Turning schools into no-testosterone zones

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 2002 | by Woody West

A front-page story recently reported that male college graduates are on their way to becoming an endangered species, so to speak. "At colleges and universities across the United States, the proportion of bachelor's degrees awarded to women reached a postwar high this year at an estimated 57 percent," according to the article.

The "gender gap" was even greater among Hispanics, with just 40 percent of Hispanic men receiving bachelor's degrees among the subset, and only about 33 percent of black males. From a 20th-century high of men earning 76 percent of bachelor's degrees in 1950 (as returned World War II vets flooded campuses), the overall rate dropped to 43 percent in the year 2000 and is anticipated to dip another two points by decade's end.

This sort of news article represents a cherished conceit of the press: its astuteness at spotting a trend, rather like a canary in a mine shaft. Actually, by the time the pressies have spread the tidings, the trend usually is so embedded in the social woof and warp that dynamite hardly would loosen it. In fact, the male rate of college graduation decreased throughout the century just past.

Curiously, however, even as the decline was evident, the feminists and their Y-chromosome camp followers still were fretting loudly at how oppressed women are in American education, another variation on the theme of the female as victim. Such groups as the American Association of University Women have been having public vapors about this for years.

Once the journalistic pack has its trend cornered, however belatedly, it dashes off to "explain" the phenomenon, invoking the usual suspects of media-certified experts. Many "social problems" could bloom from this disparity--for instance, educated women will be unable to find marriage partners of similar accomplishment. The possible reasons given for fewer males than females receiving degrees are all over the ballpark: for instance, that women's "learning styles" are more fitted to college classrooms, whatever that means, and that men are more "vulnerable" to popular culture--which presumably means injudicious quantities of beer, television and computer games.

What it finally amounts to is a drastic discount on traditional masculinity. And there might be an additional factor in this lopsided sexual percentage. Could it suggest that the educational gurus and, indeed, the wider culture are unable or unwilling to confront a critical chore of any civilization socialization of the male animal?

There has been a relentless feminization of American institutions, particularly the schools, beginning with the tadpoles. The often fractious energy of young males--the "coiled perplexities of youth" in Robert Louis Stevenson's apt phrase--stirs the competitive juices and aggressive itches. Both of these now are regarded as awful and aberrant. From elementary-school years, these energies are being subdued by insistent indoctrination, by shoving drugs such as Ritalin down young throats (particularly male throats) and by defining attention deficit disorder (ADD) to include every twitch of the immature male.

By the time he gets to high school, the male has learned that passivity--sensitivity, in its dreary therapeutic usage--is the best way to avoid the wrath of the educrats. "Bullying" (a fistfight at recess, for example, which a teacher in antique times would have handled without calling the cops) and "teasing" (boorish but common male pack behavior, which immediately can result in a mandatory trip to a shrink) are indicative of character flaws that today are categorized as falling under that silly rubric of "zero tolerance."

For males who may not fully have absorbed the "be very, very nice" drill and matriculate to Squishy U., they are further instructed in their distasteful status by Title IX. That federal standard was passed to remedy campus discrimination against women and had its greatest impact on athletics--where, no question, inequities historically existed.

It was useful to provide women wider opportunities in sports. But Title IX has been so manipulated by bureaucrats that it is a parody of its intent. For instance, if a campus population is 55 percent female, the college must ensure that 55 percent of the athletic slots are allotted for women--even if nowhere near 55 percent are interested in field hockey or basketball or whatever. To keep the federal fleas out of their administrative blankets, college after college has eliminated men's sports teams wrestling, golf, tennis and (heaven help us) baseball are frequent casualties.

Males on campuses also are daily indicted by women's-studies departments, queer-studies faculty and other "transgressive" radicals who ideologically dominate the halls of ivy and non-ivy, and are incensed by Western civilization and its "repressive" legacies. (The military remains, marginally, a place for tenacious masculine virtues, mostly in the combat-arms and special-operations units).

Of course, adolescent males will continue to trudge to college campuses for career credentials, intellectual curiosity and the challenge of acquiring knowledge. But most of them are by that point aware that testosterone is considered toxic.