[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
When a family member informed me that her granddaughter, a college student, was battling with her mother, I asked for details.
“She’s upset because her mother keeps using the wrong pronouns when addressing her,” I was told.
I recalled the college student-relative in question. She was a quiet, intense redhead when she was a small girl. She seemed normal enough then, but obviously college had changed her. She was now an advocate for gender ideology, one of the worst evils of our time. While I didn’t ask what her pronouns were, I assumed they were along the lines of ‘she/her/they’ although she could have gone full bonkers and identified as ‘he/him’ or non-binary.
If only this once-quiet redhead beauty had gone to Hillsdale College! If only her parents had taken her to church as a child for some kind of foundational structure, even if a church upbringing is no guarantee that the Left won’t abduct your child’s soul. After all, a childhood filled with Mormonism didn’t help Tyler Robinson who somehow drifted into the Left’s atheistic, violent void.
I haven’t seen this student-relative in years, so I naturally wondered what she might look and sound like now. Was she a uniform-wearing leftist with nose rings, piercings and tattoos?
Was she one of the gender lefties who celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk?
Leftwing cultural brainwashing has pretty much saturated every corner of contemporary life: hospitals, universities, theater and new plays, music, architecture, comic books and the world of publishing. Large arts organizations and cultural institutions in big cities are hiring woke young leftist women in their thirties.
In Philadelphia I have witnessed the transformation of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the Museum of Art — both under the direction of lefty woman directors — into temples of woke ideology.
In the case of the Athenaeum, the Board has been changed to reflect the political bias of the director, in effect guaranteeing a Leftist perspective far into the future. This also carries over into the selection of speakers. If you are a conservative with a new book to hawk you will not be invited to speak. This is nothing less than urban leftwing fascism.
This situation is so widespread in big blue cities like Philadelphia it will take more than one presidential administration (Trump) to even out the score and attain some ideological balance.
Even Villanova University located on Philadelphia’s Main Line, a so-called Catholic school and alma mater of Pope Leo XIV, has had a gender and women’s studies program for a number of years. In this sense, this “good” Catholic school is more radical than Texas A&M University, the largest university in America, which has no religious affiliation but operates under certain guidelines Villanova would find repressive.
On September 18, Texas A&M University forced its president Brian A. Welsh III, to step down after a controversy erupted about his handling of a student’s complaints about gender identity discussions in a children’s literature class.
The student confronted Professor Melissa McCoul over the gender content of the course, recording the confrontation on video, where she tells the professor what she is doing is illegal given President Trump’s executive order that there are only two genders. Professor McCoul said she had a right to teach the lesson while the student had the right to leave the class.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, put the video on X where it went viral. At one point there was also an audio recording of the student telling Welsh that Professor McCoul should be fired to which Welsh responded, “Well, that’s not happening.”
Welsh’s thoughtless comment to the student was something you’d expect from a dean at Harvard University. Yet by the next day he had changed his mind and fired the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Mark Zoran, and Emily Johansen, the head of the English Department, because both had approved the content of the children’s literature course.
Professor McCoul was also fired, and shortly after that President Welsh announced he was stepping down.
For Welsh, it was too little too late. His comment, “Well, that’s not happening,” was a red flag indicating that he sympathized with McCoul’s gender-views.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted on X, “His [Welsh’s] ambivalence on the issue and his dismissal of the student’s concerns by immediately taking the side of the professor is unacceptable. Most parents, students, and Aggie alumni expect Texas A&M to reflect the values of our state and our nation as well as A&M’s rich history. If President Welsh will not or cannot reflect those values, then change needs to happen.”
Meanwhile, Professor McCoul has appealed her termination and is exploring further legal action. Emily Johansen will probably follow a similar course.
Both women professors actually look like women of the Left; in photographs, McCoul, her long hair framed by bangs, can be seen cocking her head and smirking in that “Trump is a threat to democracy” way one sees at “No Kings” rallies.
Johansen’s picture — she also wears her hair in bangs — evokes the ardent feminism of novelist Virginia Woolf. (As Victor David Hanson has noted, it is in English Literature Departments where the contamination of universities had its start.)
Johansen, by the way, is the author of a book, Rereading Empathy, in which she advocates for more empathy with marginalized people. Johansen writes: “Over the last few decades… the claim has been that we need to empathize more with marginalized people as a way to alleviate social inequalities. If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don’t?”
The use of the word ‘solidarity,’ a socialist buzz word, presents a vivid portrait of this English professor.
Ironically, both McCoul and Johansen would feel more at home at “Catholic” Villanova University than at Texas A&M.
At Villanova, for instance, the Gender and Women’s Studies program there,
“…Brings feminist and queer theory into conversation with fields of study across the University, from history to sociology to global finance, helping students discover new alternatives for thinking about the problems of the world…. As teachers, we are profoundly influenced by feminist models of collaborative learning and shared authority. We recognize our students… as agents of social change.”
Yet there may be some good news on the horizon.
In 2022, the gender revolution seemed to have reached its peak, with ‘they/them’ among the most popular chosen pronouns among students and young people.
That year more than 3% of incoming students used a different set of pronouns. The analysis, according to a 2022 article in a publication called The Conversation, “was taken from more than 1.2 million applications submitted for the 2022-23 school year through the ‘Common App,’ an online application platform used by more than 900 colleges.”
That 3% in the 2022-23 school year represents about 37,000 students who did not identify as neither male nor female. That’s a lot of minds going to waste.
However in 2024, Best Colleges 2024 announced that during the 2023-2024 cycle, 1.88% of students identified as nonbinary compared to 2.2% the previous cycle.”
“This could be due to the national backlash toward nonbinary and transgender individuals,” the article concluded.
That backlash, of course, is mostly directed at the cultish push behind gender ideology that is ruining the minds and lives of so many gullible students like my grandniece.
It’s time for that push to get even harder and stronger.