Here it Is! The Solution to the Problem of Falling Male College Enrollment
I suppose it had to happen, but I certainly didn't see it coming. This article informs us that a number of colleges in the Northwest are restarting football programs, not because their teams had much success in the past or because current students particularly want them, but in the hopes of attracting male enrollees (The Oregonian, 11/3/09). A couple of the schools the article refers to have under 40% male enrollment at the undergraduate level, and apparently that's cause for concern, at least to some. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Pacific University cautiously offered this:
"It's necessary to change the gender balance to be more representative of society," says John Hayes, dean of Pacific's college of arts and sciences. "At more than 60 percent female, there is a different classroom dynamic, and I don't think the discourse is as rich."
I'm all for, er, rich discourse, but I wonder if adding a football team is the right way to go about it. There's a great deal of information to the effect that classrooms, particularly college classrooms, are not exactly friendly environments to males. At many liberal arts institutions, anti-male pedagogy is the order of the day. Consider this quotation from Nathanson and Young's Spreading Misandry:
"Using postmodernism as their front [feminists] have colonized fields as diverse as the humanities, the law and the social sciences. It is primarily because of this revolution at the upper levels of academia, propagated not only in countless classrooms but also in countless chatrooms on the Internet, that our society is becoming just as gynocentric as the androcentric one that feminists were supposed to correct in the name of equality of the sexes."
To say the least, that is not a collegiate situation that adding a football team will do much to address. But the fact of plummeting male college enrollments begins far earlier than the first day of freshman year. My guess is that it begins sometime around cradle days and continues indefinitely, kind of like death and taxes.
On this blog alone, we've read about a British writer who was appalled at the casual misandry in the most popular children's books he found himself reading to his son. We've heard from feminist icon Doris Lessing who, on visiting a primary school classroom was enraged at the denigration of boys there. From Christina Hoff Sommers we've learned that, over the past few decades education itself has turned away from how boys learn in favor of a more "progressive" style that favors girls. As more than one experiment in pedagogy has taught us, when that is changed, boys' performance changes for the better. But those experiments are almost uniformly ignored when education policy is made.
If you don't believe me, just read the article. Imagine yourself to be a 17-year-old male who's due to graduate high school in May and start college next September. Listen to what this student says.
It's comfortable having classes that are mostly women. It avoids the problem of guys being guys." says Jenny Rodriquez, a junior at Pacific.
Or this professor:
Others don't see why it's an issue to have twice as many female as male students.
"So what?" asks Martha Rampton, a professor of history at Pacific who opposed re-introducing football. "Show me why it's a problem."
Here's a student who says she wants "more boys" on campus.
Pacific sophomore Brandi Palmer says she has a writing class that's all female students.
"We're mostly feminists, and everyone agrees about things," she says. "Having more boys would encourage a clash of ideas."
Sound inviting? The most positive one, Brandi Palmer, admits that everyone in her class is female and most of them are feminists.
I like football as well as the next guy, and better than many, but let's get serious here. The drastic decline in male education in this country doesn't have anything to do with which sports are played at which schools. It has to do with a culture that, for longer than many of these young men have been alive, has itself made a sport of denigrating men. It's an experiment that has had disastrous results and those results will continue as long as we degrade everything masculine.
Teach boys from the cradle that they're second-rate human beings at best and you'll have college classrooms that are mostly girls. If that's what you want, just keep doing what you're doing.
Thanks to Rod and Susan for the heads-up.
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