What I really hate is when people substitute analysis with clumsy attempts to fit reality into facile pseudo-intellectual categories. For instance, a colleague declared that the reason why certain departments and programs within a university are considered more important than others is gender-based. Engineering has the majority of male students and professors, so it ranks higher than Sociology and Education, which are almost 100% female.
When she offered this idea to the group, people embraced it avidly. Nobody wants to tell Sociology and Education that they don’t do anything, their fields are a useless waste of time (I mean, there are now fields like “Educational Leadership”, which boggles the mind with its uselessness), so it’s easier to agree with these pseudo-feminist bouts of silliness.
Of course, what we all knew but didn’t want to say to avoid upsetting the Sociologists is that, at our university, the most important program of all whose needs always trump everybody else’s is our highly accredited School of Nursing. And I’m yet to see a single male in that program. One male student I knew applied but was rejected because his grades in biology were not outstanding.
It is obvious to everybody but the most obtuse that a program where people learn to tend to the sick will matter more than a program where people shoot the breeze about how to be educational leaders, whatever that even is. Let’s not hide from that reality behind empty pseudo-feminist slogans.
Clarissa's Blog 
Actually, I think Educational Leadership is more useful than Education, per se. One of my brothers just created a degree program in it because so many public school principals were making so many egregious mistakes such as reprimanding teachers who had in fact done really outstanding work, expelling students who should not have even been suspended, etc.
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I’m not sure how they justify an entire degree in this. A workshop, maybe a couple of workshops but a degree?
Also, I fear administrators who come with these degrees in Community Building, Educational Leadership, etc. I’d much rather they had regular degrees.
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Medicine is important but from the pov of academic prestige — NO — medicine and nursing are just technical-vocational programs.
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Academically, of course, English dominates everybody. But I’m confident that Hispanic Studies will chip away at that dominance
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“Academically, of course, English dominates everybody.”
I suspect that more people would say that history does.
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History is very rarely a university-wide pre-requisite, I believe. They have fewer students, and as a result fewer professors than English.
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It sounds like they don’t do a very good job of recruiting students to undertake studies that once were considered “non-traditional” for their gender.Why don’t they have more women in engineering and more men in nursing? Most schools have a more balanced enrollment in both of these areas.
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This is an excellent question. I believe that this is precisely where the problem lies.
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The Engineering (men dominated) and Nursing (women dominated) programs at my school used to do a pub crawl together to foster a historical camaraderie, but a few years ago, during this pub crawl, the Engineering students decided it would be really funny to sing a crude song threatening to rape the Nursing students while on the pubcrawl, so they don’t do that anymore and the entire Engineering department undergrads had to publicly apologize, which they complained about furiously.
So we see more and more men now entering the Nursing program since I’ve been here, but unsurprisingly, Engineering remains dominated by men, because they really haven’t changed their nasty, frightening ways.
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No Western culture that is more gender essentialist than USA culture. I believe this has directly to do with how much religiosity is in that culture. I have maintained for a long time that just because someone is not overtly religious this does not mean that they have not absorbed a lot of religiosity through the cultural stream. Consequently it is almost common sense for people to proclaim that males are innately one way and women are innately something else. Luckily, what is so deeply entrenched as “common sense” in USA culture is not so deep in others. We haven’t had those decades, or indeed centuries of preaching about women’s and men’s roles.
At the same time, Western cultures generally lean towards metaphysical notions of gender originating in Biblical interpretations. That his how Richard Dawkins can be blind to the need to perceive Internet sexual harassment as a real problem. Men are basically noble and it is the women who are emotional whiners. Where does that come from? Christian theology.
I’ve also been reading Steven Pinker’s many ravings of late. He comes up with some stuff, like that women are better at depth perception than men and we just have to accept that. His whole tone is: “Well you can see that this is ugly from certain points of view, but we just have to accept that!”. Then he gives what is in effect a guttural chortle.
It is good, in any case, to have an explanation as to why women would outclass men as fighter pilots and why male skydivers don’t know when to flair and so keep slamming their parachutes into the ground. Depth perception. I know it’s ugly, but you just have to accept that!
In general I think American culture has very much degenerated by taking these sorts of notions to heart.
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