Women, Academia, and Lousy, Lousy Men

Dr. Jill Biden

Joseph Epstein is a twat-waffle who shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone. My regular readers can surely agree on this thesis. I can add nothing to the controversy surrounding Epstein’s contemptible Wall Street Journal op-ed which hasn’t already been said better by women, professional academics, and scholars of journalism. And yet, even as I consider him a total asswipe, I can’t help understanding where he’s coming from.

Admittedly, I haven’t read Epstein’s attempted take-down of presumptive First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and her use of her academic title in non-academic situations. I didn’t bother going beyond the paywall; the first paragraph, in which Epstein calls Dr. Biden “kiddo,” a term almost exclusively used on small children and women, demonstrated Epstein’s attitude promptly. I wouldn’t read a student assignment with such an opening; it demonstrates bad faith.

A former student from Epstein’s years adjuncting at Northwestern University recently posted a personal memoir of Epstein’s thoroughgoing disdain for women. His refusal to call on them in class, to acknowledge their contributions, or to believe they wrote the works they actually wrote, is probably familiar to generations of women. Yet, as a former adjunct myself, I can’t help wondering what my students thought of my treatment according to gender.

Nobody ever complained, to my face, that I favored one gender over another. Indeed, as my entire career focused on teaching Freshman Composition, I found women generally better prepared for college-level writing than men. I seldom gave 100% on any student assignment, but the two times I clearly remember, were both women. If I favored one gender, it was women, but I favored them because they—generally—earned it.

My final teaching semester, I had a student, a young man on a football scholarship, approach me after class. I found this youth, let’s call him Michael, a willing student, eager to learn, but unprepared for higher-level writing. Rarely did I actively dislike any student, but I felt warmly for Michael, because he earnestly tried to overcome his unreadiness; he genuinely wanted to succeed. He just didn’t know how.

“I don’t know, Mr. Nenstiel,” Michael said, studying his shoes with a distinct lack of confidence I don’t recall seeing in many football players, “this just feels more difficult than anything I’ve done before. I just feel like the girls are kicking my ass. I don’t know if I can compete with them, they just do so much better than me.”

Joseph Epstein, former
academic and crap journalist

This was the closest anybody ever came to accusing me of gender favoritism. The girls, Michael felt, were kicking his ass. (I distinctly remember that phrase, and have written about it before.) Yet even then, I realized, Michael saw things incorrectly. In a classroom roughly divided equally by gender, only one woman regularly participated in discussions without being called on; I had five men who eagerly participated.

Yet Michael felt outclassed, not because of classroom participation, but because of tangible, portable outputs. Later in my teaching career, I abandoned lecturing at the 101 level and began running my classes as writing workshops, which better suited my disposition. Therefore Michael had seen every student’s assigned writing, even the women who didn’t speak up, and saw they wrote with more confidence and experience. He didn’t know how to compensate.

Michael responded to this lack of preparation by turning his feelings inward and blaming himself. Personally, I’d blame a public education system dominated by “skillz drillz” and Scantron tests, administered by career overseers with little classroom experience. Women, whose brains mature earlier, need less guidance, in a guidance-free school system, than men. But someone like Joseph Epstein sees the same lopsided outcomes and blames the women for succeeding.

Nearly sixty percent of college students today are women. Women are not only more likely to enter college, they’re more likely to finish what they’ve started, and more likely to achieve graduate degrees. Academia, like business, remains dominated today by male executives and managers, but as the paucity of qualified men becomes more prominent, we’re likely to witness the female domination of post-secondary school and business, possibly within our lifetimes.

Where men like Michael consider themselves responsible for this outcome, and struggle to compete individually, men like Joseph Epstein respond by attempting to tear women down. His attack on Dr. Biden’s qualifications doesn’t merely attempt to diminish Dr. Biden, or even women generally; Epstein attacks academia itself, a system that often rewards prior preparation and early maturity. A system that, in blind outcomes, rewards women. That, to him, cannot stand.