Believe it or not, we are actually far better off now than we ever used to be. People act less stupid than they have done for most of history. We might be coming off a peak of IQ high, though.

This doesn't mean that we are not being stupid, just that we used to be even more stupid, in many regards. How unfair laws used to be, for example, can be seen in books like those of Ernest Belfort Bax: https://archive.org/details/fraudoffeminism00baxerich

For example, husbands were responsible, in many instances, for many crimes committed by their wives. We still had slavery, prohibition of alcohol, we were sent to jail for the crimes of family members. That was the case both in Europe and is still the case in India in some instances, from what I understand, such as in dowry laws.

Every generation has to contend with their own share of stupidity. In that sense, we are doing our part. But, I do not need people to agree with me, because if they feel we are now more stupid than we used to be, they will still try to improve society, which is all I want. No matter how stupid we are now or we were then, we should always strive to do better.

Woodley, Michael A., Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy. “Were the Victorians Cleverer than Us? The Decline in General Intelligence Estimated from a Meta-Analysis of the Slowing of Simple Reaction Time.” Intelligence 41 (2013): 843–850.

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/woodley2013.pdf

As for universities, they may have actually become more stupid, because there has probably been an inflation of degrees. Getting to your doctorate used to be a very high honor. Now, everybody seems to have a PhD. I also felt that in the modern university I attended things were actually easier than the very traditional high school I attended, were we still studied Latin and ancient Greek, were teachers were very tough and it was rare to get full score on an exam. Virtually nobody got 100% on a test. The best student would usually get an A but there would never be a student who wasn't pushed to do better. At university, the professors seemed kind of reserved and soft, had more aversion against upsetting students, were more likely to just give an A. It was strange. Something might very well have happened in education. I know that my parents were still beaten or physically disciplined at least (pulling on ears, whacking on the hands with rulers, etc.).

But, as I said, it's probably better to err on the side of being too negative about the state of education than to be blissfully ignorant. If we are wrong about this, all we are doing is improving culture, society, and education by bringing more discipline into it again.

As for the gender divide, we are also less hypocritical about it now. I think older generations just didn't think about it as much, so they intuitively did what aligned with male and female gender roles, they automatically gave males more authority in exchange for their burden of having to defend country and society. Now, as unfair as courts often seem against men, they often also pass judgment on women in ways that only few judges would have done in centuries past, were women could often get away with murder (there were barristers who argued that women should no longer be put on trial for certain crimes because juries just wouldn't convict women).

I am not excusing any bigotry. We live in a different world now. We do not have tigers to fight anymore, we do not have rival tribes invading our villages. The threats of modern society are of a different kind that both genders should be expected to be equally well equipped to contend with, so it is time, in that regard, to make the genders more equal. But from other points of view we are also already a lot less unequal, a lot more educated, and a lot less silly. But, there are narrow areas, such as the transgenderism trend, where we do seem to have regressed, maybe temporarily as society, in its collective fashion, is figuring out how to deal with a new idea. I do think, though, that we will converge towards being sensible eventually.