Universities Hate Boys
After decades of openly hating all things masculine, American universities are shocked to discover that young men have become less enthusiastic about higher education. Actually, the academicians haven’t yet figured out that enthusiasm might be the problem. In their view, it’s just that young men are slacker sexist pigs who are inferior to young women in every way—and that’s not the fault of the universities. Time.com reports:
[A] gender gap has reopened: if girls were once excluded because they somehow weren’t good enough, they now are rejected because they’re too good. Or at least they are so good, compared with boys, that admissions committees at some private colleges have problems managing a balanced freshman class. Roughly 58% of undergraduates nationally are female, and the girl-boy ratio will probably tip past 60-40 in a few years. The divide is even worse for black males, who are outnumbered on campus by black females 2 to 1.
While educators debate whether there is a “boy crisis” that warrants a wholesale change in how to teach, colleges are quietly stripping the pastels from brochures and launching Xbox tournaments to try to close the gap in the quality and quantity of boys applying. “It’s a gross generalization that slacker boys get in over high-performing girls,” says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, “but developmentally, girls bring more to the table than boys, and the disparity has gotten greater in recent years.”
Ms. Delahunty has special experience with this issue. After working on admissions committees that favored boys over girls for the sake of class balance, she experienced a moment of moral clarity after her own daughter was wait-listed. So she wrote an article about it for the New York Times in which she apologized for this unfair treatment of girls. The article generated many responses from a wide range of viewpoints. She heard from misogynists and, uh, what’s the opposite of a misogynist?
“It pissed off the feminists and the misogynists–I got both sides of the spectrum,” she told me. “The misogynists said women already have too many advantages. And the feminists said, How dare you not treat women like men.” But what most amazed her was the reaction of young women: by and large, they assumed this is just how things work. “Why aren’t they marching in the streets? That’s the part that slays me,” Delahunty says. “It isn’t fair, and young women should be saying something about it not being fair.”
And this is apparently the attitude of many college administrators: Sex discrimination against girls is a profound tragedy. Everybody knows that sex discrimination should only disadvantage boys.
Maybe they can find some solace in the thought that they aren’t really trying to help out boys. God, no! They’re really just trying to indirectly help the girls. As an admissions director for the College of William and Mary told US News & World Report: “even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”
Memo to higher education: The boys know that you hate them. You haven’t exactly kept it a secret, even before the Duke rape case. And since you hate them so much, they have done both you and themselves a favor by not attending your schools.
(For readers who are not familiar with the problems that I’m describing with an admittedly broad brush, Glenn Sacks has a recent article that describes them more specifically.)