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.