When I taught business ethics at Butler University (1993-2018), the student body was consistently over 60% women, once hitting over 65%.
Inasmuch as any applied ethics course must deal with “real world” data, the data were given to students when we addressed affirmative action policies. That triggered several of my male students to visit my office and offer me stories about how they were treated at Butler.
I made sure they knew that in the disparity, Butler was not unique and that the hostility they said they felt was not isolated to Butler, that some schools had female professors who barred men from taking their classes.
The young men felt marginalized. If colleges are to be a success, young men have to feel welcome on campus and in class. Again, Butler is not unique.
Campuses across America have women’s studies programs and women’s centers with no analog for men. Is it any wonder the Chronicle of Higher Education has articles on the precipitous decline in males attending schools of higher education?
The pattern was established in the early 1980s, for it has been that long ago that female undergrads outnumbered men with institutions showing little or no regard for disparities that favor women.
As well, the cultural pattern of snubbing boys and men occurred in the 1980s. Sara Ruddick’s “Maternal Thinking” stated that anyone who took care of the children was a mother no matter what the sex, thereby insulting male care providers.
Andrea Dworkin’s comment that any woman who has given birth has been raped twice, once at conception and then at the birth of the child, was denigrating to both men and women.
The kind of toxicity those two feminists showed characterized much of popular culture and was tolerated by institutions of higher education. Shortly before I retired, a committee was formed to implement a “social justice” component in the curriculum.
My ethics course, which included a critical appraisal of various positions on distributive justice, did not qualify to satisfy the requirement. The committee assigned to design the “social justice” component was composed of nine women and two men, none of whom had an advanced degree in philosophy, the discipline where matters of justice are critically appraised.
As a side note, the widely used and well-respected Stanford Encyclopedia has no entry for “social justice,” nor does it have an entry for “equity,” inasmuch as those terms presume a preferred position on distributive justice. That encyclopedia treats the matter of justice philosophically, as an open question.
Thus, it is no surprise to me that men are not attending college. When we discussed affirmative action in class, I pointed out that people who are excluded lose incentive to try to get a job or a position (it’s an argument for affirmative action on behalf of the excluded).
Inasmuch as boys and men are not the preferred sex, or perhaps more accurately, are the wrong sex, per enrollment numbers and per affirmative action policy, they can be expected to show less interest in college.
Schools should work harder at removing toxic behavior regarding all groups, even men. Until that happens, the national disparity regarding the sexes, will continue.
It is currently 59% female undergraduates to 41% males, growing over the past several years. The graduate population is even more dramatic: 39% of enrolled graduate students are male, 61% are female, according to the Education Data Initiative.
It will be a better day when colleges and universities bring “students who felt excluded from higher education back into the fold.” These days, that means men.
Richard McGowan, who has a doctorate of philosophy, is an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. He’s taught philosophy and ethics cores for more than 40 years, most recently at Butler University.