The War on Men Continues on Campus – The American Spectator

Nowhere has the feminist goal of domination been more clearly realized than on the college campus.

At the front of the classroom, women hold an equal number of full-time faculty positions as men and surpass them in non tenure teaching roles. Three-quarters of Ivy League presidents are female, and 66 percent of college administrators are female.

Among those seated at the desks, the 2020–21 academic year saw 11.4 million women enrolled as college students, far outnumbering the eight million male students and continuing the trend of a female majority in higher education that has persisted for decades. (READ MORE: The Biden Administration’s Title IX Revisions Provoke Backlash From Left and Right)

Men are also more likely to drop out of college. According to recent graduation rates, women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four are more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree, at 46 percent compared to men’s 36. Women also earn more graduate and doctoral degrees than their male counterparts. 

Most observers agree that these female-majority statistics show no signs of abating, in part because the college degree, with its steep cost, has lost its luster for many young men, who instead opt for blue-collar jobs, tech pathways, apprenticeships, or the military. 

The American Spectator

But there is another factor less often discussed but just as vital to the big picture: men are browbeaten on college campuses with the mantra that masculinity is bad and that men who choose to identify as women are the real heroes.

At freshmen orientations, eighteen-year-olds are often admonished with the debunked claim that one in five female students will be sexually assaulted during her four years on campus; with this claim, young men are cast as the campus’s villains right from the start. Many colleges also host so-called privilege walks in which male students are told to step forward to acknowledge their advantages in life.

Such exercises are merely the first death by a thousand cuts for these young men, as they will spend the next four years under a campus paradigm that essentially blames men for the nation’s ills.

The nebulous term maleness is often used as a curricula cudgel when teaching subjects such as colonialism, capitalism, and systemic and institutional racism. In one example, a class called “Hate Speech” underway this spring at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill teaches that “hatred is sustained through the imposition of racist, sexist, and heterosexist ideologies that privilege Whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality,” according to its syllabus.

The alleged problem of “toxic masculinity” has also exploded in academia over the last decade, with workshops, courses, and academic papers all focused on reversing the traditional male ideals of stoicism, bravery, and chivalry. Toxic masculinity has been blamed on university campuses for sexual violence, body shaming, a “hyper-masculinized sporting culture,” and acts of domestic terrorism.

One 2019 Utah State University–based study cited toxic masculinity as a cause of climate change. At Texas State University, a student op-ed argued in 2018 that toxic masculinity is responsible for hatred directed toward vegans.

A course called “The Rhetoric of Toxic Masculinity” offered at Rhode Island College this spring argues against telling young men to be strong and stoic. “As we work to make sense of the rhetoric of toxic masculinity we’ll strive, ultimately, to imagine better and saner ways to be a man in the 21st century,” the class’s description states.

In tandem with the attack against traditional masculinity, college leaders are also propagating the narrative that gender is a matter of personal choice. Consequently, it is unsurprising that a growing number of young men have decided to identify as female. Many college health plans cover hormone therapies and sex-change surgeries to help students along the way. After biological men transition to female, they are heralded on campus as courageous individuals who have embraced their “authentic selves.”

On the opposite side of the spectrum are guys who just want to be guys, many of whom flock to fraternities, which have been completely demonized by women’s studies departments and the phalanx of overzealous administrations eager to crack down on the unbridled vigor of youth. Today’s Greek life party scene has been largely snuffed by the threat of malicious Title IX enforcement and cultural-appropriation bias reports for themed parties.

The cancel culture mob is also quick to protest any frat that steps out of line, most notably over sexual assault allegations. Rather than hold to the adage “innocent until proven guilty,” student activists hold marches, launch petitions, and engage in public smear campaigns to try allegations in the court of public opinion.

In recent years, a parade of anonymous social media accounts have popped up intended to allow women to name and shame college men accused of sexual assault — recognizing not a whiff of due process or the right of the accused to defend himself — such as “share your story uvm,” “Assaulters at UMich,” and “make them scared.”

Columbia University’s infamous “Mattress Girl” case and the debunked Rolling Stone article, which alleged a brutal rape by University of Virginia frat boys that never happened, show just how far the exaggerated rape culture narrative is pushed on a national level.

Data maintained by KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and coauthor of the 2017 book The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, shows that more than seven hundred lawsuits have been filed by students who say that they have been falsely accused of sexual assault at their universities. 

The lawsuits began to show up around 2013, two years after the Obama administration reduced the amount of evidence needed to find a student guilty of sexual assault. In the years since, hundreds of young men who have been accused of sexual assault have had their lives derailed by false accusations and university kangaroo courts.

“How many young men have to have their lives destroyed?” That was the question one father asked after his son, a talented wrestler at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was cleared of sexual assault after a yearslong battle that ended his time in collegiate athletics. 

It’s a good question, but when feminists are extracting their pound of flesh, no number appears too high. Under the Trump administration, due-process rights were increased for students accused of sexual assault. Under President Joe Biden, those protections are expected to be rolled back.

The feminist mantra is akin to the antiracism argument, which holds that current discrimination against white people makes up for past discrimination against black people. In feminists’ minds, affirmative action for women today serves as a corrective for previous decades in which women were expected to fulfill traditional roles as homemakers.

Consider the high volume of female-only university scholarships, fellowships, internships, academic aid, and STEM programs — all offered in violation of Title IX, which rules that “[n]o person … on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Since 2018, economist Mark J. Perry has filed 582 civil rights complaints against colleges and universities that have illegally offered such single-sex programs. He told The American Spectator that most of those complaints have ended in resolutions in which the university agreed to discontinue the program or open them to both sexes. But why offer them in the first place?

“Female privilege,” Perry suggested. “It’s power, privilege, and payback, exploiting the victimhood narrative.”

The cost of that payback is the fate of our nation’s young men, who are truly the backbone of our society. But modern feminism rejects the Judeo-Christian cultural paradigm of patriarchy, now a dirty word among secular academic progressives who push views of female dominance, female independence, and female authority at any cost.

The consequences of this obsession are evident in the burgeoning mental health crisis on the college campus, which, at an all-time high under this revenge campaign, sees both women and men flocking to counseling and turning to antidepressants in record numbers.

Feminism’s goal to neuter men has weakened families, derailed lives, and advanced unhealthy policies, and, ultimately, it is destroying our nation. Nowhere is that battle more visible than on America’s college and university campuses. 

Jennifer Kabbany is editor-in-chief of the College Fix, a…