BigDaddy-
BigDaddySc said:
@Chase. My take is it is a reaction to the increase in sexual violence on your campuses.
Sexual violence trends are actually down significantly:
Sexual Violence Against Women Down 64 Percent In Decade.
... however, there's a huge epidemic (especially on U.S. university campuses) of false rape accusations... something to the tune of 45% to 55% of all reported rapes, it seems:
How to Avoid and Deal with False Rape Accusations.
Societies go through periods of sexual restriction followed by periods of sexual openness, and back and forth; e.g., the sexual freedom of the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s followed by the restriction of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and the sexual openness of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s have been an odd set of decades with a great deal of disunity, and groups of people (mostly unattractive women and low status men) pushing for simultaneously both sexual freedom of one sex and sexual repression of another, apparently not realizing that the sexes are linked and must work together either in repression or expression (possibly because the leaders of this push
are largely high-testosterone women who do not represent the female opinion at large and are more likely to think aggressively/masculinely than cooperatively/femininely).
I suspect the enabling of this is due to the "outrage machine" that's taken over Western politics, and actually started with Fox (right-wing) News in the U.S., then became adopted by the CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS (left-wing) News shows, which turned the news into nothing but cut-and-paste sensationalism / outrage du jour. Once the news was doing this, anyone who wanted a platform to make outrage public suddenly had an huge channel to broadcast what were essentially minority views and make them sound like they had the support of the majority from all the credibility being on a national news broadcast imbued. Suddenly, anyone could do a takedown on his enemies if he fit the right victim narrative and could portray himself as sufficiently injured and/or outraged; the news needed sensationalist stories to keep its ratings up. The news still plays this role of "officializer" of drama and sensationalism, taking, say, Twitter protests or change.org protests run by a few thousand people and turning them into national movements and portraying them as expressions of unified national sentiment.
The outcome for universities was a hush falling over many larger U.S. institutions, responding fearfully to what appeared to be (yet was in fact far from) the "will of society", with universities being especially sensitive to this, likely because they're already insulated "ivory tower" places easily swayed by argument and abstraction, and because they'd been on a large pro-female student kick already for decades, trying to get more and more female students and distance themselves from their old male-dominated histories, and showing solidarity with female students by taking stands against their male students to make the campus a safer place for women appeared to be a natural next step.
A funny effect of the universities giving over to mob rule is that many of them have effectively transitioned into a model closer to the long-defunct student-controlled model
championed by the University of Bologna in the Middle Ages from the 13th to 15th centuries. Professors are censored or terminated if they offend students, grades are revised if students complain loudly enough, course material is controlled by student complaints. The student-controlled model failed in the Middle Ages because Middle Age universities served as vocational institutions (much as today's universities do), and student-controlled universities simply didn't provide competitive alumni in the after-school jobs market (and over time, everyone realizes which schools produce the "Grade A" workers who come in and make the business more money, and which ones produce the "Grade B" workers who primarily serve as placeholders and paycheck-collectors). It seems this lesson needs to be relearned by many of today's universities, all too eager to follow the fickle whims of student bodies and assume the students know better than the teachers do:
The Coddling of the American Mind
I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me
I'm not certain if there's a way to make co-educational universities work in an anti-monogamous/marriage society like the West is right now. Co-ed worked when women went to university to get their MRS degree (i.e., find a husband), but it doesn't seem to work so well when they're approaching university as a place to further political goals of alternating expression and repression instead of one to get an education or a life partner (it's not even all or most women causing these problems; instead it's a "few bad apples spoil the whole bunch" deal). I suspect you'll see a trend of male-only universities re-emerging that promise a quality education free from drama and political intrigue, since this seems to be the major market gap that isn't being served right now: men who just want an education, instead of re-education.
Chase
