BY MARTIN KICH

So writes Richard Vedder, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, in an article for Forbes. What follows is the opening paragraph, which is essentially an overview of the main points of his argument:

A good case can be made that males are discriminated against on college campuses, and the discrimination has grown over time. Men are vastly outnumbered in America’s universities—in the fall of 2016, there were 2,667,000 more women studying than men. Not only are they significantly outnumbered, men are often disproportionately harshly treated in campus disciplinary actions, often being denied rights routinely and constitutionally provided all Americans off campus. Colleges spend millions on Women’s Studies programs, but never a dime on Men’s Studies. Special efforts are made to get women to study in the STEM disciplines, where men are numerically dominant, but no such effort is made to increase the number of men in other fields where women significantly outnumber men. Over 80 % of obstetricians doing their residency are female: are there any efforts to lure men into obstetrics? All-women colleges are much more prevalent than all-male schools. Arguably, a War Against Men exists on American college campuses.

So, the argument basically rests on five points.

First, Prof. Vedder emphasizes that women now outnumber men among those enrolled in colleges and universities. But, as far as I know, there is no institutionalized discrimination against men that accounts for markedly fewer of them now being enrolled. In other words, the idea that the historical prohibition against enrolling women and people of color has somehow now been reversed and men are now the targets of some sort of comparable discrimination is a real stretch, if not preposterous.

Second, Prof. Vedder argues that the discrimination against men is reflected in the ways in which campus discipline is enforced against male students accused of sexual impropriety, harassment, and assault. Clearly, the current system has deficiencies, especially in cases involving behavior that is criminal. But the #MeToo movement has involved a great many prominent men, and very few accusations against those men have proven to be isolated, never mind false. So, despite some cases in which injustices may have been done to some male students, I don’t think that there is overwhelming evidence that female students are more prone to making false or exaggerated accusations than women in general are. At one point in the middle of this essay, Prof. Vedder claims that the idea that one in four female students has been sexually “abused against their will” is “still widely believed” but “almost certainly factually inaccurate.” I would counter that it is all too easy to dismiss shocking statistics as fabrications and that abuses that have long gone unreported have repeatedly been exposed as incredibly shocking in their scope. Although one cannot extrapolate from the most extreme cases, who would have believed that Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky would have been able to abuse dozens of victims over decades while holding prominent and very visible positions at major public universities? And who would have believed that hundreds of priests in just one state would have been not just institutionally protected but, in effect, institutionally enabled to continue their crimes?

Whatever the reasons are for the under-enrollment of men (and I am not even sure that “under-enrollment” is at all the right term for describing this phenomenon), they almost certainly do not include anxieties about an atmosphere that is inherently and palpably hostile to men. To believe that supposition, one would have to believe that workplaces that young men are entering instead of our colleges and universities have remained relatively unaffected by the growing awareness of the unacceptability of sexual impropriety, harassment, and assault. That’s preposterous. I will add that in my three decades in higher education, I have worked with many female colleagues and students, and although some (and, perhaps, many) of them have had the same reasons as some of my male colleagues and students to find me difficult or even at times unbearable, no one has ever accused me of sexual impropriety or sexual harassment because, in whatever ways I may be fairly described as an asshole, that’s not one of them. This is not about reacting to a certain atmosphere; it’s about choosing or avoiding certain behaviors.

On Prof. Vedder’s third point that “millions are spent on Women’s Studies programs but not a dime on Men’s Studies,” the easy answer is that given the male domination of almost all disciplines previous to the last quarter- to half-century, anything that is not Women’s Studies is, in effect, Men’s Studies. Furthermore, the popularity of Women’s Studies programs could reflect the continuing need for such programs, rather than some sort of conspiracy to marginalize or to emasculate men. One cannot argue by analogy, but often analogies are provocative. I would suggest that just as the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency did not move America into a post-racial social, economic, political, or cultural era, so, too, the development of Women’s Studies programs has not resulted from or been followed by our transcending gender inequities. Women still earn less and have a more difficult time getting promoted than men. Perhaps those realities explain why they are taking on a disproportionate percentage of student-loan debt—because they feel that they need every possible advantage to cancel out some of their continuing disadvantages in the workplace. And, just so I don’t leave the point unaddressed, I am certain that if there were an actual demand for Men’s Studies programs, colleges and universities would be rushing to meet it.

Fourth, I am certain that the claim colleges and universities have to convince women to enroll in STEM disciplines because of some lack of aptitude has long been put to rest. Instead, the issue has been that the disciplines have, in effect, been closed off to women. This culture is changing, but female colleagues in business, the sciences, and engineering who are quite a bit younger than I am very clearly still face hurdles that are related to their gender. On the other side of the issue, I do know that male students are being actively recruited into elementary and middle-school education programs because so few teachers at those grade levels, in any disciplines are male. I am assuming that much the same is true in at least some other traditionally female-dominated fields.

Lastly, women’s colleges may still be more common than all-male institutions, but many of the women’s colleges that have managed to survive either enroll male students in evening and/or weekend programs or on life-support. It seems more than a little lame to end an argument about a “War Against Men” in American colleges and universities by pointing to a category of institutions that is not just small but, some would argue, anachronistic. Although the supporters of these institutions do fervently believe and can make a credible case that they continue to serve an important purpose, I think most of them would agree that the institutions fill a niche need. So, the idea that the mission of such institutions reflects some broader bias against men within higher education is, at its core, a self-contradictory proposition.

What surprises me most about the whole argument presented by Prof. Vedder is how superficial and dependent on non-sequiturs it is. I think that he himself was aware of those weaknesses in the argument because in the conclusion, he seems to try to take a more reasonable stance:

American universities of, say, 1965, were terribly discriminatory against women, with the most prestigious colleges like Harvard, Yale or Princeton not even accepting them. Corrective action was appropriate and needed. We perhaps are now on the verge of over-correction, of discouraging male participation in higher education, of depriving our nation of productive human capital. In my judgment, the welfare state has had unfortunate unintended consequences that have contributed to the decline in male collegiate participation that has been especially acute among minority populations. The decline in traditional two parent families has led to declining academic preparation at the primary and secondary school level, arguably adversely impacting males more than females. The problems of a dearth of men on college campuses is not, I think, primarily the result of deliberate gender discrimination by college admission authorities. But it is a problem, and one our nation needs to ponder and address.

Well, that’s not quite what I was hoping for.

Oh, yes, the bulk of the blame is certainly on the “welfare state,” even though it has been largely dismantled over the past four to five decades and even though the penalties of poverty that it was intended to ameliorate have gotten steadily worse, rather than somehow simply resolving themselves with the elimination of the “nanny state.” And, yes, the blame can also be put on the change in social mores reflected in the decline in two-parent families, even though men have certainly had as much to do with that change in mores as women have.

Over those same four or five decades, there have been very dramatic changes in the cost and financing of higher education and in the governance and budget priorities within our institutions. At the same time, there have been even more dramatic changes in the American workplace—in the nature of work, in the types of jobs available, in the compensation and benefits that those jobs provide, in the permanence of those jobs, and in workers’ rights. I suspect that all of those changes–in some very complex combinations–account for patterns in postsecondary enrollment at least as much as and probably much more than the “welfare state” and single-parent families account for them.

But it is undeniably easier to blame Women Studies programs and to point to a course on “a feminist approach to geography” as if the implications of the ridicule are so self-evident as to not require any delineation and substantiation.

I feel compelled to add that at most institutions, including my own, programs such as Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Latino/-a Studies and LBGTQ Studies get a lot more lip-service from administrations than they get funding. It is astonishing how many times a news release about the accomplishments of the students and/or faculty in such programs get juxtaposed against much more quietly announced cuts to those programs’ budgets, even though the programs are often operating on a shoestring to begin with. If female faculty and students were truly reshaping our institutions to their own very skewed ideological agendas, I would think that they would be using their power to provide such programs with more sustainable, never mind lavish, budgets. This talking point seems analogous to the assertions that most people who are dependent on food stamps are using them to purchase just about anything but food, as if they are somehow immune to hunger—as if hunger is just a meme that serves their actual ulterior purposes.

Richard Vedder’s complete article is available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/11/12/are-males-being-discriminated-against-on-college-campuses/.