BY AARON BARLOW

Years ago, when we were walking our dogs in our new neighborhood, a man my age at the time (late-50s) stepped out of his house and got right in my face on the sidewalk. I refused to back away. He yelled at me about dog pee and poop. I didn’t yell back but was proud of myself for standing up to a ranting new neighbor. Afterward, my wife brought me down to reality: “The two of you looked ridiculous.”

Sometimes it takes a woman to tell a man that he’s being stupidly “manly.”

I thought of this today when I heard about an incident at my alma mater, Beloit College. I have fond memories of my time there; the school made my scholarly career possible. So, when I see something critical of it, my tendency is to jump to its defense. My dander gets up; my “manliness” clicks into gear.

The incident concerns a Harvard professor named Harvey Mansfield who is best known for his 2006 book Manliness. Reviewing it for The New York Times, Walter Kirn wrote that Mansfield believes that there is something to be learned from the stereotypes about manliness, and that whether or not this is true is the central question of the book:

The answer is meant to be, “yes,” of course (or, rather, “yes, professor”), but a reading of Mansfield’s book suggests it’s “no.” No, there is actually nothing to be learned from deciding that we’ve known everything all along about how men are a mixture of pluck and pride and a certain primordial selfish-unselfishness that would rather die than live unfree, but which, if permitted to live free, isn’t afraid to kill, if necessary — especially to protect the weak.

Whether he manages to prove anything about “manliness” or not, Mansfield believes that we have lost this quality and are poorer for it.

Mansfield, as a result of his book, has become something of a darling to certain segments of the American right. On April 6, the Beloit College chapter of Young Americans for Freedom sponsored a campus talk by Mansfield. According to the college’s newspaper The Round Table (I was a writer and assistant editor for it during my own undergraduate days), a protest was considered:

Ultimately, there was no formal protest at the lecture, although a security guard was present, which is not typical of academic events at Beloit College. Significantly fewer students, faculty and community members were in attendance than the Round Table typically observes at lectures on campus.

The paper’s story, viewed today on its website, includes this:

Following the talk, which summarized the ideas expressed in Manliness, Mansfield responded to questions from the audience. Those in attendance addressed Mansfield’s perception of the relationship between gender and biological sex, challenged his focus on Western concepts of masculinity or manliness, and requested statistical evidence to back up his claims. (To that request, he responded that he does not “like to live by statistics.”) All of the questions asked of Mansfield challenged his views.

However, the story seems to have been edited. According to another story, this one on the Power Line blog, it seems to once have included this:

Several audience members booed Mansfield as he took the stage, and some heckled him throughout his talk. After Mansfield said that women are innately weaker than their husbands, [name redacted: the student has already received threats] stood and yelled, “Who the fuck is paying you to be here?” [Name redacted] was asked to leave by the security guard present, and he obliged. Mansfield did not acknowledge most of the interruptions.

I have no idea what led to the deletion of this paragraph (it was deleted: a Google search  leads one to the Round Table story, even though these lines are no longer there). Perhaps some of the information is incorrect. It doesn’t really matter. [Update: the intent, I am told, was to protect the student who had been named in the paragraph, for that student had begun to receive death threats, bumping up the seriousness of this to “outrageous,” thanks to Power Line. Inadvertently, more was deleted than was originally intended.]

What does matter, to Power Line, is that the outburst happened (or appears to have happened) and was over the line of propriety. The story there ends with this:

Memo to Power Line readers who may be Beloit alums: Send a stiff note to the administration informing them that you will henceforth decline to make any financial contributions to the college.

The speech of one student, it seems, reflects on the whole college. And the college should be punished. This reasoning is itself more of a threat to free expression (though I doubt Power Line would see it that way) than the student’s outburst, and it should be vigorously countered. It doesn’t matter, to Power Line, that the question period was one of challenge to Mansfield, just what should be happening on college campuses. It doesn’t matter that the college wanted Mansfield to speak. The college should be punished.

In its post, which appears under the headline “The Disgrace at Beloit College,” Power Line also tries to tie this incident to the college as a whole by juxtaposing the Mansfield story with a faculty job-vacancy announcement that ends with:

Because equity and inclusion are central to our students’ liberal arts education and vital to the thriving of all members of our residential learning community, Beloit College aspires to be an actively anti-racist institution.

This bothers Stephen Hayward, the Power Line writer, a great deal. He attempts irony: “Boy, I am glad Beloit clarified things with that last statement, because I was deeply worried that Beloit College was a hotbed of white supremacy.” As I am sitting on a hiring committee at the college where I teach right now, I am quite aware of the reasoning behind such statements and, in some situations, their necessity. There is no need to denigrate them. There are strong pedagogical reasons, anyway, for the attempt at diversity that the statement intimates. Attempts such as Hayward’s to paint this as some sort of orthodoxy are duplicitous, at best. They twist a desire to incorporate a variety of viewpoints into what they imagine is a desire to exclude their own.

I admit it: the Power Line story is only a minor example of the sort of common right-wing characterization of what goes on when people with unpopular views speak on college campuses. It is significant to me simply because of my own connection to the college.

But that, itself, is a problem. We should not let even small incidents like this pass with only a shrug of the shoulder, a ‘there they go again’ dismissal.

There is a deliberate and on-going effort on the part of many activists on the right to paint today’s campuses as places where students are coddled and spoon-fed leftists views. They take small incidents like this one and try to blow them up into a “disgrace.”

The real “disgrace,” of course, is theirs. They evade debate and discussion by replacing it  with attack, replacing discussion with manifestations of what David Horowitz has termed “political war.” They are harming American higher education.

They may even pretend that they are not welcome on campus, but that is not the case. As an institution, Beloit welcomed Mansfield–just as I would welcome anyone with a legitimate desire for discussion and debate on an appropriate topic to visit my classroom… and, if they do, I will make sure that “manliness” does not turn collegial discussion into a pissing match.

The vast majority of my colleagues across the country–not to mention our students–would do the same. We are not going to stoop to the level of “political war.”