A Glimpse into the near future. By Victor Davis Hanson.
Where US universities go, the rest of US society and the West soon follows.
Females dominate:
Women number almost 60 percent of all college students — an all-time high. Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. …
Right-on bureaucrats galore:
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150 percent in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10 percent. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.
In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.
Midwits and non-whites dominate:
Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.
Consequently, “problematic” standardized tests are damned as biased and antithetical to “diversity.”
To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population — regardless of grades or test scores.
At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50 percent white and 55 percent female. Fourteen percent were admitted as “legacies.” In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23 percent white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests — but recently conceded it rejects about 70 percent of those with perfect SAT scores. …
At Cornell, students push for pass/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in New York, students demand that everyone receives “A” grades. Dean’s lists and class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission must automatically guarantee graduation—or else! …
Reality will find a way:
Traditional colleges will seize the moment and expand by sticking to meritocratic criteria as proof of the competency of their prized graduates.
Private and online venues will also fill a national need to teach Western civilization and humanities courses—by non-woke faculty who do not institutionalize bias.
More students will continue to seek vocational training alternatives. Some will get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.
And thus the Enlightenment came to an end.
