I just keep on getting more insensitive and politically incorrect every day. Well, actually I’m NOT getting more insensitive, I just let a little more of my real thoughts and beliefs leak out of my head and onto the pages of “What I’d Like To Have Said” for your selective enjoyment or outrage. I guess you’ll have to be the judge each day, and today I’m probably going to piss a few people off.
The current topic is single sex educational institutes. When I attended Georgia Tech in the late 1970’s, our enrollment was seven men for every one woman. Since many of the women were enrolled in the college of management, I could actually go for days at a time without speaking to a woman unless she worked in a campus restaurant or was a professor. My parents seemed to think that I shouldn’t worry about it because I wasn’t in college to meet girls; I was there to get an education. The situation still had a “negative static pressure” (it sucked.)
It seems that the girls enrolled at Wells College in Aurora, New York are more than a little upset that the college has made the decision to admit men in their 2005 freshman class. Notice that I place emphasis on the word decision, the college wasn’t sued in court and tried in the media and in the court of public opinion and forced at gunpoint into admitting men. They did it for financial reasons.
The article states that “(a)ngry students staged a sit-in and took over the administration building for a week after the October decision. The Collegiate Cabinet called for a vote of no-confidence in the school's president. A group of alumnae started a petition to protest the change. Students and parents marched in a demonstration during Parents' Weekend.
Now they're in court.
Two students, freshman Lauren Searle-Lebel and sophomore Jennifer LaBarbera, filed a lawsuit to prevent Wells from accepting men until 2008, when both women will have graduated. A hearing is set for Thursday in Syracuse, 35 miles northeast of here.
The students declined to comment. Searle-Lebel's mother, Ellen Searle-Lebel, a 1973 Wells graduate, said her daughter “chose to go to a women's college … and was under the understanding that it was going to remain a women's college. It's pretty simple.”"
Railey Savage, 19, a sophomore from Freeville, N.Y., who helped organize the sit-in, says Wells is “populated by strong women who could be in leadership roles, who could be active members of their communities, who have found their voices. That's become really important to me, and I value and cherish it. And I want to keep it.””
I’m sure that, for the men enrolled at the Citadel and VMI in the early 1990’s, their all male corps of cadets, free from the sexual tensions and resulting impediments to learning that the presence of the opposite sex often presents, was important to them also. Unfortunately, the Federal court and a bunch of the US population saw things differently.
The lovely Miss Shannon Faulkner was used as a pawn of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization of Lesbians, er…um…make that…Women to break down the 150 year old single gender educational doors of The Citadel in Charleston, SC in 1995. Once admitted after a two-year legal battle, she lasted less than a month because she was not qualified physically to meet the rigors imposed on the “knobs” by the Corps of Cadets. Of course, being a woman, an immediate exception to tradition was granted to her by the school. She was not forced to have her “knob” (head) shaved on the first day of indoctrination. Let’s just say things went downhill for Miss Shannon from there. So what was the %$&@* point?
The primary argument used against The Citadel and VMI (and, for that matter, practically every other all male organization like The Augusta National Golf Club) is that the exclusion of women by these institutes and organizations unfairly prevents them from enjoying the business, political, and professional networking that the male members enjoy. The accomplishments and success of the graduates of these all male institutes is somehow viewed as being not of their own making, but rather primarily the result of where the men chose to go to school or hit a golf ball.
In the end, the colleges lost their legal challenges because they both accepted partial state funding. The idea of setting up separate but equal all girl institutes was rejected as not providing a true “Citadel” or “VMI” experience. Shannon Faulkner apparently got her fill in just a few short weeks, but the damage was done. In the five years after her admission, 43 women were admitted to the Citadel, but only one graduated. Was this result because of discrimination, one might ask—or a basic incompatibility with the program?
Now back to little Wells College.
Wells College is facing declining enrollment and a resulting funding problem. Being a private school, they fortunately don’t take much in the way of state taxpayer funds. It also seems that their illustrious all female alumni base is either real selfish or else they are preoccupied with marching, protesting, holding sit-ins, or perhaps having babies and raising families after graduation. Regardless of the reasons, Wells College’s endowment funding is not up to meeting the financial expenses of running an all woman college in 2004. You do realize that a college is a business and, like any business, red ink is bad news?
By admitting men to their student body, Wells College is killing two birds with one proverbial stone. They are seeking to expand their female demographic base while at the same time increasing their shrinking enrollment—and you know what, ITS ALREADY WORKING. Their 2005 freshman class jumped to 170 from 109 this year. Only 25 men are included in that figure. As a result, there will be 46 more women on campus next fall, but only 25 men—poor henpecked bastards…
"But Wells President Lisa Marsh Ryerson says the choice for the college is coed or dead. The college is running a deficit and relying on its $54 million endowment to break even. If that continues, Wells will wither, Ryerson says. “The solution is to expand the audience.”
Currently, 64 colleges in the nation are all-women, down from 300 in the early 1970s. And three of those colleges are planning to admit men as undergraduates next fall — Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., Immaculata Women's College outside Philadelphia and Wells. Only two colleges are all men: Hampden-Sydney in Virginia and Wabash in Indiana."
Waahh—there are ONLY 64 all-women schools left, an 80% reduction in 30 years. I wonder how many were forced to defend their admissions policies in court and only admit a bunch of “girly men” after they lost a class action lawsuit? What kind of man would want to pay to go to college so they can study whatever the hell they teach in a ‘woman’s studies” curriculum. Not many, I suspect. The most telling statistic is that there are only two all male schools left in the US. I bet that most of those fell by the wayside to lawsuits filed by feminists and other interlopers who were jealous of being excluded from the pool of successful male alumni.
I find it ironic that Wells College voluntarily decided to go coed. They might also try teaching something that would actually equip their new male graduates to earn a respectable living once they have endured four years of radical feminism. A quick review of the Academic Programs at Wells only includes a handful of undergrad majors (math, molecular biology, chemistry, physics, computer science) that would likely yield an ability to produce some cash after graduation. The rest are either useless or require further work at the masters or PHD level to get even a high school teaching job. What the hell would someone want to borrow money or ask their parents to pay for four years of college to study “Ethics” or “American Culture” for any way?
I’ve had it up to here (pointing to the top of my head) with “American Culture.” And good luck to all of you 25 guys hanging out with three or four hundred angry women next fall in Aurora, NY…you’re gonna need it.
(PS: I'm having trouble with my HTML code editing working between MS Word and Mozilla Firefox. Please let me know by commenting if your browser shows any funny code inserted in my text)
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