UNC-Wilmington criminal justice professor and practising gadfly Mike Adams has determined to launch a Men's Resource Center on his campus:

The principle purpose of my Center will be to provide a safe haven or a comfort zone for men who feel that they are working and/or studying in a hostile environment. I first got the idea for these safe zones for men in the Fall of 1994 while I was serving on the Sexual Assault Advisory Board. During one of our board meetings a feminist student suggested mandatory rape awareness training for male students who were members of fraternities. Under her plan, fraternity members would face expulsion from the university if they refused to attend the classes.

I though it would be nice to have a place where these men could go to get away from feminists who think that fraternity members are inclined to be rapists. In fact, six years later, a student of mine (a member of a fraternity) was falsely accused of raping a female student. After she retracted her accusation, the male student didn't have a special place where he could go to receive support from the trauma associated with his horrific ordeal.

Nor was there a safe haven for a philosophy professor at UNC-Wilmington who was viciously attacked by another professor in his department for his beliefs about the crime of rape. According to my conversations with both professors, their argument dealt with the issue of different degrees of rape. The feminist (and socialist) professor took the position that all rapes are equally bad. The man argued that there should be more than one degree of rape.

In order to support his position, he made a hypothetical comparison between the rape of a woman who was attacked in an alley and beaten severely versus a woman who consented to sex and then changed her mind at the last minute only to have the man proceed to penetrate. He simply concluded that the first scenario should be first degree rape while the second scenario should constitute second degree rape.

Despite the fact that the man's position was, and still is, the law in North Carolina and in most other states, she decided to take the matter to the Dean seeking a reprimand and possible dismissal. It seems to me that he could have used a place to go and seek reassurance from someone who cares.

The irony of this--one Adams sardonically indicates--is that one result of all the energy that has been poured into protecting all the women, minorities, and LGBT people on campus from straight, white men is that the supposed oppressors have become targets of animosity themselves. Plans are afoot at UNC for reconstituting men's damaged self-esteem, however, and for giving artistic voice to the systemic degradation they undergo as the favored whipping boys of campus orthodoxy: Adams is already planning the Men's Resource Center fall lecture series, and though he denies any precise plans, it's pretty clear that he hopes to stage UNC's first ever production of The Penis Monologues.