The splendidly clear-sighted researcher and writer and defender of reason Heather Mac Donald wrote this in a City Journal article, Spring 2020. Its truth abides.

The feminization of the university and the prominence of therapeutic culture [both of which she amply demonstrates to be facts] have created a perfect storm directed at free speech and reason. In a recent survey of college students, females were twice as likely as males to say that a controversial speaker should be canceled if the majority of students “feel emotionally unsafe or uncomfortable with the speaker’s content.” Males, by contrast, were more likely to support a controversial invitation in the name of academic freedom and the advancement of knowledge. …

The real crisis in academia is not mental health; it is the breakdown of universities’ understanding of their core mission. All other alleged crises follow from this one. Education exists for one main purpose: to pass on an inheritance of human achievement …  Yet faculty have lost the language for celebrating that inheritance; they have gone mute, or worse, when it comes to articulating the splendors of Western civilization.

College is not even about the promotion of happiness. That is too utilitarian a goal; knowledge is an end in itself. But even were student happiness a legitimate matter for colleges to concern themselves with, a therapeutic approach is the wrong way to cultivate it. The surest route to happiness is a passion for something outside the self. The only thing that kept Bertrand Russell from committing suicide during his adolescence was his desire to learn more math, he recounts in his 1930 book, The Pursuit of Happiness. As an adult, his “diminishing preoccupation” with himself led to growing contentment: “Every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui,” he wrote. J. S. Mill, who also grappled with depression, agreed. “The only chance [for happiness] is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life,” Mill wrote in his autobiography. …

Away with Women’s Studies (and Black Studies, Chicano Studies …)!

Our civilization is engaged in an unprecedented experiment: turning on its own accomplishments with shame and contempt. American students growing up today are given reason to be proud of their heritage only if they have had that rare nonconforming teacher who still honors the past. Otherwise, students are taught to see in the monuments of Western thought and imagination a thinly veiled power grab. They themselves are either oppressors or the oppressed, either category spirit-killing. …

The university’s comparative advantage over all other institutions should be the promise of real knowledge. But as the therapeutic culture has spread throughout the university, the language of reason and evidence has been replaced by claims of emotional hurt. In any controversy, the person who can express the deepest outrage or injury wins the day …  “I feel like” substitutes for rational argument.

Of course women are the emotional sex. Their feelings rule them because their physiology torments them. Their temperatures go up and down as the moon waxes and wanes.

Dear Patriarchs,

Thank you for still being there.

Please don’t put women at the helm of the ship of state. Do not put their fingers on “the nuclear button”. Do not seat them in a passenger-jet cockpit. Do not send them to the battle front. Do not give them the job of defending the innocent or prosecuting the guilty in a court of law, or judging guilt and innocence.

Do not give them power.

There are exceptions among them who are capable of reason. Those few will make themselves known. As a general rule –  be nice to women but remind them that there are only two sexes, and they’re the sex that’s destined by biological evolution to feel the tragedy of life, while you can laugh at its comedy.

Let them weep and wail. Out of earshot.

You? Discover and invent.