Emma Conroy, Contributing Writer
During your next lecture, look around. Take note of who is taking notes, who is teaching and what subject you are studying.
The current freshman class at VCU is 63.3% female and 36.7% male. That is not a footnote — it is context.
Anti-intellectualism is at a peak, yet college enrollment is at an all-time high. The value of a college education’s cultural capital is at an all-time low. Why?
Maybe it’s because college campuses have become “elitist incubators of extreme liberalism” — we’ve all heard that gripe before.
So let’s take a look; Who fills campuses? Women. Who teaches in them, particularly in the humanities and social sciences? Predominantly women. This is not incidental.
Gendered jobs and subjects involve deep-rooted societal assumptions: masculine roles mapped onto engineering, construction and leadership; feminine roles onto caregiving, education and administration. While women now make up roughly 50% of overall STEM employment, they remain under-represented in engineering at 15% and computing roles at 25%, but dominate in health care at 74%.
The institution of higher education that women entered and began shaping in the 1970s was never neutral — it was already organized around particular assumptions about what kinds of knowledge matter.
Women’s mass entry into academia coincided with — and partly drove — a shift in what was considered “valid” knowledge. The experiential, the testimonial and the emotional gained institutional legitimacy. Fields like women’s studies, trauma studies and later Diversity, Equity and Inclusion frameworks institutionalized the idea that lived experience is itself a form of expertise.
This was not anti-intellectualism in its origins — it was a genuine epistemological argument about whose knowledge and perspective had been excluded from academic discussion. But it created a template. The logic of “my experience is valid evidence” escaped its original context and became available to anyone with a grievance.
Second-wave feminism readily employed this ideology. “The personal is political” insisted that private emotional experience had structural causes and political stakes. This was a powerful and necessary claim in its moment, but the logic of “my feelings are politically valid” proved to be a democratization of grievance that no single movement could control.
Men’s rights movements adopted this rhetoric to frame male disadvantage as emotional suffering deserving redress. Culture war arguments used it to claim the injury of feeling “erased.” Therapeutic language began to bleed into legal and policy domains. The framework that women used to enter public life became the framework that reactionary movements used to contest their presence in it.
Anti-intellectualism was not necessarily born out of the gender wars — it was already baked into the American character.
Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” in 1964. He traced the condition to its roots — early Americans were egalitarian. The common sense of the people was to be trusted; the inaccessible musings of an aloof elite were not. Modern society inherited that suspicion and deepened it.
Heart and hustle came to be valued over rigor and reason. Core knowledge became secondary. Utility became primary. The country that was founded on critical thinking — at least in its aspirational myth — had quietly decided that thinking was optional.
This theory was extended into the twentieth century, where feeling became the primary currency of public life.
When the academy, once a male domain, became majority female, the anti-intellectual impulse found a new target and a new urgency. Dismissing expertise became a way of dismissing the people who now held it. The attack on institutions was an attack on their new occupants. Anti-intellectualism had always been around, but now it has a recognizable face.
Here lies the deepest irony with the framework women used to enter public life — “my experience is valid, my feelings are evidence” — became the framework men used to protest their exit from it. Two opposing movements, one shared epistemology.