Gender studies that have hurt our country

I read an online article the other day that talked about Camille Paglia, dissident feminist. She is an interesting person who doesn't share many of my values, but she makes sense when she talks about gender and women's studies.

 She believes women’s studies programs were rushed into existence in the 1970s partly because of national pressure to add more women to faculties that were often embarrassingly all-male.  Administrators at many colleges and universities were less concerned with maintaining scholarly rigor in these new women's studies  programs than with solving a prickly public relations problem.  The message from these classes was the same-- all gender differences are due to patriarchy, with its monolithic enslavement and abuse of women by men.  Male scholars at these schools, sensing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to challenge the new power structure and shrank back out of fear of being labeled sexist and retrograde.  

Paglia also discussed what happens to boys in school these days. Our present system of primary and secondary education should be stringently reviewed for its confinement of boys to a prison-like setting that curtails their energy and requires ideological renunciation of male traits.  When men graduate from college, the years of indoctrination have smoothed and ground down these males to obedient clones.  She charges the elite universities have become police states where an army of deans, sub-deans and faculty committees monitor and sanction male undergraduate speech and behavior if it violates the establishment feminist code. 

Finally, she discusses what this all means for our society. Her claim is that extreme gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany.  Like late Rome, America too is an empire distracted by games and leisure pursuits.  She worries that there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force.  Can we defend ourselves if we have bought into this new gender world the universities have indoctrinated us into?