Despite a growing gender gap on Canadian campuses, universities are balking at a fledgling movement in the United States to make special efforts to attract more men, such as adopting affirmative action initiatives that favour male applicants over female ones.Campus recruiters and admissions managers from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver say they are taking no extra steps to target male students.
Nor do they consider it a problem -- at least not yet -- that female university students outnumber men by about 60-40 on average nationwide.
If the situation were reversed -- men had a 20% numerical advantage in seats -- you'd better believe it would be a "problem." The feministas would be howling from the rooftops that this constituted "systemic" discrimination.
It doesn't at all surprise me that institutions that display an almost pathological hostility (for examples too numerous to go into here, check out Christina Hoff Summers' The War Against Boys) towards boys and young men would wind up with such screwed-up demographics.
Since the only numbers that these bean-counters seem to understand are simple percentages and government dollars, the solution is evident: Until the universities can show good-faith efforts to recruit males until they achieve a more equitable balance, funding should be chopped to reflect the disparity. If they really need the money, I'm sure they can find it by shutting down some of the innumerable basket-weaving courses that infest critical faculties like Women's Studies.
Barbie was right: Math is hard! But arithmetic is easy.