women.

Jael and Sisera, unknown artist. As described in the Book of Judges, the painting depicts the moment when Hebrew heroine, Jael, is about to kill the defeated commander of the Canaanite army, Sisera—and thereby deliver Israel—by hammering a tent peg into his skull while he sleeps. Image courtesy of artuk.org

The dyed-in-the-hair advocates for sweeping diversity, equity and inclusion across our modern-day campuses might want to pause at this point and check their epistemological privilege at the council chamber doors. Though it may have surprised many that the top jobs at three of today’s leading universities are held by female academics, it should not have done. One might have argued it was merely happenstance, that this was an unrepresentative sample. But it wasn’t; and it still isn’t. As Heather Mac Donald’s excellent essay disclosed last Spring, everyone should be aware that females are now ruling the roost in higher education, with three-quarters of Ivey League premierships and two-thirds of all administrative positions now occupied by women.

Critics will point to a selective bias in this data reporting, advocating that men still hold the majority of high-ranking positions overall, especially in the STEM subjects. But we scientists tend to prefer a sceptical, analytical approach. So, not to be swung by such polemic assertions, I recently looked instead to my own institution as a test case that might proffer evidence one way or the other. A quick review of the complement of The Office of the Dean at the University of Toronto Mississauga reveals there to be a male in the top job—albeit one who is openly gay—with support from an administrative team comprising 33 individuals, fully 7 of them men, just fractionally over 20%. Hearty congratulations, then, to James, Adriano, Andreas, Dakota, Ajay, Marc, and Ahad for defending the locis masculis.

Now, I’m by no means an expert on the inherent career inclinations of the two sexes, nor for that matter, those self-identifying ever more gleefully into the myriad different emerging genders—these represent one in three hundred people in Canada, so let’s not get side-tracked by a not-quite-microscopic minority—yet I sense here a lack of equality of outcome. Where is the equity we are so often promised? It behooves a modern academic, well-versed in today’s woke attitudes, and trained to scent out injustice like a bloodhound, to demand strenuously for accurate and fair gender representation. We want it, and we want it now; or at least soon—take your time.

When I once pointed out to my departmental chair, Lindsay Schoenbohm, that twice as many women as men held administrative posts at North American universities, she quickly tried to disabuse me of these misguided notions of unfairness by asserting that the men on the faculty had it “a lot easier” because they weren’t lumbered with the tedious paperwork and tiresome meetings that are part-and-parcel of the life of an administrator. She certainly has a point, there: not least because policy and curriculum meetings are undeniably purgatorial. Nonetheless, it’s unclear to me how such fuzzy logic can be substantiated when anyone appointed to such a post automatically receives a stipend (admittedly modest) and—far more valuable to the ivory tower academic—a reduction in their workload, namely the number of courses they are required to teach.

Why would any of this bother me? Perhaps it is the exasperating, monotonal narrative advanced by many women administrators exhorting professors to exhibit boundless compassion in response to student claims of adversity; to extend every assignment to the point that deadlines only exist, in any real sense, in Narnia; to inflate grades and generally to acquiesce in all matters, purely for the sake of being kind.

What’s more disturbing still is the proclivity of women in positions of power and authority at universities to fall afoul of the embarrassing antics so ably popularised by a whole generation of uncomfortably ‘liberated’ male academics in a prior era: the misguided castaways of Flower Power, free love, and the age of Aquarius.

For instance, at a departmental town hall I reported on previously in The National Post, I failed to mention one glaring interlude where the very same chair, in her introductory remarks, dwelt implausibly, gracelessly, on the camaraderie she had enjoyed working alongside a male postdoctoral fellow. The unctuous praise showered on the fortunate admiree, who sadly was not present, were reminiscent of gauche sophomore declarations of affection, and reportedly made some of my colleagues—so they were to tell me later—feel remarkably uncomfortable. Doubtless, these obsolescent men were stunned into a freeze-frame reverie imagining just how the campus ‘behaviour police’ would come crashing in carrying an enforcer if the roles were reversed and a male faculty member were to make such remarks about a female intern.

If you detect a whiff of literary grapeshot here from a disgruntled interloper, one who once held an administrative job himself and now looks back in anguish, then you’d be right. It’s fair to say that I dropped my program directorship like the scalding headpiece of the Staff of Ra from the shrieking hands of the Gestapo Kommandant, Arnold Ernst Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sturmbannführer Arnold Ernst Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Image courtesy of Indiana Jones Wiki.

But there are objective truths. Of course, I know the Postmodernists won’t have those; and that deluded, alternate reality was not long ago brought home to me at an academic panel discussion on anti-racism, something I misguidedly signed up for last Fall. Needless to say, there were wild assertions that began—in reaction to the Q&A—with my immediate marginalisation as a White Eurocentrist who was somehow responsible, at least in part, for my forefathers bringing to the New World the dual evils of science and capitalism. The natural thought progression led to more specific accusations about how the murderous British recruited typhoid and famine as weapons of mass destruction on the Indian subcontinent. I felt the militaristic surge of a sudden desire to be rid of these people course through my veins, but managed to resist the inbred temptation for genocide in the afternoon, realising it would soon be tea-time. Towards the end, the creative minds around the table had, with self-congratulatory avowals, settled on the inability of anyone ever arriving at the Truth. To this I raised exception, reminding the all-female quartet of panellists that, whereas we could each intellectually masturbate about the authenticity of our individual ‘lived experiences’ and embrace standpoint epistemology as the be-all and end-all of our existence, nevertheless we were sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a third-floor room built of glass, concrete and steel, and I would wager any one of them to gainsay my prediction of what would happen if they were to step out onto the balcony and take a dive over the safety railing. None of them took me up on that offer.

But I was talking about truth. What truth? The objective truth that I’m referring to is the abundantly obvious, inequitable composition of today’s UTM Undergraduate Curriculum Meeting, where decisions are routinely taken about what subject matter is taught in our fine university. To borrow from the playbook of now defunct Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, the roll-call of attendees might look a little bit like this:

“Vice-Dean Teaching & Learning and Committee Chair—female.”

“Program & Curriculum Assistant—female.”

“Associate-Dean, Pedagogical Development & Scholarship—female.”

“Associate Chair, Undergraduate Biology—female (with purple hair).”

“Vice-Dean Faculty—female.”

“Vice-Principal & President—female.”

Actually, the last one is misleading because she didn’t attend, but I could go on. Of course, I don’t object to any of this because, unlike the abundantly racist former Scottish First Minister, I am not going to fall into bigoted ways. I know full well that all these meritorious women were appointed by dint of their accomplishments. But if the tables were turned, how long would it be before a clamour of discontent would arise from the serried ranks of the social justice warriors? Even the high-speed photo-flashes we use to capture chemical reactions in motion would come out blurred.

If we want our universities to be governed with balance and equanimity, then surely we want our apparently lazy males to step up to the plate, or, at the very least, to take a backseat in the wheelhouse. Right now, it is not looking at all that way, and the feminine tendency for compassion has, in the words of thinkers like Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Haidt, tipped the academic environment away from intellectual challenge and debate towards the coddling of students, backing them into a ‘safe’ corner to the point of pathological—or as Gad Saad puts it—suicidal empathy. It’s past time we redress the balance. We’ve seen what the intersectionalists did to the Indiana Jones’s. Now, rather prophetically, no one can be bothered to keep up with them.