Fail Male

It seems we'll be going through this all again: Inside Higher Ed has an article on what, every other year, is brought forth as a new national emergency. crisis. reason to think male academics have learned nothing. I debated linking to the article at all, because it is written by someone named Thomas Whitmire, whose blog is dedicated only to that issue ("why boys fail;" must be hell keeping that going). His statistics are just startling: "lackluster graduation rates are due to men floundering in college," he mongers. Forty-two percent of men earn four year degrees. Clearly a crisis when a gap in parity with females is eight percent. Perhaps one has not consulted obvious things, such as atlas.gov, which states, "According to Census 2000, 281.4 million people were counted in the United States — 143.4 million of whom were female and 138.1 million male." There are more women, fool. No wonder more of them are getting degrees ! Of course, it's more complicated than that, but the argumentation in this particular article couldn't be bothered, in its zeal to fuel a crisis (and grab money for the MDRC), to examine the percentage of males entering four year institutions who graduate compared to that of female entering students. But never mind: our author is doubly concerned because men tend to major in math and science, so if they don't graduate, this is a "special concern" for the tech industry. I am not making this up. It's the only reason I included the link, because if you haven't read the article, you will have a hard time believing that it says what I claim it does. I had to have two Extra-Strength Excedrin and a coffee just to kill the throbbing pain in my head caused by the illogic and Inside Higher Ed's flashing, gyrating, irritating layout. But never fear: our man admits "Elite colleges generally don’t suffer gender imbalances, especially those offering boys admissions preferences." Oh, footnote that, please. If anyone out there knows which "elite" colleges implicity or explicitly don't offer boys admissions preferences, please raise your hand. Can anyone say "alumni network" and "legacy admission" ? I need chocolate, now.

CIA (that's Cranky In Academe, get used to it) does agree with Mr. Illogic's article in one very broad respect, but most likely, not with the particulars (there are none): Public K-12 is a ruinous system. It is not only bad for boys, but bad for the human species as a whole. The whole culture, from certification to the layouts of buildings to the serf-like conditions designed to create and rein in an anti-intellectual cadre of teachers, has got to go. Most of my plagiarists are young men. Women do it too, but over the last five years of running a good number of all sorts of papers through TurnitIn.Com and various search engines, working from memory (men tend to buy essays more than women do, in my experience), I have found that the male plagiarists outnumber the female [insert many valid theories as to why here]. In part, I blame the acculturation to neglect created by the K-12 system, where overworked teachers can barely find time to grade in between monitoring the halls for violence, drugs, and death threats; where cameras lurk in every corner of every building, and lunch is twenty-five minutes long if you are lucky. I see this, in "good" schools, and it makes me cringe and wonder: it must be quite a shock for teenagers, prone to be clever and defiant, keen as truffle hunters when it comes to hypocrisy, to stumble from a culture of numbers management and surveillance, counting and regulating and watching, into one that has the time and intellectual resources to care that they learn, to even care for the subject itself. By the time they come to us, many students are damaged in small and large ways: they do not trust the value of their own intellect, and thus, they do not trust the value of ours. I will venture that boys and young male teens are more negatively affected by the numbing prisonlike atmosphere of their schools, but I leave it to others to venture why. Plagiarism, along with many other "shortcuts," is now viewed as a means to an end, a way through an obstacle course rather than an education. This kind of talk will lead us to those proposing three-year college degrees, cutting out the "fat" of extra courses, and that will lead CIA to need more aspirin and a drink, not a good combination. I told you I was cranky.

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2006/08/pale_male_gets_.html