The state of non-STEM American academia is starting to look a lot like the Energizer Bunny on drugs: It just keeps getting dumber, and dumber, and dumber. We've grown accustomed to all manner of abject nitwittery from the ivory towers of our nation's universities, and the purveyors of that nitwittery aren't about to let trivial things like facts get in their way.
Problem is, sometimes the woke horse squeeze intrudes into spaces where it has no business, like the sciences. Any scientific subject, like biology, should be taught strictly as a presentation of observable facts, and the mechanisms those facts reveal. But that's not always what's happening.
Case in point: Now we read that three professors at Michigan State University, one in sociology, one in physiology, and one in biology — who really ought to know better — have published an article claiming that the portrayal of plant reproduction in biology textbooks is "sexist."
Yes, really. The abstract begins:
Scientific stories about plant reproduction often draw on gender stereotypes and myth, making such myths appear natural. Based on an analysis of introductory biology textbooks, the authors demonstrate how the authors of these books cast male plants and plant parts as active heroes while portraying their female counterparts as passive, reluctant, or sometimes even deceptive.
Uh, none of those things are stereotypes or myths. They are facts. Plants do this. This has been known for hundreds of years. That's how they reproduce. These are facts. Sometimes the amount of dumb in one academic effort extends well beyond the ability of the English language to adequately describe.
Look, these are matters of objective truth, not finger-wagging activism or gender theory malarky. In many plants, most in fact, no matter whether they are pollinated by wind, by insect, or by any other means, it's true that the male part of a plant casts pollen out, while the female part receives it. That's not sexist. That's fact. Now plant reproduction is more complicated and doesn't always follow all of the same rules as animal reproduction, particularly we mammals, but the male/female part holds true.
That should be the end of it. Unfortunately, it's not — not for these people. The College Fix has noted some of the splashback to this utterly ridiculous notion.
Diana Fleishman, an evolutionary psychologist and former professor at the University of New Mexico, first noticed the study and called it out on X.
“Oh, you see a tranquil field of dandelions? Bigot!” she wrote sarcastically.
Her original X post:
New paper in Contexts laments that biology textbooks reinforce gender inequality by describing how pollen travels to fertilize female plants while female plants wait to receive it. Describing plant reproduction reproduces “dominant cultural ideas about masculinity and… pic.twitter.com/sIJhNFX4i2
— Diana S. Fleischman (@sentientist) September 30, 2026
The post reads:
New paper in Contexts laments that biology textbooks reinforce gender inequality by describing how pollen travels to fertilize female plants while female plants wait to receive it. Describing plant reproduction reproduces “dominant cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity.”
We might note that Diana S. Fleischman's X profile notes that she has left academia so that "...I can say whatever I want here now," and we have to wonder if debunking horse squeeze like this is part of the reason for her departure from the once-hallowed halls of academia.
The real baffling thing here is that the three professors who put out this paper haven't been booted off campus, their withdrawal accompanied by howls of derisive laughter from their former colleagues. That's the only rational response to something like this, and while I'm personally disappointed to see one of them is a professor of biology, who really ought to know better, it's more than likely that this prof's supposed expertise will be used to try to lend more credibility to this nonsense.
Against stupidity, as the saying goes, the gods themselves contend in vain, and that's one of the major problems our institutions of higher learning face today. These people are taking biological reality - plant reproduction — and complaining about the accurate description of those processes in a science textbook as "sexist." In my own college days, when I was studying, you know, biology, any of the professors I studied would have laughed this kind of crap off, and that wasn't all that long ago; I graduated in 1987. That's how science education works. There are matters of objective fact, that must be described accurately. That's not sexism. That's the proper employment of the English language to describe observed facts.
Is there some award, some grant program, that these people can get into for the most ridiculous outpouring of poppycock imaginable? If so, these three professors have a good chance at winning. And by Tophet, I'll name them, since they have made their identities public in publishing this paper: they are Stef M. Shuster (Michigan State University) Nicole Wonderlin (University of Texas, Austin) and Shahnaz Masani (Michigan State University). Their names, again, are already public. They put them out on the internet in this abject silliness, which is, again, here.
This, folks, is the sad state of American academia today.
