George Steiner’s pining for a university without women should be a reminder of the rupture that women occasion by their very presence in the university. Here is Virginia Woolf’s evocative account of thinking while a woman and of a university that makes those thoughts fugitive:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on 
the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.
There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought–to call it by a prouder name than it deserved–had let its line down into 
the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind–put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting,
and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I
 could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts
and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind–Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they
 came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his
 essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning
 crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here.
…
It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I
 put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the 
manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. … Here I was actually at
 the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a
 flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery,
kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its
 treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and
 will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

That Beadle, gesticulating wildly in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, his face contorted in horror and indignation, is George Steiner. I think we mustn’t underestimate the trauma, the disorientation, the sheer terror that clutches at Steiner and the male structures that he deputizes for when he chances upon women in the seminar room, at faculty talks, at high table. That’s what it’s often about, the deep grammar in the yowls about “political correctness,” the mewls about “free speech,” the sanctimony about “rigor,” standards,” “clarity,” “merit,” “real disciplines,” in the end often amounts to a recoil at the sheer presence of women — now increasingly black and brown women — in the university.