This column appeared in the Dec. 2005-Jan. 2006 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe, please click
here.
On September 23, USA Today published an editorial which
should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who cares about American
higher education. Pointing to a recent U.S. Department of Education
study, the paper noted with alarm that across the country, “135
women receive bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men. That gender
imbalance will widen in the coming years.” As the paper warned,
“This is ominous for every parent with a male child. The decline in
college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success
in life. The loss of educated workers also means the country will
be less able to compete economically. The social implications —
women having a hard time finding equally educated mates — are
already beginning to play out.”
USA Today cited some possible culprits for the
increasing distaste young men are showing for college, pointing
provisionally to our high schools, suggesting that perhaps “female
teachers in elementary and middle schools, where male teachers are
scarce, naturally enforce a girl-friendly environment that rewards
students who can sit quietly — not a strong point for many boys,
who earn poor grades and fall behind.” One reader countered that in
fact, “schedules, curriculum, social politics and teaching methods
have gone overboard to benefit girls” and other officially
designated “protected groups” — which essentially amounts to
anyone other than white males.
In subsequent days, letter writers aptly noted that if such an
imbalance cut the other way — if women were turning out to be
under-represented at U.S. colleges — it would result in a national
uproar, including presidential fact-finding commissions,
multimillion dollar study grants from non-profit foundations, and
calls for affirmative action. To no one’s surprise, the decline of
the male on campus has elicited no such concern — particularly on
the very campuses where it is happening. Indeed, it would be hard
to find an environment more hostile to the concerns, preferences,
and (in some cases) even the presence of young men than the average
secular or post-religious American college.
And that, I would like to suggest, is a big part of the reason
that men are leaving them — dropping out, refusing to enroll, or
seeking friendlier habitats such as work on construction sites
laying pipe, or the battlefields of Fallujah.
NOW, THERE HAS NOT BEEN (and never will be) a U.S.
government-funded study of the effects of classroom feminism,
political correctness, and anti-male affirmative action on male
American college students. So I do not have the benefit of
statistics here. However, I can draw on both personal experience
(as someone who pursued, and completed, a Ph.D. in the humanities)
and the abundance of anecdotal evidence which comes my way as
editor of Choosing the Right College, a guide to over 130
American colleges compiled with information gathered from thousands
of faculty members, alumni, and current undergraduates.
In our research, we found many schools with strong curricula and
healthy campus life. We also came across many instances of feminism
gone amok. Now, “feminism” as practiced on college campuses has
nothing to do with equal rights, equal pay, or equal treatment
under the law. Such worthy goals have largely been achieved in the
West and are no longer controversial. The varieties of feminism
that inspire teachers and administrators across America are those
inspired by Marxism, which regard women as a “domestic proletariat”
engaged in class conflict within the family — or recondite
European cultural theorists such as Monique Wittig, who is famed
for such formulations as:
The discourses which particularly oppress all of us,
lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those which take for
granted that which founds society, any society, is
heterosexuality.
And:
It would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate,
make love, live with women, for “woman” has meaning only in
heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems.
Lesbians are not women.
Again and again, we heard reports from students appalled to hear
the great thinkers of the West — from Plato and Socrates to Thomas
Jefferson, even Jesus — dismissed as “Dead White European Males”
(DWEMs for short). Spend enough time listening to stuff like that
in what you thought was a class in English Lit, and a job at
Wal-Mart might begin to seem appealing.
Nearly every elite campus we cover features some sort of
“women’s center” — typically dominated by radical feminists or
lesbians; at the same time, traditional male preserves such as
fraternities are frequently under attack. At Colgate University,
where a women’s studies professor became president, the school in
2003 decreed that all fraternities had to close and sell their
buildings to the college — to be transformed into “diversity
housing” units. Students who did not comply faced expulsion. At
several colleges, highly popular male sports have been discontinued
in favor of lightly attended activities for women — in the name of
complying with the federal government’s intrusive “Title IX”
regulation.
At Wesleyan University in Connecticut — which surely takes the
cake as the most “politically correct” school in the U.S. —
students can burn off most of their distributional requirements
with courses such as “Rereading Gendered Agency: Black Women’s
Experience of Slavery,” “Questions of Queer Travel,” “Problems and
Methods in Queer Historiography,” and “Multiculturalism and
Oppression.” The president of Wesleyan is pressuring all its
fraternities to become co-ed, while the student government
denounces single-sex dorm rooms on the grounds that “gender and
biological sex are separate and distinct concepts,” which means
that students must be free “to define their own gender.” The
college-sponsored “Queer Resource Center” provides a lending
library of gay porn.
IT GETS WORSE AS YOU BURROW DEEPER into academia. I know several
highly qualified graduate students who left degree programs in the
humanities because of the intense promotion of feminism (enforced
by punitive grading) in the classroom. While I persevered and
finished my Ph.D. in English, I knew better than to apply for
academic jobs; one glance at the panels presented at the annual
Modern Language Association (essentially the job-fair for English
majors) told me that as a white male I was not welcome. Traditional
Western philosophy was dismissed as “phallocentrism”; an entire new
discipline, “Queer Theory,” was erected to assert the equivalence
of same-sex relationships with marriage; panel after panel singled
out and discussed female writers, and never male — unless, lucky
things, they happened to be “Queer.” The job notices I saw posted
were all, to the last flier, adorned with a standard affirmative
action notice, always some variant of: This university especially
encourages applications from women, African-Americans, Asian
Pacific Islanders, and… essentially everyone but me. I knew how
to take a hint.
One professor at an ostensibly conservative Southern school who
was imprudent enough to criticize campus feminism publicly found
himself charged with sexual harassment — on the grounds that such
criticism itself created for women professors “a hostile work
environment.” This mild-mannered Old English scholar who loved
J.R.R. Tolkien was so ostracized and persecuted by his colleagues
that eventually he gave up tenure and moved to an ashram in
India.
Most American men who enter college will not be driven that far.
They will suffer through some tedious classes that trash their
values and deride their religious beliefs and patriotism, collect
their B+, decide that humanities are only for women and “Queers,”
and move on. They will face charges that they belong to an
“oppressor gender” with a stiff upper lip, and do their best to
graduate. What they will not do, unless they are incredibly
stubborn and brave, is try to become teachers in the humanities.
Even those who entered college with a love for literature, history,
or art will likely move on to other disciplines, rather than try to
explore and pass along the fragile, immensely valuable traditions
of the West, which created our free society — and which are
essential to its survival.
