Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
UC Rethinks Rejection of Men’s Literature Course
In January, the University of California reversed itself and agreed to accept for transfer credit a course taught by Professor David Clemens at Monterey Peninsula College, “Literature By and About Men.”
In December 2004, Clemens complained that the University of California had rejected his literature course for transfer credit because, the university claimed, the course had a “narrow focus” and “no comparable course in lower division” existed at any of the University of California’s nine campuses.
Clemens wrote following the university’s decision that,
While I don’t question U.C.’s woeful admission that not even one campus offers a course in literature by and about men, U.C. does accept, for lower division transfer from community colleges, such English courses as “Images of Women in Western Literature” from Saddleback, “Contemporary Women Writers” from Santa Barbara, “Women Writers” from Foothill, “Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Multicultural Voices in Literature” from Diablo Valley, “Women in Literature” from Santa Rosa, “Images of Women in Literature” from Santa Monica, “Changing Images of Women in Literature” from Butte, “U.S. Women’s Literature” and “Her Story: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Multicultural America” from Chabot, “Literature By Women” from Sierra, and “Literature By and About Women” from Shasta, among dozens of other clearly thematic literature surveys.
By what process can U.C. analysts find “Literature By and About Men” not comparable to “Literature By and About Women”? Apparently, U.C. sees comparability as defined only by gender, not by level or type of course, thereby applying a standard of gender discrimination that produces an inequitable, politicized curriculum and differential treatment based solely on sex.
After Clemens wrote about his course’s rejection on a number of web sites dedicated to academic freedom, the University of California initiated its own appeal of the course’s rejection. According to a press release from NoIndoctrination.Org,
Shortly thereafter, Professor Clemens learned that U.C. had a change of heart. It decided it would initiate its own unusual appeal of the course’s rejection. Dawn Sheibani, UC’s Principal Analyst for Community College Articulation, explained to Professor Clemens that U.C.’s rejection was in part because “we have never seen this before” while admitting that such reasoning sounded like “Catch 22.”
After further review by U.C. faculty, “Literature By and About Men” has now been accepted for transfer, making it the only English course in the nine campus U.C. and 109 campus California community college systems to survey “multiple sources, enactments, and depictions of maleness, manhood, and masculinity in essays, films, short stories, and poetry either by men or about men.” “I’m sure the publicity played a big part in U.C.’s decision to recant,” states Professor Clemens.
Sources:
A Victory for Gender Equity at the University of California. Press Release, NoIndoctrination.Org, January 24, 2005.
Sex and the Multiversity. David Clemens, December 20, 2004.
Tags: California
DNA Test Clears Colorado Athletes of Rapes
Almost as quickly as the multiple accusations of rape by University of Colorado athletes emerged, the set of charges appeared to crash and burn due to lack of evidence and, in some cases, positive evidence of innocence.
Following the school’s recruiting scandal, a woman came forward an accused two University of Colorado football players of raping her after she supposedly met them in a tavern in August 2002.
But both DNA tests excluded both football players as the rapist, and the attorney for one of the players said the police were racial profiling. According to attorney Nancy Holton, the woman did not remember anything about the identities of the men who raped her except for the fact that they were black.
In total, eight cases of alleged sexual assault were reported as a result of the recruiting scandal, and prosecutors have set all of them aside due to lack of evidence.
Source:
Woman reported she was raped in 2002. Associated Press, May 13, 2004.
Afghan Women Training for Role in Information Technology
What a difference a couple of years and a war makes. Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan could not work outside the home and the Internet was banned because of all the immoral content it carried. Now, women in Afghanistan are training in computer networking to help kick start Afghanistan’s information technology industry.
Reuters ran a story in April noting that of the 17 people who graduated from Kabul University’s first certificate program in networking skills, 6 were women. Reuters quoted 18-year-old Nabila Akbari saying, “My personal goal is to share this knowledge with other Afghans, especially Afghan women.”
Rita Dorani, 23, another graduate of the certification program added,
My message for all Afghan women is to try as much as possible to learn about computers, because it is essential for every man and woman to be aware of this global technology. Men should allow women to learn this technology.
No, the U.S./Northern Alliance war in Afghanistan did not turn the country into a democratic paradise overnight where women have the same sort of rights they enjoy in the West — in fact, as Reuters notes, some rural areas of Afghanistan have reimposed Taliban-style limitations on women. But even with that in mind, there’s still no doubt Afghanistan is a much brighter place for women today than it was prior to the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban.
Source:
Afghan Women Usher in IT Age. Reuters, April 8, 2003.
Tags: Afghanistan
Columbia’s Sexual Harassment Policies and Its Status as a Private School
Wendy McElroy makes an interesting observation that I had not heard before about the controversy surrounding Columbia’s sexual harassment policy. If Columbia were a public university or college its policy would be clearly unconstitutional and the courts would take little time at all overturning it. Columbia is a private university, however, and so doesn’t have to abide by the Constitutional protections that a state institution would have to consider — the standard for private colleges is that it has to adhere to “fundamental fairness.”
But as McElroy points out, Columbia is using a federal grant to pay the university official in charge of administering the harassment policy,
Columbia’s Administration also points out that the University is a private institution and the courts have upheld its right to determine which procedures are appropriate to serve its needs. In short, students have no right to expect Constitutional protections from university procedures. Private or not, it is the government, which means the taxpayer, who will foot much of the bill for Columbia’s experiment with gender justice. As part of their Report, the Task Force mentioned that grant funding to finance a full-time officer responsible for disciplining sexual misconduct was available from the Department of Justice. The on-campus gender crusader is estimated to cost $125,000 of taxpayer money in the first year. Yet, according to Patricia Catapano, who chaired the Task Force, “The courts only have said that Columbia…has to have fundamental fairness” because it is a private institution.
If Columbia wants to maintain its Star Chamber-like system of student justice it may have the right to do so as a private university, but it certainly shouldn’t use taxpayer money to enforce a policy that would be unconstitutional at a public institution.
Source:
Gender Madness on Columbia’s Campus. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, March 20, 2001.
Tags: Columbia University, Wendy McElroy
Columbia University Refuses to Defend Its Sexual Misconduct Policy
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that Columbia University is apparently refusing to publicly defend its controversial sexual misconduct policy. The new policy completely strips persons accused of sexual misconduct of any meaningful rights and has garnered a lot of unfavorable publicity for the university.
On February 23, the Columbia University chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union organized an event to discuss the policy. Along with opponents of the policy, such as Columbia Law professor Vivian Berger, the ACLU invited Charlene Allen, the administrator in charge of Columbia’s Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, as well as representatives from the campus group that pushed for the new policy, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER). SAFER declined the invitation, but Allen agreed to participate. Shortly before the event, however, Columbia issued a statement that Allen would not participate after all. Fox News recently aired a story about the policy, and again Columbia refused to comment on the policy.
FIRE’s Harvey Silvergate said,
Columbia cannot bear the public scrutiny. They didn’t show up at the ACLU event, nor for the television program, because there is no principled defense for their policy. How can they justify the stripping away of the due process protection deemed necessary for hundreds of years. HOw can they justify the stripping away of the due process protections deemed necessary for hundreds of years in a free and decent society? The policy is worthy of the kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union, the current People’s Republic of China, or Spain under Franco. It is not worthy of a world-class class university in a free country.
A good insight into the sort of thinking that went into this policy was given last year by SAFER co-chair Sarah Richardson. Asked by a reporter about the rights of individuals accused of a crime, Richardson asked, “Why are we so concerned about the rapist?” Guilty until proven innocent is at the core of SAFER’s claims and the “justice” meted out by the Sexual Misconduct Policy.
Sources:
Columbia University unable to defend policy in public; activist enemies of due process censor FIRE, then make a U-turn. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001.
Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, Columbia University, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Will the Heather Mercer Case Help or Harm Women?
When Heather Mercer won a $2 million judgment from Duke University, it was hailed as an important victory for women’s athletics. Instead it will likely shut the door for women who want to follow in Mercer’s footsteps.
Mercer wanted to be a kicker for Duke’s football team. She was given a tryout by the coach, but since her range was about 35-yards in practice, while a Division I school needs someone who can kick 45-yard field goals during a game, her coach cut her.
Mercer sued and a jury agreed that she had been discriminated against based on her sex. So why isn’t this a clear victory for women?
Because of the provisions of Title IX as they apply to sports. Under Title IX, if a school doesn’t have a women’s team in a given sport it must allow women to try out for the men’s team, with one important exception — contact sports are exempt from this rule.
That’s right, the current law is that if you allow a woman to try out to be a kicker on the football team and then cut her, she could potentially sue the university for sex discrimination as Mercer did. If you just tell the woman point blank, sorry football is a contact sport and the university doesn’t allow women to try out for such teams, the student has no recourse whatsoever.
The federal appeals court that allowed Mercer’s case to go to trial explicitly upheld the contact sports exemption writing, “we hold that where a university has allowed a member of the opposite sex to try out for a single-sex team in a contact sport, the university is, contrary to the holding of the district court, subject to Title IX and therefore prohibited from discriminating against that individual on the basis of his or her sex.”
The obvious reaction from universities seeing what happened in the Duke case will be to institute policies, either written or informal, to refuse try outs to women who want to participate on a men’s contact sport team.
In the end, Mercer’s legal victory will end up diminishing rather than enhancing women’s sports opportunities.
Source:
Sidelined! Kimberly Schuld, The Women’s Quraterly, Winter 2001.
Mercer v. Duke University. United States Court Of Appeals For The Fourth Circuit, No. 99-1014, Decided: July 12, 1999.
Tags: Heather Mercer
Judith Kleinfeld On the MIT Gender Discrimination Study
Judith Kleinfeld recently wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor summarizing her views and the recent Independent Women’s Forum study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sexual discrimination study.
MIT’s study claimed that the university had discriminated against female scientists, but on closer analysis the study was a political document devoid of any statistics or solid facts that would allow anyone to examine whether or not there had indeed been sex discrimination at MIT. As Kleinfeld writes,
Did MIT actually discriminate against its female faculty? Check out the study yourself at MIT’s web site (http://web.mit.edu/). You will notice an astonishing fact: MIT’s study is innocent of evidence of gender discrimination. Not an iota of data is offered to show that MIT treated its female faculty any differently from its male faculty.
Irrational self-flagellation — it’s not just for medieval monks anymore.
Source:
False solution on gender. Judith Kleinfeld, The Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 2001.
Tags: Independent Women's Forum, Judith Kleinfeld
Mary Daly and Boston College Reach Settlement, But Continue to Argue
Feminist theologian Mary Daly recently reached a settlement with Boston College over her strange exit from teaching. For 25 years Daly had refused to allow men in her classroom, and to their discredit Boston College officials grudgingly accepted this arrangement.
But in 1999 a student threatened to sue Boston College if Daly refused to allow him in her classroom. When college officials informed Daly that her sexist policy was no longer tolerable, Daly said she’d rather retire than allow a man in her classroom.
Boston College took her at her word and announced that Daly had retired. Daly claimed she had never said she was retiring and sued Boston College for breach of contract.
And then things got even weirder. A few weeks before Daly’s case was to go to trial, Daly and her lawyer approached Boston College seeking a settlement. The college agreed and the two parties entered into a settlement which included a confidentiality clause — neither side was to discuss the terms of the settlement.
Except Daly and her lawyer apparently couldn’t resist getting in a dig at Boston College and put out a press release falsely claiming that Boston College had come to Daly seeking a settlement and proclaiming, “We are confident that, after hearing all of the testimony, the jury would have ruled in our favor and found that Professor Daly’s tenure rights and academic freedom had been trampled.”
Boston College was outraged by the breach of the settlement as well as the false claim that it, rather than Daly, had sought a settlement. The college threatened to sue Daly for violating the terms of the settlement, and Daly’s lawyer responded by issuing a retraction of the comments that admitted Daly had sought out the settlement.
Regardless of who did what, hopefully other college and universities will get the message that sex discrimination is simply intolerable at institutions of higher learning. Ironically Daly continues to insist that the principle of academic freedom gives her the right to discriminate based on sex in her classrooms. What a twisted view of academic freedom.
Source:
Suit settled, feminist and BC still arguing. Patricia Healy, Boston Globe, February 8, 2001.
Tags: Mary Daly
IWF Finally Brings Some Data to MIT Sex Discrimination Case
A little less than a year ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report, A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT, that claimed there was institutionalized discrimination against women at MIT. The university followed up that report by increasing the salaries of female professors and took other actions to remedy the discrimination.
But was there really ever any discrimination occurring at MIT? This question was raised by conservative groups who noted that the MIT report was a) written by the very same people who had filed complaints of sexual discrimination, and b) was completely devoid of any actual evidence of sexual discrimination. The MIT report essentially said that merely asserting sexual discrimination was enough to prove it.
The lengths to which the report went to avoid presenting any evidence was bizarre. Even such data such as average salaries for male and female professors was removed from the final report.
Unfortunately nobody but MIT has access to the salary data so the issue of how women and men are paid can’t be addressed, but the Independent Women’s Forum has released a study that does answer another question — assuming that men and women are compensated differently, is it possible that this is because men and women on MIT’s faculty perform differently?
Since this whole episode was kicked off by the allegations of biology professor Nancy Hopkins — who was also the chief architect of the MIT report — the IWF examined the productivity of biology professors. Specifically it looked at publications, citations and grant money by biology professors.
The results eerily mirror the claims about sex discrimination at MIT. For older professors who earned doctorates from 1971 to 1976, there was a wide disparity in publication and citation for men and women, while for younger professors who earned their PhDs between 1988 and 1993 there was a rough parity between the productivity of men and women.
There were 11 professors in the older group (six men, five women). Of those, three of the men had published more than 100 papers from 1989-2000, but only one of the woman had done so. Only one out of the six male professors had published fewer than 50 papers, but four out of five women had published fewer than 50 papers. When it came to citations, the disparity was even more dramatic. Three of the six men had more than 10,000 citations. The most widely cited female had a little under 3,000. When it came to federal grants, there was relative parity by gender except for a single male professor who had almost three times as many federal grants as anyone else in the group.
For the younger group, who had recently earned their doctorates, there was far more parity. There was a single male biologist who had published 120 papers and was cited 14,000 times — far more than anyone else in the group — but the second highest publication count was by a woman, and the second most widely cited individual was female. Similarly the top performer for citations per paper was a woman, and several women had more citations per paper than their male colleagues.
Based on this data, it would be expected that there would be wide disparities in salaries and resources devoted to the male scientists than female scientists in the older group, while we should see roughly equal salaries and resources among the younger scientists. Since MIT has refused to release the data it used, it is impossible to say for sure whether or not this is the case. However, when the MIT report first broke it was widely reported that younger associate professors reported much higher satisfactions with their salaries and available resources than female professors who had been at MIT much longer (and the younger professor’s views were routinely dismissed as being a result of inexperience or naivete).
Source:
Confession Without Guilt? Patricia Hausman and James H. Steiger, The Independent Women’s Forum, February 2001.
Tags: Independent Women's Forum
How Long Until Colleges Create Affirmative Action Programs for Men?
In recent months there have been a number of news stories about a gender discrepancy at American universities and colleges that is likely to grow even larger in coming years — women now are disproportionately represented in higher education.
This year, for example, men made up only 44 percent of admissions to colleges and universities. For a variety of reasons, that percentage is likely to decline further before it stabilizes. By 2010, the United States Department of Education estimates that men will make up only 42 percent of higher education admissions.
Already some colleges are creating what are essentially affirmative action programs for men to increase “diversity” on campus, and thanks to the feminist mantra that a statistical discrepancy is prima facie evidence of active discrimination, such programs are likely to survive and expand.
According to a Daily Telegraph (UK) report, The University of NOrth Carolina and DepauL University have already started targeting potential male students with more outreach than female students, including extra mailings with more emphasis on traditionally male areas of study such as engineering. Meanwhile, some women who applied to the University of Georgia sued that university because they argued it’s admissions policies were biased toward men. They lost their suit.
The Daily Telegraph claims that the decline is attributable to men opting not to go to college to pursue more lucrative independent careers such as with Internet companies, which may be true for a very small segment of men, but is unlikely to explain the entire difference. Rather the difference is attributable to the fact that women as a group tend to do better in high school then men as a group. Women have much higher graduation rates, and although men tend to do better on standardized tests than women, this is only because the male sample of test takers is skewed because far more men tend to take tests such as the SAT and ACT.
Given the disparities, should there be affirmative action programs for men? Absolutely not. Affirmative action programs were a lousy way to try to compensate for statistical disparities when they favored men and they would be a lousy way to compensate when the statistical disparities favor women.
Source:
University women in a class of their own. Philip Delves Broughton, The Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2000.