Island Living 29: Democracy on Campus by A. D. Coleman

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Lately I’m pondering the case of scholar and teacher Mary Daly, about whose current struggle with Boston University you may have heard.

Daly, referred to by one supporter as “a radical feminist star,”¹ found her courses dropped from the catalogue by this university, at which she’d taught for decades, when she chose not to obey the law of the land. A male undergraduate senior, one Duane Naquin, sued the school under Title IX over Daly’s refusal to allow him into her “Introduction to Feminist Ethics” course, admission to which she’d restricted to women for a quarter of a century. Daly wouldn’t budge, and found herself effectively terminated. A goodly cross-section of the feminist movement and the liberal-left spectrum presently waxes wroth over this outrage.

(Title IX, for those who came in late, is the federal anti-discrimination law that, among its provisions, requires equal access for both sexes to all educational offerings at any school accepting federal funding. Its enactment is rightly considered one of the great triumphs of contemporary feminism. As Katha Pollitt puts it, “Title IX . . . has probably opened more doors for girls and women than any other statute on the books.”² )

In an extremely one-sided report on this brouhaha in The Nation, Laura Flanders cites an unnamed “Boston-area educator” as saying that “If Mary was a man who’d transformed his field as Daly has transformed hers, she’d have a comfortable sinecure someplace, and she’d be allowed to admit whomever she wants into her class.”³

As any college teacher (or editorial writer) should know, a sinecure is, according to Webster’s, “an office or position that requires little or no work.” In other words, a teaching position that’s a sinecure represents the academic equivalent of union featherbedding -- exactly the kind of deadwood that has long given the tenure system a bad name and fueled the efforts of its enemies to do away with it.

In my opinion as a college-level teacher with almost 30 years’ experience (and I’m hardly alone in this), anyone seeking or holding a sinecure in academe should be bounced out on his her ear ASAP and unceremoniously. No teaching system, at any grade level, can afford to encourage leeches. I’m not in favor of sinecures for teachers, even feminist ones.

In a subsequent rebuttal to the Flanders version of herstory from Nation columnist Katha Pollitt,⁴ however, one learns that Daly at age 70 did in fact have a sinecure in the ivory tower. She not only enjoyed tenure but was excused from all the standard committee work, received an astonishing fourteen leaves of absence in 33 years, and had tacit permission to hand-pick her own students. This administrative coddling obviously fostered in her a profoundly warped sense of entitlement.

Aside from that, Daly’s problem, it appears, lies in her fundamental misunderstanding of the strictures of Title IX and/or her unwillingness to believe that it might actually apply to her. (According to Pollitt, Daly considers Title IX’s pertinence to her specific case “a nerdy turdy legalism.”⁵ ) For the blunt truth is not that Daly won’t any longer “be allowed to admit whomever she wants into her class”; it’s that she won’t be permitted anymore to exclude whomever she wants to from her class solely on the basis of gender. Is that something to which any of us should object?

Now, if Daly were offering her classes privately, there’d be no grounds for formal complaint against her -- she could hand-pick her students and keep out men, cripples, people of color, the adolescent, the elderly, or anyone else against whom she felt like exercising a prejudice. Were she teaching at an all-girls’ school, the problem of admitting men would not arise (though of course she would not be allowed to reject whomever she wanted to on other across-the-boards premises -- the ambidextrous, Latinas, art students, say).

Fact is, though, Daly taught in a co-educational institution, whose courses supposedly are open to all. So her compromise offer to the 22-year-old Naquin to instruct him privately, though presumably well-intentioned, missed the point entirely, and he was right to spurn it. If Daly wants to teach women only, she can either transfer to a women’s college or offer her course privately to a female-only clientele. If she wants to teach it under the auspices of a co-ed school supported by tax monies, the law mandates that any qualified student can register for it -- regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, gender preference . . . or gender.

And Daly’s age, number of college degrees, reputation, or number of books published do not give her any special privilege in that regard. In other words, neither venerability nor renown and accomplishment are entitlements for discrimination against any class of people or exemption from the law.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I have no problem with any of that. I used to love to go to McSorley’s, the working-class beer hall in New York’s East Village that had a “no women allowed” policy (except for a once-a-week “ladies’ night”) from time immemorial until the late 1960s, when the women’s movement caught up with it and, in a highly publicized showdown, forced it to integrate. I hated to see that happen, personally; sometimes a man, even a heterosexual man who loves the company of women, needs to go someplace where there are no women around. But I understood the principle: this saloon was a city- and state-licensed place of business open to the public. So I accepted the loss of my refuge as a price paid to what I saw then -- and still see -- as the greater good.

I’m not comparing Daly’s seminar to a beer hall. But the underlying principle is no different. And the fact that, in this case, it’s being asserted by a “Young Republican” with backing from a conservative think tank (the Center for Individual Rights), and enforced by the quite possibly patriarchal administration of a private Jesuit college,⁶ neither invalidates the principle nor proves the merit of Daly’s position. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this case both reason and law are on Naquin’s side.

I wouldn’t doubt for a minute that, as some have claimed, there are “sound pedagogical reasons” for excluding men from Daly’s seminar. Let’s remember, though, that in various educational systems in this country and elsewhere since 1950 there were -- still are, in some places -- also “sound pedagogical reasons” for refusing admission to college classrooms to Blacks, Asians, Jews, Gypsies, recent immigrants, people not fluent in the dominant language of the culture, women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, the differently abled, female students wearing slacks, even men with shoulder-length hair or not wearing ties and jackets. So let us not pretend for a minute that pedagogy is some impartial, reliable hard science instead of an ever-mutable, ideology-driven branch of social engineering that bends readily to the winds of fashion and politics.

If Daly thought herself above the law of the land, it surely was time for her resignation or removal. Substitute any other class of people -- African Americans, the deaf, the rich, the poor, Buddhists, short people -- for the men Daly has for the past twenty-five years systematically excluded from her seminar and the prejudicial nature of her practice immediately becomes both obvious and insupportable. Boston University should have put a stop to this years ago; shame on them for needing the threat of a lawsuit to prompt their belated review and revision of this discriminatory practice.

Were Naquin demanding the creation of a B. U. class -- any class, on any subject -- open to men only, Gloria Steinem and Feminist Majority’s Eleanor Smeal, who’ve come out in support of Daly, would be up in arms over that. Were Daly categorically closing her classroom door to the brown-eyed or the right-handed (or, unthinkably, women), the liberal-left position on this would be exactly reversed. So, embarrassingly, those constituencies have made Naquin’s point for him -- and done his radical-right backers’ dirty work for them -- by displaying anew the chronic inability to answer a straightforward albeit vexing question about one of their own festering cultural contradictions: If it’s not okay to institutionalize prejudice against any class of people, why is it okay to discriminate against men?

Here’s a hard truth to swallow: On campus or anywhere else, democracy comes at a price -- and it don’t come cheap. As this episode reminds us, too many of our fellow citizens at every point along the political spectrum remain unwilling to pay that cost when the chips are down.

¹ Laura Flanders, “Feminist De-Tenured,” The Nation, Vol. 269, no. 4 (July 26-August 2, 1999), p. 5.

² Katha Pollitt, “No Males Need Apply,” The Nation, Vol. 269, no. 6 (August 23-30, 1999), p. 10.

³ Flanders, loc. cit.

⁴ Pollitt, op. cit.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Which “has a majority female student body at undergraduate and graduate levels; its tenured arts and sciences faculty is 26 percent female,” according to Pollitt, ibid. B.U., we should note, had the option of siding with Daly and surrendering all claims to federal funding. They chose the money.

 

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© Copyright 1999 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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