As debates about "wokeness" roil college campuses, it's important to remember that every action towards equality has engendered an equally strong reaction against it. Just like a law of physics, this push and pull has played out over decades, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, it took years not just to resolve gender discrimination issues, but even for discrimination in the faculty to be accepted as an actual problem. The story is captured in intimate detail by Kate Zernike in her new book, The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.

The book centers around the experience of Nancy Hopkins who, in 1963, was studying at Radcliffe, which is Harvard's sister school. Harvard didn't accept women as undergraduates for most of its history, only merging admissions with Radcliffe in 1975, although some of Harvard's graduate schools ...