Affirmative Action for Dudes

The US Commission on Civil Rights is now conducting inquiries into preferential admissions policies for men in private colleges.

Here’s the problem. Women, having apparently bought into the female empowerment message, are now flooding our undergraduate schools. It is estimated that 60% of all undergraduate degrees in this country are awarded to women. There is no reason to think that this percentage will not keep rising. Already, in many major U.S. cities, women in their 20's are out-earning their less educated male contemporaries.

The imbalance in men and women present a difficulty for colleges and their ability to attract new students. Men feel intimated going to a college with too many women and women don’t want to go to a school where there are only slim pickins’ among the men. Plus, studies have shown that, as the percentage of men in an institution declines, so do their grades. So, do we now need affirmative action for dudes? See Probe of Extra Help for Men.

My thought about this is that the falling educational aspirations of men is just more evidence that men are simply ceding the field to women. The macho "I don't give shit" attitude, which seems to be the prevailing male approach to life these days, is essentially nothing more than, as Jon Zobenica of the Atlantic Monthly said in a slightly different context, "a way to take control of defeat by forfeiting the game rather than risk another losing effort."

Perhaps men kept women oppressed for so many years because they knew that, given the opportunity, women would end up outperforming them.