Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Colleges Accused of Title IX Violations

Perhaps you've heard that Stephanie Monroe, the Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights, had announced that her office would launch an investigation into possible Title IX violations in colleges and universities with a disproportionate ratio of male to female students in math and science departments. These are colleges and universities, mind you. Don't students declare what they wish to major in? Aren't departments within their rights (and responsibilities) to accept students who demonstrate high aptitude for and success in those areas of study?

Obviously, there are women who have a God-given aptitude for math and science. I have female friends with their master's degrees in engineering, certainly not a soft science, and it would have been wrong for them to have been denied the opportunity to follow their interests just because they are female.

On the other hand, to demand that colleges have males and females in their science, math and engineering programs in proportion to the gender distribution of their student bodies could cause hardships for our young men who are already outnumbered on many college campuses. Women could be encouraged to major in subjects which are not compatible with their strengths, and men who really belong in those fields could be booted out to make way for women.

Could it be that men and women might actually tend to have interests and aptitudes in different areas? Could we admit this without losing our jobs, fainting, or going to the other extreme and pigeon-holing everyone by sex into designated fields (women in English departments and men in physics)?

Thankfully, Ms. Monroe has backed off for now. Hopefully, no further steps will be taken until long after my son declares a major and is accepted into a program (and hopefully none after that either). He should, after all, have rights, too and should not be penalized for being born male.



Link to Jennifer Roback Morse for further opinions and information on this topic.

7 Comments:

At 4/27/2006 7:13 PM, Blogger mynym said...

...had announced that her office would launch an investigation into possible Title IX violations in colleges and universities with a disproportionate ratio of male to female students in math and science departments.

It would seem that first she needs to investigate the disproportionate ratio of female to male students in college in general these days. It can probably assumed that it is yet another act of victimization by women against men given their long and sordid history of having men take all the most dangerous jobs, having them fight wars to protect them and so on and on!

So this is just another instance of women victimizing men as is initially indicated by the fact that a disproportionate ratio exists. Not to mention the fact that men disproportionately tend to have less body fat then women and given the fact that we know that women inherently tend to victimize men that's probably from women starving them somehow.

 
At 4/27/2006 11:53 PM, Blogger Anna Venger said...

Geez, Mynym. I thought I was rather supportive of you men, but here you are lumping all women into the same category and accusing us all of being victimizers. Well, I take umbrage at such a suggestion. Angry white males sound just as hysterical as the Feminazis they despise so much, won't you agree?

And for the record, up until the last century with improvements in modern medicine, women had the far more dangerous job of carrying babies to term and not bleeding out from miscarriages or dying from complications of childbirth.

Bottom line, most women don't hate men or seek to victimize them. That's why I posted about this ridiculous scheme in the first place.

 
At 4/28/2006 9:29 PM, Blogger mynym said...

Hmmm, the note about starvation at the end was supposed to give the satire away...but if I were to continue as a masculinist I would pull some statitics out of thin air as well as history proving that women victimize men. That done, I would have the path to power layed out and might even get to the point where men have the right to kill their offspring if they feel like it and so on.

 
At 4/28/2006 10:06 PM, Blogger Anna Venger said...

I did know you were teasing!

But now you want men to be like tomcats that kill the little kittens instead of men fulfilling their roles as protectors. Naturally your power grabs will never work because we all know that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

 
At 5/01/2006 11:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If I may add some possibly useless and unsarcastic analysis here, I think what we have in the realm of women's rights (and minority rights as well) is the natural overcompensation that invariably happens when major societal ideas get overturned. I think this overcompensation in fact must occur in order to make any headway in righting the ship, given the fact that none of us have an obvious and universal road to total equality that everyone can follow neatly.

 
At 5/03/2006 12:44 AM, Blogger Anna Venger said...

Don't mind Mynym and me, Andy.

I think there is concern that there's already been a great deal of overcompensation. Christina Hoff Sommers' books, "Who Stole Feminism" and "The War against Boys" document well the fact that it's boys who are suffering educationally today, not girls. But regardless of what the statistics show, the cadence continues of discrimination against girls in education...

 
At 5/03/2006 10:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I suppose I just have faith that the system will correct itself in this respect.

Oh, and I added the "unsarcastic" line just because I didn't want to confuse anybody given the nature of your comments up till mine. Go nuts with the sarcasm all you want. I do too plenty of times.

 

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