After my post yesterday about Penn's policy of discouraging the hiring and promoting of men, I received some interesting email.

One telling email was from the co-director of Penn's Women's Studies program (radical egalitarianism dictates that such programs will never have single leaders who are named as such). Addressed "to women faculty" (since men faculty are apparently not affected by or interested in questions of gender equity at Penn), the missive directed recipients to the Daily Pennsylvanian coverage of Penn's recent gender equity meeting, adding that "The reporter did a good job of summarizing Prof. Phoebe Leboy's excellent presentation on the problems in achieving gender equity at Penn." Thus did a Penn administrator blithely confirm Prof. Leboy's striking revelation: that Penn is indeed in the business of giving financial boosts to departments that hire and promote women, while at the same time instituting "disincentives" to hire and promote men. I was hoping the DP had got it wrong. And I was expecting that whether the DP got it wrong or right, the Penn administration would scramble to distance itself from the reporter's representation of their discriminatory tactics. Silly me. It seems that we at Penn are damn proud of our double standards and we don't care who knows it.

Most of the mail I received, though, was from men, and its tone was a far cry from the complacency exhibited by the co-director of Women's Studies. Here's an eloquent extract from a man who hopes one day to pursue an academic career as a historian:

I can't help wondering a few things:

How do women such as Phoebe Leboy expect someone in my position to react to this kind of nonsense? Can any honest person, in truth, actually believe that this kind of discrimination, openly advertised as "progress," fails to crush the hopes and dreams of perfectly able young men at Penn and elsewhere? Having grown up under a constant deluge of media denouncing me for my offending chromosomes, filling me at every turn with self-doubt, I have grown accustomed to shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to the notion of being resented, even reviled, by minority classmates and colleagues. (It should be noted here that women do not constitute an actual "minority" of my classmates in any meaningful sense of the word.) It is quite another thing, however, when I am confronted with the reality that active steps are being taken, at this very moment, to prevent me from achieving anything like success in academia.

Am I expected to feel differently about this than women of just a couple generations ago felt? Do these people ever consider how heartbreaking and discouraging it is to know that the day I face nigh-insurmountable, institutionalized obstacles is the day we will have achieved "justice" in America? This strikes me as a ghastly perversion of the entire American enterprise.

[...]

I'm tempted to say, "How far we have fallen," but that's not exactly true. A better summary might be, "How little we have risen."

I couldn't agree more. And I await the day when the women who benefit from academe's dirty little secret--that women are not a minority on campus anymore, and that in some fields they have established a dominance that utterly belies the continued disingenuous cry of discrimination--realize that there are boys and men on the wrong end of their vengeful little stick. Some of those boys and men will be their sons, their husbands, their lovers, their friends, and even their fathers. All of them will be living a life wilfully hampered by the coarse retributive logic of a feminism that rejects equal opportunity and insists, illogically and destructively, that unless women constitute 50% or more of the faculty in every field, a dire state of discrimination exists.

For the record, treating men the way women used to be treated is not a means that justifies the end. Privileging sex over qualifications--or, more deconstructively, scrambling the definition of qualifications so that they become inseparable from and contingent on demographics (as in California's post-Prop 209 world of college admissions)--may get a greater variety of bodies onto the faculty. But it does so at the expense of both individuals and education itself. For planned historical change to work--particularly change as radical as that envisioned by the anti-discriminatory language of Title VII and Title IX--it must be given time to work. Race and gender preferences are explicitly imagined as ways of hotwiring historical change. They are impatient policies, centered on short-term gratification and blind to long-term ramifications. They seek to engineer a shift rather than to create the conditions that will enable a shift that the majority of Americans believe is necessary and right. And in so doing, they are eroding our educational system, our Constitution, and our lives.

Policies such as Penn's are not fair or equitable attempts to be true to the letter of Title IX. Title IX has been used to rationalize many such extreme campus policies, particularly in athletics, where it is decimating men's sports in the name of achieving parity for women athletes. There is some fine writing about academic abuse of Title IX--if you are curious, the best places to start are with Wendy McElroy and Jessica Gavora (see this and this).