When Evidence Is Branded as Hate

On today’s campuses, evidence itself is too often branded as hostility. Research that once sparked debate now risks being dismissed as “harm.” At Sarah Lawrence College, that reflex has escalated further: a faculty member joined students in a federal lawsuit, mischaracterizing scholarship as an “attack.” That isn’t mentoring or teaching. It is indoctrination in grievance tactics, and it represents a dangerous turning point for higher education.

I know this firsthand. In a complaint just filed in the Southern District of New York (Case 1:25-cv-06442, filed August 5, 2025), a group of students and a faculty member sued Sarah Lawrence College and Congress over the potential release of material related to campus protests and violent building occupation. Though the case is not about me or my writing, the filing made use of well-known anti-Semitic tropes against me as a Jewish and Zionist professor – the filing invoked the “myth of Jewish greed” and posited that I am a “mouthpiece for…deep-pocketed benefactors” – and then made note of my co-authored article in Real Clear Investigations, The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female, mislabeling it as an “attack” on “politically active women.”

The claim about my article is false and irresponsible and was presumably uttered, in part, in response to my Jewish faith and Zionist heritage. Unsurprisingly, the claim was made by fiat and declared as an “attack” without further commentary or data. The article, in reality, is not a polemic but an empirical exploration of how unmarried, childless Millennials and Gen Z women have emerged as a decisive Democratic voting bloc.

The demographic shifts we highlighted are profound. In the 2022 midterms, CNN exit polls showed that 68 percent of unmarried women voted Democratic, while married men, married women, and unmarried men leaned Republican, according to exit polling data. That stark divide reflects decades of change. In 1950, only about one in five women had never married; today it is more than one in three. Over the same period, the share of married women fell from nearly 70 percent to under half, and the percentage of households anchored by married couples with children dropped from 37 percent in 1976 to just 21 percent today. Attitudes have shifted alongside these patterns: nearly two-thirds of women under 30 now say what happens to other women directly affects them, compared with fewer than half of women over 50.

These are not opinions; they are empirical realities. And they raise many pressing questions: What happens when partisan identity increasingly maps onto marital status? What does it mean for civic institutions when family formation diverges so sharply along ideological lines? How should policymakers adapt to an electorate in which marriage and childbearing arrive later—or never?

These are precisely the kinds of questions collegiate environments should welcome – especially at Sarah Lawrence College, which was a pioneer in women’s history. Instead, the data was labeled as an “attack.”

Making such serious claims about ideas and written work isn’t laziness. It is an active assault on scholarly norms.

The proper role of faculty is always the same: challenge, publish counter-analysis, invite debate. That is how disciplines evolve, and how students learn the habits of democratic citizenship. What professors may never do, without betraying their profession, is collaborate with students to suppress data and ideas because it makes some uncomfortable. Colleges should be centers where students are occasionally uncomfortable because they encounter questions and ideas that unsettle them, their norms, biases, and prejudices. A solid liberal arts education will ensure that students “learn to work through differences in opinion, cultures, and worldviews.”

The consequences of seeing a professor model the behavior in this complaint are profound. When students are taught and see in legal cases that disagreement equals hostility and analysis equals harm, they don’t learn how to debate, govern, or compromise. They learn fragility, not resilience; smears, not study. They carry these habits into civic life, where compromise and persuasion are essential.

The chilling effect is obvious. An inconvenient demographic finding could be caricatured as “hate,” and that impulse could silence generations of scholars whose work asks hard questions about family, inequality, or political behavior. Scholarship would wither not because it was wrong but because it was risky.

This is not the first time America has seen research suppressed by outrage. In the late 1960s, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the Black family identified troubling demographic trends. The data were real, but the backlash was immediate. Critics denounced the report as racist, and for years it was sidelined. Only later did scholars and policymakers acknowledge how prescient some of the findings had been. The lesson is clear: dismissing evidence because it is uncomfortable does not erase problems; it only makes society less prepared to address them.

This matters beyond the ivory tower. Parents who send their children to college expect them to encounter ideas, wrestle with evidence, and emerge more capable of handling life in a pluralistic democracy. Taxpayers fund public research with the expectation that truth-seeking, not political theater, will guide universities. When faculty instead model fragility and teach students to weaponize institutions against inquiry, it is not just the academy that suffers: it is every citizen who depends on universities to cultivate knowledge, resilience, and civic competence.

The same mistake is being repeated now. The proper response to papers that challenge norms has always been more evidence, sharper arguments, deeper debate. If professors think my work is flawed, they should marshal counter-data, publish alternative analyses, and invite open discussion. That is how students learn what genuine intellectual engagement looks like.

Our article asked questions; it did not pass judgment. Our piece ends with a question:

“Ultimately, the question remains what kind of society Americans want to have. Historically, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, the family perspective has generally been prevalent and tied intimately to the sense of a common polity. But as the country changes and becomes ever more single and female-influenced, the historical pattern is likely to be challenged and significantly modified.”

There is a difference between inquiry, which seeks understanding, and ideology, which demands conformity. Our piece is about inquiry. But when faculty collapse that distinction, they abandon their professional and ethical core.

In short, the irony here is stark. Labeling empirical analysis and demographic data as an “attack” does not protect students: it impoverishes them. It is not an act of solidarity: it is an abdication of responsibility to truth. A university that cannot engage demographic evidence without moral panic is not preparing citizens for democracy—it is training partisans in outrage.

The trends we documented are real and consequential. They will shape party coalitions, civic institutions, and American life for decades to come. Ignoring them or recasting them as hostility will not erase them. It will only leave us unprepared for the change already underway.

Professors are stewards of intellectual life. Their task is not to amplify outrage but to cultivate argument. When they fail, they betray both their students and their profession. When professors trade evidence for indignation, they do not teach citizens; they train partisans. And parents, students, and citizens alike have no reason to trust them.