From a woman reader incensed by Penn's Gender Inequity policy of using (as-yet unspecified) "disincentives" to discourage departments from hiring and promoting men:

Affirmative action is wrong at the university admissions level, at the hiring level it is dead wrong. But deciding it is fine to oppress the unwanted males is a new low. Giving a "make-up call" to someone wronged might be a human instinct hard to suppress at times, but deciding to give unearned advantage to those who have not been discriminated against (but who had a relative who might have been discriminated against) doesn't do a free and open society anything but harm. Women might have been discriminated against in the past (which is hard to prove in fields that are still not chosen by women even when actively recruited today). But why do we repay their daughters to make amends to the dead? Why is perpetuating discrimination (once it is recognized as unfair) good for anyone? Gutting the fundamental American principle of equality and meritocracy in a university should be unthinkable. That such policies are openly discussed and accepted without dissent should be incontrovertible proof that reason is now extinct at the university. They don't seem to realize they have lost it and don't appear to miss it. Can we vote on which people we want to make the privileged "ins" and which will be "out" of fashion? Can we do this often so everyone gets the liberating experience of getting a turn at being oppressed and being an oppressor?

Equal opportunity victimhood does seem to be one solution. In a way, the marginalization of men on campus is a means of doing this. The undergraduate student body is becoming increasingly feminized (women make up more than 60% of undergraduates and are expected to be fully 2/3 of the student body within a few years), and the faculty is following suit (at Penn, for example, more than 90% of graduate students in English are women--a number that is not a local aberration, and that telegraphs quite clearly that this is one discipline that is fast becoming a single-sex enterprise). But one of the strange things about this massive demographic shift is that it does not in any way mitigate or controvert the loud cries of discrimination that have become such a reflexive tic on campus. You could argue that the signal achievement of academic feminism is to reconcile actual dominance with the rhetoric of subordination; indeed, how better to parade your institutional power than to force everyone around you to participate in the lie of your oppression? The oppressed people on campus are not those who, to borrow a priceless phrase from feminist rhetoric, "have a voice." They are not those whose subordination is the subject of endless protective policies, studies, syllabi, classroom discussions, sensitivity workshops, research projects, scholarships, fellowships, "incentives," "disincentives," and whole academic departments. They are those who cannot speak up about the double standard for fear of losing whatever small chance they have of making it in what is increasingly a woman's academic world. They are white men.

Another point raised by this letter that is worth highlighting: the logic of gender equity as it is presently carried out on many, many campuses is not that of equity (the term is a grotesque misnomer) but of reparations. The overwhelming majority of women who are currently benefiting from affirmative action in the name of gender equity on campus belong to a generation that does not know what institutionalized discrimination is. They are women like me, raised and schooled entirely in an America that was bending over backwards to give girls opportunities. They grew up knowing they could do anything boys could do. They played sports, excelled in school (even in math and science!), never imagined they would not go to college, never imagined they would not be able to pursue the career of their choice. Like boys, we always had an answer for the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Contrary to the received wisdom of self-help psychobabble, we were confident girls who grew up to be self-determining women. We are independent agents. We have choices and endless opportunity. And yet we luxuriate in the myth of our oppression and expect to be compensated personally for the way it "used to be" for other women living in other times. The hypocrisy is intimately related to that which animates those who think America's past history of slavery justifies paying reparations to blacks today.

Which thought brings us full circle here at Critical Mass. We find ourselves wondering: what is the place of race in Penn's hiring program of selective incentives and punitive disincentives? Does a department have a greater "incentive" to hire a black man than a white woman? What's the bounty on black women scholars? If there is a punishment for hiring white men, surely there must be a special prize for hiring minority women. Yes, this is a disgusting line of thought. But it isn't mine: it's that of an "affirmative action" that has lost its dignity, its respect for humanity, and its mind.