A UC Berkeley math professor is fretting that her calculus students need remedial training. She exclaims that “Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics.”
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Consequently, rather than impart theorems of calculus such as continuous change, she’s guiding the lost puppies through fractions.
There are several reasons that college students are dumber today than in past generations.
During their K-12 indoctrination, they have been shortchanged by union-dominated teachers whose leaders care more about their benefits than their pupils. Moreover, they have been inculcated with DEI and Woke precepts to the detriment of essential subjects such as math.
Then there was Faustian Fauci advising to close down the schools. The teacher unions obstruct compiling real performance metrics, such as student grades and graduation rates; also, they downplay standardized testing as unfair.
Okay, that’s all pretty well established, providing a contextual prelude.
Here’s another reason college students are stuck on fractions rather than exploring the exciting world of differentiating and integrating functions. Most of the college students these days are Gen Z women. At UC Berkeley, specifically, about 55 percent of undergrads are women, while 44 percent are men (don’t ask about the remaining percent, but it’s unsettling even for Berkeley)
These students tend to thrive on DEI and woke social “justice” contrivances in their “Easy A” curricula. They are intent and content with pleasing the teacher by parroting her wokism and memorizing leftist orthodoxy. Of course, there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. Generally, members of the Gen Z cohort are being admitted to colleges thanks to lower standards.
Given the administrative bloat at colleges, you’d think they’d have time to rationalize their admissions criteria. With all the superfluous bureaucrats (outnumbering professors), they should be able to tailor admissions tests that match the applicant’s major of choice. If a prospective student is unsure about her major, then reapply when she grows up — stop wasting our time. Even pin-headed college bureaucrats should be able to manage this — just dumb down the Advanced Placement Tests a bit (the goal is not to earn college credit in high school, just to show enough aptitude to matriculate).
Instead, the Parkinson’s Law prevails in admissions offices: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. They end up admitting socialist wannabees who don’t know their elbow from their earhole, let alone the preposterous prescriptions inherent in dialectical materialism. They’ve been imparted with leftist ideology that ill-prepares them for STEM curricula, generally speaking.
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Indeed, while female enrollment in universities overall is much higher than for men, that is turned upside-down when it comes to universities specializing in STEM fields. For example, there are more male undergrads than female at MIT. When it comes to graduate studies, the gap widens. Similar differentials occur at famed Caltech in Pasadena, CA. In graduate studies, the enrollment gap is even more pronounced — 63% male, 37% female for 2025-2026.
What about the demographics of professors in universities? Overall, female and male professor ranks are roughly equal (though men dominate in higher-level courses). However, in math departments, men dominate, and this is not for want of feminists trying to fabricate gender equality.
One reasonable takeaway: loquacious females dominate in the squishy leftist arts studies that are infiltrated with woke ideology. When it comes to useful, real-world applications that enhance productivity, men are still outperforming. And it’s not as if the verbose women haven’t been afforded all manner of leg-ups: DEI, Disparate Impact provisions, and AA-cum-Reverse Discrimination, for example.
Without those anti-meritocracy concoctions, the gap would be even wider. You just know that those bloated college bureaucrats (often resentful women whose girth is literally bloated) are devising all manner of schemes to prop up women, even if it ultimately undermines scientific rigor (the results for an increasing number of research papers are embarrassingly non-reproducible).
Women are good at remembering stuff, but it’s hard to memorize solutions in higher-level math; instead, one needs to actually think through problems analytically and conceptually based on evolving scenarios. Calculus, for example, uses various types of logic; unfortunately, many of the students are incoherent bundles of irrational emotions. No wonder they are admitted to leftist-arts programs — the admission officers are likewise afflicted.
In one sense it all begs the question: why are they even enrolling in calculus classes? Most of the college majors women seek don’t require rigorous math sequences. Of their top choices, only Business and Economics at Berkeley require minimal quantitative preparation. Some women who have managed to master fractions go on to accounting, but that field doesn’t require calculus proficiency — basic algebra and statistics are often prerequisites (some of that can be memorized).
Rather than remediate math-deficient students, drop them or give them an “F.” Then send a note to the Dean of Admissions, copying the vice provost and registrar, noting that a student was improperly admitted. If supported with public funds, compile reports that delineate drop rates for students per major, then refer to admissions for their own remediation.
Here’s the upshot: An inconvenient fact for the fake feminists is that students in undergrad math classes need remedial training because a higher percentage are Woke women. In addition to squishy soft sciences and accounting, they are primed for jobs as administrative assistants, fake-news journalists, and revisionist curators at the Smithsonian, for example.
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