The ladies of Mills - criticism of protest against male students at Mills College

National Review, May 28, 1990

THE TRUSTEES of Mills College, a California school for women, which has been suffering from declining enrollment, have voted to open the class of 95 to men, and the students don't like it-not because they regret the passing of a 138year-old tradition, but because they resent the violation of the very modern rules of the feminist game.

It seems that whenever male students appear on a campus, "women feel cowed," as a Mills sociology professor (a man, as it happens) put it. Amy Hutto, a freshman, shaved and painted her head, tore off her shirt at a demonstration, and shouted, "Mills College does not exist," which doesn't sound very cow-able to us. Other young ladies blocked offices with sit-ins and rousted the president out of bed with blaring horns.

Two aspects of this little outburst of Sixtiesism stand out. One is the shift, in the terminal stages of any minority-group agitation, from inclusion to segregation. Just as feminist literary critics want to see Jane Austen and Sappho, not grouped with the giants of literature, where they manifestly belong, but stuck in a ghetto with Erica Jong and themselves, so the Mills students want not to join the real world, but to stay in a cossetted feminist cocoon.

The other is the fetish of self-esteem. We hear a lot of talk about people's feelings, not enough about their responsibility to buckle down and work hard, whatever they feel. Every immigrant, every member of the lower class, gets slighted on the way up. That's part of the definition of being down. But millions make their way nevertheless. Demands for self-esteem come close to suggesting that it's better to feel good about yourself than to do well. That's a bad lesson for Mills, or any college, to be teaching.