The Undermining of Feminism at Top Universities

The college campus used to be a hotbed of feminism and the center of the fight for women’s rights.

Now, Yale, and other top universities, are turning their backs on women’s rights altogether, instead funding far-left agendas under the guise of feminism. 

Case in point, a fall 2024 class at Yale in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department titled “Feminism Without Women” plans to “[push] back against the idea of ‘women’ as the subject of feminism.”

And yes, they did put the word women in scare quotes.

This is the natural next step for a campus that funnels money into a Yale Women’s Center that does little if anything to help women despite the Center being under investigation by the university. Rather than provide the services one would expect an officially designated women’s center to provide, it acts as little more than a vehicle for unabashedly pushing Marxist causes on campus under the banner of women’s interests, exemplified by their recent public relations disaster—organizing and subsequently postponing an event featuring openly antisemitic speakers titled “Pinkwashing and Feminism(s) in Palestine.”

Of course, the Center’s overt agenda might be more acceptable if the Yale Women’s Center was funded like every other Yale club: applying for and going through multiple rounds of funding to finance its existence. Instead, the organization benefits, perhaps disproportionately, from reliable and consistent university funding as befits the status of an institution rather than a club.

Unlike every other student group on campus, the Center has paid board positions and staff whose salaries come directly from Yale. The institution’s budget comes directly from the Office of Gender and Campus Culture to sponsor events that are often fringe left-wing and ostensibly unrelated to women’s advancement. At one point, it even had its own endowment to draw from.

As a result, it straddles the line between a student club and an official Yale University Institution with over $10,000 annually, a budget far higher than most student organizations.

The debacle with their annual conference on pinkwashing, which insisted that Israel is benefiting from performatively supporting the LGBTQ community without actually supporting it, is only the latest in a string of increasingly political events that have baffled the Yale community.

In reality, the breakdown was far from sudden. The organization’s political leanings go much further back. 

Over the past several years, the Center has increasingly directed its efforts (and substantive funding relative to other student organizations) toward supporting often openly political groups and events around the Yale and New Haven community instead of the women for whom they receive funding. These have included Yalies 4 Palestine, Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, Yale respect New Haven, New Haven tenants union, Sex Workers Alliance Network, and Transgender Visibility  Today among others.

And these kinds of overtly political shifts are (not restricted to Yale’s campus) happening at top universities everywhere. Cornell’s women’s organization, titled The Women’s Resource Center, was renamed the Gender Equity Resource Center in August 2023, “As part of an ongoing goal to better meet the needs of both women and students who identify outside the gender binary.”

This political hijacking of women’s issues is pushing out women who do not align with the political agenda of the so-called women’s spaces on their campuses.

The Yale Women’s Center has specifically been known to refuse engagement with other women’s groups on campus in the name of Marxism—and at the expense of women at Yale.

The Women’s Center board has repeatedly shut down proposals to partner with other women’s groups on campus. They claimed that such women’s organizations were “not consistent with the YWC values” and asserted that partnering with such organizations “perpetuates the evils of capitalism.”

The unwillingness to work with any group not deemed Marxist enough, even in ways that support women, forced one of the writers of this op-ed to resign from the board in frustration.

The Center’s neglect of women’s issues and groups in favor of supporting and funding activist groups like Yalies 4 Palestine and even non-Yale affiliated groups like the New Haven Housing Fund were not the only red flags.

The appearance of a tub of pronoun pins, none of which were she/her and almost all of which were “neopronouns” at the front desk; the spearheading of Queers for Palestine; and the frequent conversations about the intentional Marxist agenda of the YWC behind closed doors made it clear that the “Yale Women’s Center” had deprioritized women in favor of politics.

Other prominent higher education institutions are allowing and endorsing similar situations. For example, the two main upcoming events listed at Brown University’s women’s center, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, are a “Gender on the Move” scavenger hunt and a joint garden party with their LGBTQ Center. Women’s centers all across higher education now reek of activism rather than feminism.

One thing seems clear: America’s elite universities have no discernable interest in or even understanding of what a women’s center should be, even if it seems obvious to everyone else.

With the Center now facing investigation and possible disciplinary action for its board members, Yalies have been left wondering how the center got here, how the university allowed Marxism to cannibalize a space meant for women, and why Yale funds it. 

Funneling an outsized budget (funded by students and donors) and lending the credibility of the official-sounding “Yale Women’s Center” to such a blatantly ideological institution seems lax at best, and wanton at worst. Greater oversight of the function and funding of its institutions is required at a place of higher education as significant as Yale.

If the Women’s Center continues in its current direction, Yale has a responsibility to redirect its funding to an institution that actually provides a space on campus for women.

The Yale Women’s Center and the recent scene it has caused in drifting from its mission should remind university leadership what these groups were established for—and are still expected to be doing.