Dear Steve:
You’re kidding. Colleges are giving preferences to male applicants–lowering admissions standards for the men? I hardly read that article. But I’m up in arms.
(And you’re also kidding that we are about three weeks away from our 40th wedding anniversary. Oh dear. I don’t want to think about my age, and I know what we’ll be doing on the date. Working. Which one of us is crazy?)
Now, back to the colleges. I’m horrified, but amused, having gone to Barnard when it was really separate from Columbia. I wasn’t very happy there. No men, in short.
But still. I’m hardly going to fret about the plight of the women stuck on a college campus without a Saturday night date. And perhaps some will marry men who look up to them as the better educated, better paid, or whatever. Remember the passage in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Bennet, quizzing Lizzy on her decision to marry Mr. Darcy, says, “I know you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband, unless you looked up to him as a superior”? Well, some men may now be looking up to wives as “superiors”; not a bad turn of events.
And thus I’m in total sympathy with the two Barnard College students whose successful protest of a recruiting brochure was reported in Tuesday’s New York Times. The brochure had a passage reassuring students and parents that graduates of women’s colleges marry and have children at a higher rate than at co-ed institutions. Gee. Barnard was educating future wives in my day. The message was loud and clear: success was a rock on the fourth finger of your left hand. I headed to Harvard graduate school bare-handed; it was a mark of shame. But how can Barnard have been tempted by such a message today?
If the men aren’t on the college campuses, women will find them elsewhere. But where, in fact, are the men? What’s happening to them? And why hasn’t anyone been paying attention? All the handwringing about the girls, and it turns that the boys are the ones in trouble. Our friend Bill says the picture in at least one suburban school is clear. The peer culture is a disaster. The cool boys are the ones who drive and drink and play ball and …never study.
But what’s the rest of the story?
Abby
