Femaleness and its Discontents 1

More than half of Iraqi oil comes from wells with Chinese involvement, and 30% of Iraq’s oil goes to China.

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Pigeons and doves are technically the same exact animal. In fact, the only real difference is in the name: the word "dove" is more Nordic, while "pigeon" has a French origin. Despite the fact that there's no big difference between the birds, some people tend to categorize them by size, dubbing bigger birds pigeons, while smaller ones are typically called doves.

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There is enough salt in the ocean to cover the Earth's entire surface. If all of the salt was spread out across the entire planet, it would reportedly be about 500 feet thick, or the height of a 40-story office building. Most of the salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land and is typically transported by rainwater runoff.

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Femaleness and its Discontents 1

Pitt has appointed a new president, a woman who will join part of a revolution in education bureaucracy and sensibility. Here's part of an article that believes the advancement of women in academia is not an 'advance,' it's a symptom.

'New York University’s selection of its new president is Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker, and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy.

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate

Mirroring the feminization of the bureaucracy is the feminization of the student body. Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. 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. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change. College institutions “really have a part to play in how we support students” suffering from that mental health crisis, Beilock tweeted recently. (A psychologist, Beilock specializes in improving female success in science by combatting performance anxiety, making her another overdetermined choice for university president.)

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity. On taking the helm of Barnard College in 2018 before ascending four years later to Dartmouth, Beilock pledged to ensure that the college was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Both terms are overwrought. There is nothing at Barnard or any other American campus that could rationally be cause for “fear” (apart from the possible incursion of violent street crime from surrounding areas); there has never been a more welcoming, supportive, and tolerant institution in human history than a college campus, at least toward humanity’s traditionally marginalized groups. Likewise, “hate” can be found here only under its new definition as a disfavored ideological position—the position, say, that seven-year-olds should not have premature knowledge of sexuality forced upon them via in-school “gender” instruction.

Given the ubiquity on campuses of the language of vulnerability, it is fitting that Linda Mills’s social work specialty is trauma. Her trauma research has centered on domestic violence, where the concept has legitimate applications. But the claim that NYU is a place of pervasive unsafety will likely get an additional boost from Mills’s ascendancy. In her letter of introduction as NYU’s president-designate, Mills adopted the fateful vocabulary of hurt and trauma. “We are a community that is hurting,” Mills asserted, especially after the “traumatic effects” of the pandemic. (The real hurt was inflicted by the unnecessary lockdowns, whose victims were not NYU’s bureaucrats, professors, or even most of its students, but rather small-business owners deprived of livelihoods and children whose parents did not have the capacity to homeschool them. The record does not reflect an effort by NYU’s leaders to combat those lockdowns.)

Mills portrayed the U.S. as endemically biased: “In the United States and elsewhere, we are struggling to address persistent inequalities and discrimination, whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or other factors.” This by-now reflexive condemnation of alleged American bigotry is at best an awkward, and at worst an irrelevant, importation into a president’s first message to her university. In an alternative world, Mills might have celebrated the joy of learning and the grandeur of the Western tradition. But in any case, the real “struggle” should be to close the academic skills gaps whose effects the academy then attributes to racism.'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (to be continued)