Why Males Don't Go to College
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2002
As the
percentage of males on our college campuses continues to decline, many
observers are finally beginning to ask questions. Much of the
discussion has focused on the fact that boys at all levels K-12 have
fallen seriously behind their female counterparts, and how our schools
are not meeting boys' needs. This discussion of males' educational
problems--particularly the problems of low-income and minority
males--is long overdue, and boys' sagging educational performance is
the main reason for the increasing disappearance of male students from
our college campuses.
However,
there is another, unacknowledged reason why some males don't go to
college--rampant anti-male feminism has made college campuses a place
where many males feel unwanted and unwelcome. To use a feminist term,
our universities have become "hostile environments" for young men. To
illustrate, let's look at one campus--the University of California at
Los Angeles, 1999-2001.
Sensationalized lies about men--what dissident feminist Christina Hoff
Sommers and others call "Hate Statistics"--were an integral part of
the campus culture. The Women's Resource Center (later renamed the
Center for Women and Men), the Clothesline Project and others
publicized discredited academic frauds like "one in four college women
has been the victim of rape or attempted rape" and "domestic violence
is the leading cause of injury to women aged 15 to 44."
Worse, such
statistics were repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam by the campus
newspaper, the Daily Bruin , and also by both professors and
students. The message behind the lies was clear--men are so powerful
and despicable, and women are so helpless and victimized, that men had
better not dare to complain about anything.
This hostile
attitude towards males is manifest in the classroom as well. I recall,
for example, my Latin American folklore class, taught by a woman whom
we'll call Ms. Smith. Ms. Smith is a kind, gentle, elderly lady whose
bigotry rings as loud and clear as that of any stereotypical racist
Southern cracker. The sometimes subtle, sometimes slap in the face
prejudice which males endured in her class is typical of what occurs
in many modern university classes.
Early in the
semester Ms. Smith informed the class that all folklore was widely
believed to be a code of misogyny that was developed and employed by
men to suppress women. Ms. Smith did say she considered this to be a
slight exaggeration, yet whenever a folktale contained a negative
portrayal of a woman, it was cited as evidence of the rampant misogyny
in men's dark souls. What Ms. Smith never explained was why this
"misogynistic" folklore contained far more negative portrayals of men
than of women.
Ms. Smith
also informed us that folklore was largely invented by women, because
it was women who had the "long, tiresome, boring jobs" and thus the
motivation to invent it. Unanswered were two questions. One, why would
we say that folklore was misogynistic if it had, in fact, largely been
invented by women? Two, did we really imagine that the men of that
era--or at least 98% of them--did not also have "long, tiresome,
boring" jobs?
Ms. Smith
wrung her hands over the stigma, enshrined in some Spanish folklore,
against romantic or sexual activity by Spanish women whose men had
gone off to fight the invading and occupying Moors. This was, she
said, another example of the oppressive social controls which men
placed upon women. What Ms. Smith never mentioned was the nature of
the oppressive social controls which made 12 and 13 year-old Spanish
boys march obediently off to war for years at a time, many of them
never to return.
Most of the
males sat in the back of Ms. Smith's class, an arrangement which
started to feel more and more like the back of the bus. The females in
front were fully engaged, enjoying the class and its anti-male tales.
Not surprisingly, many of the males were disengaged, and seemed to be
there simply to put in their time.
One day,
after an hour or so discussing tale after tale where Ms. Smith
concluded that the men involved were always wrong or evil or cruel or
stupid and the women were always right and good and kind and smart,
Ms. Smith began softly describing a soothing tale of a father and his
daughter setting off through the woods to go to the big city.
"The
father....and his daughter....rode together... as they went through
the beautiful Spanish countryside," Ms. Smith said softly.
I sat back
and closed my eyes.
"They...were
on their way to the big city....the daughter had never seen the city
before.....she was happy that her father was taking her..."
I imagined a
special, loving, father-daughter bond.
"..and
then.....he rapes her."
Jolted, I sat
up. A male in the back of the classroom pushed his heavy book off of
the table and it made a loud, crashing sound.
An accident?
Or the only protest he could make?
I did
sometimes protest in Ms. Smith's class and others, but a 6'2" male
confronting a female educator about her bigotry, however politely, is
quickly perceived as a bully. In addition, tension and arguing make
the days and semesters long and hard, and there were times when it was
easier to tune out, as so many other males had done. Some male
students have told me that they had been retaliated against at grade
time for speaking out against misandry. I never had this experience,
and Ms. Smith did grade me fairly.
In Spanish
language class we were reading and discussing Snow White when a
properly PC-educated male student raised his hand and lamented the
poor, womanly lot of Snow White, "forced" to cook and wash dishes
while the dwarfs "did nothing." Naturally I raised my hand and
explained that mining (the dwarfs' trade) was a hard, dangerous job
which required a lot of sacrifice. I was immediately fighting a battle
against the male professor and 10 other students (the usual odds one
faces when confronting misandry in our universities) but I defended
those seven dwarfs the best I could.
One woman, an
older student obviously infused with decades of anti-male bigotry,
smiled contemptuously and explained that whatever the dwarfs did, they
still didn't do housework and were thus morally indicted. In her
world, whatever men do, whatever their special sacrifices and their
burdens, all that matters is who washed the dishes last night.
Part of the
reason it is difficult and unpleasant to be a male college student
today is that anti-male bigotry pops up by surprise all the time in
the most unlikely of places. For example, on my Portuguese final we
were presented with some disputes and were expected to discuss
possible solutions to them in Portuguese. A couple of the problems
were between married couples, and in both situations there was a clear
person who was right and a clear person who was wrong. The reader can
guess the gender of both offenders without my assistance.
In answering
one of them, about a husband who was oppressing his wife by not "doing
his share" around the house, I explained that numerous studies have
shown that, when all work--both housework and breadwinning--is
considered, American men are doing at least as much in their
households as women are. I also noted that I was unhappy with this
negative portrayal of men.
To her
credit, the professor graded me fairly and responded to my objection.
She explained that my complaint was not valid because men's control of
society and women were so vast that a man's complaints about anti-male
prejudice paled in meaning beside it. In other words, it's OK to say
whatever you want about men, no matter how unfair, cruel, or
inaccurate, because all the man-hate in the world could never amount
to more than tugging on Superman's cape.
Even by the
professor's own PC logic, however, her argument fails because many of
the males in the class were black or Latino. On the PC left's strict
race/gender hierarchy, she should have at least shown sensitivity to
those minority males. After all, their maleness is something to
despise but their color is somewhat redeeming.
Perhaps the
professor still imagined herself to be "oppressed" even in relation to
those minority males. In reality, this white, middle-class female
teacher enjoyed many advantages which even white middle class males
did not have, such as a longer, healthier, safer life, and more
choices as to how to live it.
While at UCLA
I made money on the side doing carpentry and construction work. After
a while I noticed a strange phenomenon--I looked forward to the work
and I did not look forward to going to school. How was it possible
that I looked forward to hard, hazardous labor but had little desire
to spend my days comfortably sitting in class?
One reason
probably was that I enjoyed building and creating. Camille Paglia
calls carpentry and construction work "male poetry." While I don't
want to idealize the work, she definitely has a point.
Perhaps more
importantly, when working I could feel valued as a decent human being
instead of as a lesser who was always expected to apologize for
himself. Doing construction work I endured no bigotry arising quickly
and unexpectedly out of what had seemed to be a pleasant conversation
or lesson, and no verbal slaps to the face. It somehow seemed much
more peaceful and harmonious.
While on my
knees hammering thousands of nails into a scorching hot asphalt
shingle roof I often reflected upon my higher education. I thought of
the smug professors who teach contempt for men in the massive, red
brick buildings assembled brick by brick by men who risked their lives
to build them. According to men's advocate Warren Farrell, author of
The Myth of Male Power, even today "virtually no large office
building or bridge is built without a man dying in its construction,
whether as a lumberjack, trucker, welder, roofer or construction
worker." I wondered how many had been killed or maimed in the
construction of UCLA. Or did anyone even bother to keep track of such
a thing?
I and a
friend from UCLA who sometimes worked with me often commented on how
strange it was that men--many of whom put their safety on the line to
extract, refine, deliver, construct, produce, and build the
infrastructure and wealth upon which this society is based--are
treated with such contempt by our educators. How strange that the
group which makes these sacrifices (including the three million mostly
male workers who the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
says are injured on the job each year) is derided as seamlessly
"privileged," while those whose jobs rarely put them in harm's way are
always the "oppressed." Feminists once correctly criticized our
society for not properly acknowledging the massive contributions of
women in child rearing and housework. Today it is men's contributions
which are ignored.
On one job we
were building a loft in a large warehouse. Because of the warehouse's
peculiar conditions we had to stand under the loft and support it
without it being secure. As my friend and I struggled under the weight
of the loft, he smiled and joked, "you know, if this were to come
crashing down on us right now, my last wish would be that one of my
beloved professors could be standing here right by my side as it
happens."
In the
library after Ms. Smith's class on the day the student dropped the
book in protest, I pondered how sad and unfair it was that he and
other young men had been branded, stigmatized, and marginalized in the
institution which was supposed to enlighten them and set fire to their
minds.
I thought of
the feminist academics (female and male) who poured their derision
upon them, knowing that their students could not effectively fight
back. I thought of the timid male professors who were so content with
their own careers that they were perfectly willing to allow 18
year-old boys to be beat up on rather than jeopardize their own
comfort by speaking out. And I asked myself a question which hundreds
of thousands of male college students often ask themselves:
"What am I
even doing here?"
This article originally
appeared on the Glenn J. Sacks
Website
and appears here with the permission of the author.
Copyright 2002 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
