COLLEGE AVENUE: Bashing Men on Campus
Zmirak, John
COLLEGE AVENUE JOHN ZMIRAK Bashing Men on Campus N SEPTEMBER 23, USA TODAY published an editorial which should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who cares about American higher...
...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, AfricanAmericans, Asian Pacific Islanders, and...
...In our research, we found many schools with strong curricula and healthy campus life...
...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...
...panel after panel singled out and discussed female writers, and never male—unless, lucky things, they happened to be "Queer...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 JOHN ZMIRAK 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...
...The social implications—women having a hard time finding equally educated mates—are already beginning to play out...
...Such worthy goals have largely been achieved in the West and are no longer controversial...
...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...
...government-funded study of the effects ...- of classroom feminism, political correctness, and anti-male affirmative action on male American college students...
...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...
...Pointing to a recent U.S...
...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...
...essentially everyone but me...
...They will face charges that they belong to an "oppressor gender" with a stiff upper lip, and do their best to graduate...
...IT GETS WORSE AS YOU BURROW DEEPER into academia...
...Traditional Western philosophy was dismissed as "phallocentrism...
...In subsequent days, letter writers aptly noted that if such an imbalance cut the other way—ifwomen were turning out to be under-represented at U.S...
...Indeed, it would be hard to find an environment more hostile to the concerns, preferences, and (insome cases) even the presence of young men than the average secular or post-religious American college...
...So I do not have the benefit of statistics here...
...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...
...The loss of educated workers also means the country will be less able to compete economically...
...COLLEGE AVENUE JOHN ZMIRAK Bashing Men on Campus N SEPTEMBER 23, USA TODAYpublished an editorial which should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who cares about American higher education...
...Nearly every elite campus we cover features some sort of "women's center"—typically dominated by radical feminists or lesbians...
...Students who did not comply faced expulsion...
...Lesbians are not women...
...Tolkien was so ostracized and persecuted by his colleagues that eventually he gave up tenure and moved to an ashram in India...
...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...
...John Zmirak is editor of Choosing the Right College and author of The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living...
...The decline in college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success in life...
...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...
...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...
...That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years...
...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 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...
...We also came across many instances of feminism gone amok...
...However, I can draw on both personal experience (as someone who pursued, and completed, a Ph.D...
...The college-sponsored "Queer Resource Center" provides a lending library of gay porn...
...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...
...As the paper warned, "This is ominous for every parent with a male child...
...an entire new discipline, "Queer Theory," was erected to assert the equivalence of same-sex relationships with marriage...
...Now, "feminism" as practiced on college campuses has nothing to do with equal rights, equal pay, or equal treatment under the law...
...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...
...The president of Wesleyan is pressuring all its fraternities to become coed, 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...
...DECEMBER 2005/JANUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It would be hard to find an environment more hostile to the concerns, preferences, and even the presence of young men...
...Most American men who enter college will not be driven that far...
...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...
...What they will not do, unless they are incredibly stubborn and brave, is try to become teachers in the humanities...
...This mild-mannered Old English scholar who loved J.R.R...
...Department of Education study, the paper noted with alarm that across the country, "135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men...
...at the same time, traditional male preserves such as fraternities are frequently under attack...
...At Wesleyan University in Connecticut—which surely takes the cake as the most "politically correct" school in the US.—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...
...I knew how to take a hint...
...in English, I knewbetter than to apply for academic jobs...
...While I persevered and finished my Ph.D...
...TOW, THERE HAS NOT BEEN (and never will be) a U.S...
Vol. 38 • December 2005 • No. 10
