Pas Possible: Discrimination – Against Girls?
Kudos to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for raising an issue that the higher education establishment would rather keep buried.
The commission’s latest inquiry involves suspected gender discrimination on campuses, where women are approaching 60 percent of the applicant pool. As this report indicates, women are “more plentiful” in college admissions, no matter that feminist activists have been carping for years about supposed discrimination against females. The question arises whether, bowing to “reverse” gender bias, campuses are now limiting the number of women they admit so as to increase the ranks of less meritorious men.
Jennifer Rubin at Commentary remarks aptly on this ironic turn of events:
First, where are the Justice Department and so-called feminist groups? They apparently don’t much care if women are now on the short end of gender preferences. It’s all about “diversity,” you see. And second, one realizes how misplaced has been the hue and cry about anti-female discrimination in education. Apparently there is no civil-rights or other organization upset that men now make up only 40 percent of the college-admissions pool. Are they being discriminated against? Are their educational needs being ignored? We don’t know, and no one seems interested in finding out why.
This is very interesting material, but I wonder if there’s also another angle to this story as well. Specifically, I’m referring to the fact that for quite some time, higher education, where a virulent, institutionalized feminism reigns unopposed, has been distinctly guy-unfriendly. See this link to a story at Inside Higher Education, for example: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/22/men. I think, though, that it also cuts deeper than higher education, as Christina Sommers argued in her seminal book, “The War Against Boys.” In it, she makes a very convinicing case that the educational system, K-12 is heavily stacked against boys and staffed by feminist teachers. If that’s true, it doesn’t surprise me that they show up in ever decreasing numbers at colleges and universities.
Glenn Ricketts