More than 20 years after Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers first challenged the academic establishment, both women say society is reaping undesirable consequences of higher education's impact on millennials.

Perhaps no two people have done more to expose the ills of contemporary feminism. At the end of a tumultuous school year, one where campuses from coast-to-coast were rocked by violent protests, they came together for a spirited conversation at the Independent Women's Forum's 2017 Women's Lead Summit in Washington, decrying the state of the educational institutions they set out to reform decades ago.

Paglia, a longtime professor at the University of the Arts, believes the education system's failure to provide students with historical perspective explains so many young people's impulse to see America as "the source of all evil in the universe." After 46 years of teaching professionally, Paglia says she's "felt the slow devolution of the quality of public school education in the classroom."

"These young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind….no sense of the violence and the barbarities of history," she observed. "They now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America….They've never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity, they know nothing."

Sommers seconded that point. The author, who travels regularly to campuses around the country to lecture on her research, explained students are being taught that "the society that allows them to go to this wonderful university is a matrix of misery."

"We're heading into this very murky future of the world with terrorism on the rise and I don't know how this generation is going to cope with it — I don't think they have the ability to cope with it," Paglia divulged.

Not only do their parents smother them with protection, but Paglia believes today's kids like it.

"They want to feel this presence," she contended. "They want reassurance, they want the parental eye on them."

"That's why we're not going to get anything interesting in intellect or the arts from a generation that has been coddled and infantilized the way this generation has been," Paglia said.