Universities will be the last bastion of gender ideology and the denial of women's rights

[BridgetPhillipsonIsACowardlyJobsworth]

With thanks to @IcakethereforeIam A new/spinoff thread to discuss/commiserate about the steadfast refusal of universities to acknowledge that women have rights in law.An article from The Critic, and what I posted on the House of Communion/EDM thread (love the typo, BTW!)

https://archive.ph/L8E0b

https://thecritic.co.uk/how-the-war-wasnt-won

It is depressing, and I think she has put into words how I have been feeling lately about the whole thing. I worked in HE many years ago (not as an academic) and it seems clear to me now that, as universities always do, they will continue to move and change at a glacial pace, if at all.

Universities exist, and have for a very long time existed, in order to exist. They generate income in order to generate income. They hoard their resources in order to buy up land and build their estates, in order to generate more wealth by taking on more and more international, high-fee-paying students, whose families then do their publicity for them. Which, in turn, generates more wealth. So they can exist. In order to exist.

I believe that the only thing that will shift the HE sector will be a high-level, extremely public, lawsuit against a top-ten ranking, Russell Group institution, won with significant damages awarded. So, not one academic suing for constructive dismissal, but a suit by a high-profile, wealthy individual or foundation taken against UCL, Imperial College, or LSE, with the outcome and damages awarded not being hidden behind an NDA.

Or a major foreign donor withdrawing support for the institution.
This could take another generation. I have a feeling that universities will be the last bastion of gender ideology, where the law-deniers teach the next generation of law-deniers.

I'm very glad that I no longer work for a university.

Any thoughts? We know that many universities have withdrawn from Stonewall, but there's a lot more to do. Please cheer us all up if you have any progress in HE that you have noticed. I think we could all use a good news story right now, after the EDM and Hampstead Heath Ponds announcement.

It’s no wonder dd feels unable to be anything other than endlessly kind and agree with them.

Could she gently and without fanfare just withdraw from all that drama? A teen equivalent of the MN "Smile and nod" ?

Anything other than full-throated support and centering lead to social ostracism in one friendship group. It’s easier to just avoid the issue in some of the others, and I strongly encourage that.

So she’s currently feeling lonely and questioning whether there is something wrong with her, because any attempt to smile and nod in one friendship group means she’s accused of being oblivious to all the support that’s needed and not doing her share. It’s almost like support for vulnerable peers and each other is a shared special interest in that group, and they all bond over hours of discussion of it. They all have various diagnoses.

I do think Universities etc will be the last hold outs

https://x.com/brivael/status/2064797283280207877?s=46

(This is translated, not in French)

But it's more than just gender ideology, other things will come in as that goes out. I hope it's all for the better, I think it is on balance, but we will have to see and it's going to take a while

Yes, Ipve seen that happen in quite a few student groups. Just as a bit of strategy - does she also socialise outside of that group? At university it can be very tempting to get sucked in to one intense group but it's worth pursuing several different interests and being (lightly) part of more than one group.

So she’s currently feeling lonely and questioning whether there is something wrong with her, because any attempt to smile and nod in one friendship group means she’s accused of being oblivious to all the support that’s needed and not doing her share.

If she were one of my personal tutees and talked to me about this, I would gently suggest that her friends are manipulative, to the point of emotional abuse. I would advise her that no friendship should be so emotionally enmeshed, with punishment meted out if a friend doesn't comply. I'd be sending her to Wellbeing to talk to someone about boundaries, and finding new friends.

I had a difficult experience of dealing with this sort of enmeshment between undergrads years ago (it wasn't about traaaaanz) where one very mentally ill young person used extreme emotional blackmail on a flatmate: "If you go to your lecture, I will kill myself" sort of stuff. We had to work with the friend to reassure her that this was not a situation that was her responsibility to manage, poor lass.

Definitely in French.

Apologies the version I linked to had been translated and well, from French. There should be a translate button.

I used to think this, but I don't anymore. Universities are on the ropes. They need money. All Gen Z / Alpha / Beta have to do is make it clear they're not on board with this schtick, and a lot of it will quietly disappear.

Gender woo woo is mainstream now - it's the voice of authority - and younger generations always want to kick back against that. These generations have been brainwashed almost from the cradle, but we're already seeing pushback from them, and I think it'll only continue. I have hope.

Sounds good to me, I hope you are right about that!

Yes, agree with SnoopyPyjamas. Some institutions will be slower than others to turn the ship around. My institution was relieved to quietly lose the rainbow variants and multi-gender toilets. The students were over it a while ago, because they could see the difference between the impossible anime trans and the reality of sweet autistic kids with purple hair and balding, middle-aged males squeezed into dresses.

Why I am not surprised to see the University of Greenwich there? Their recent past features a lot of pandering to the lowest common denominator (which is probably a contributor to why they are languishing at place 119 out of 123 in the Guardian's British university ratings).

Not too long ago I came across the an article at the Higher Education Policy Institute on AI, and a senior figure at the University of Greenwich was arguing that: "If you can get generative AI to produce a summary or an abstract, then why are we asking students to do that?" I mean, maybe because it is educational? You learn to create summaries not because they are necessarily interesting in themselves, but you're teaching a valuable thinking skill. But Greenwich doesn't seem to get the need to teach thinking skills, which is maybe why they think it is a good idea to become a Stonewall Trailblazer.

(I know the quote seems unlikely, so, if anyone wants to see it in black-and-white, the link is below:

https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/06/18/using-ai-to-think-with-students-not-for-them/ )

I agree that it's not surprising they are on the list. And the list has grown a bit:

University of Greenwich
University of Brighton
The James Hutton Institute (Scotland)
Exeter University
University of Huddersfield
University of Derby
University of Northampton

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I'm sure they won't be the only HE institutions still captured.

I think the argument that "student as customer is King" that a lot of posters have made us valid. Why give your students work to do that they probably wouldn't want to do, especially if they'll just use AI to do it, and you'll turn a blind eye to it anyway? (I know this is supposedly about preparing students to use AI in the "real world" but they seem to just be throwing their hands up over the idea, and giving in).

I'm not surprised that some universities tend towards that, but I am surprised to read a quote from Pro VC saying this. I suppose they have to at least pretend that they endorse their new "simple but effective tool to consider the vulnerability of its assessments to generative AI being misused by students."

ps. Actually, perhaps the whole "students using AI in HE" needs its own thread? Obviously not on FWR, I wouldn't think. Perhaps someone wants to start one? I've been out of HE for a while, and am not an academic.

The "customer is king" aspect is definitely part of the problem. I was an undergraduate in the 1990s, and the attitude then was very much that the university revolved around the academics and you were being given an opportunity to learn from them. Returning more than a decade later as a postgraduate, institutions were very much centring students more as consumers.

But I also think there is is an aspect relating to the mentality of academia. There has long been a notion that academics represent an intellectual pinnacle in our society, yet the growing access to information in the modern world means that one can seek mental cultivation from one's sofa in the evening via the Internet. My thought is that, as knowledge becomes more accessible, academics have sought out ways to set themselves further apart from people outside academia. So, one takes on opinions, particularly unpopular opinions which are accepted as progressive, as these then become indicators of intellectual sensibilities which are portrayed as lacking in the broader population.

(I agree that the AI discussion would very quickly divert from the substance of this thread, and of this board, but that quote by the Pro VC at Greenwich is very revealing. It certainly is saying the quiet part out loud. And it also has a certain contempt for the students at the institution: "Yes, they will cheat with AI, yes, we don't want to ask them to do anything difficult." I feel it has a strand of the intellectual snobbery in it which I think is ingrained in the "progressive" attitudes behind, for instance, Stonewall affiliation.)