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Man Up, Lady Down
Perry L. Glanzeron the Demise of Ladies & Gentlemen in Higher Education
This past year, sixteen female students and alumni from Yale University filed a complaint under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act claiming that Yale University failed to address a “hostile sexual environment.” The major incident sparking the complaint was a pledge ritual by members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, who marched pledges around campus and told them to shout phrases such as “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f— dead women.” Clearly, wisdom and high SAT scores do not always go together.
After the unsurprising campus outcry and the filing of the complaint, the leaders of DKE apologized to the Yale Women’s Center. The apology failed to spare DKE a five-year suspension. The moral of the story: Don’t create a hostile environment for Yale women, because they’ll sue your pants off (only figuratively, of course). This is the moral philosophy behind most college behavioral admonitions these days: “Behave—or we’ll sue you.”
“We Don’t Sue, We’re Gentlemen”
While lawsuits will always have their place, such a response to this incident illustrates the extreme poverty of moral language pertaining to gender at our colleges and universities. Understandably, the Yale women were outraged at the lack of moral sensibility displayed by the DKE men in their pledge ritual. Yet, as many of the online comments pertaining to this incident showed, the only sort of language women themselves could muster to express their moral judgment was that of taste (“disgusting and appalling”), feminism (“sexist”), or liberal speech codes (“hate speech”). None of the language appealed to the masculinity of the young men.
The recent movie Social Network demonstrates this same poverty of language and propensity to sue to resolve moral problems between college students. Yet the film also contains a glimpse of an older approach to such problems that actually bears some relation to gender. It occurs in a scene in which twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who believe that Mark Zuckerberg has stolen their idea for a social networking site, argue over what to do about the matter:
Cameron: We’re not fighting a knife fight in The Crimson. And we’re not suing anyone.
Tyler: Why not?
Cameron: Because we’re gentlemen of Harvard. This is Harvard, where you don’t plant stories and you don’t sue people.
Eventually, Cameron abandons the idea that gentlemen don’t sue, but only after unsuccessfully trying other approaches, such as talking to university leadership.
Of course, after the Yale incident, there were no stories about female students struggling with the idea that “ladies don’t sue.” Women at Yale wouldn’t use that language. It’s too dated. Yet, not so long ago, it was common to use words like “gentlemen” and “ladies” to summarize the moral ideals associated with the masculine and feminine aspects of our humanity.
The cultural expectations associated with words identifying social roles and identities carry significant amounts of moral freight. Consider, for example, a famous experiment devised by Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, in which he presents his subjects with various moral dilemmas to see how they reason their way through them.
In his famous Heinz dilemma, a man’s wife is dying and the only hope of a cure lies in a drug that costs $4,000. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, tries every means he can think of to raise the money, but he only acquires $2,000. He then tries to negotiate with the man who developed the drug, telling him that his wife is dying, and pleading with him to sell him the drug at a reduced price. The druggist refuses, saying, “No, I discovered this drug, and I’m going to make money from it.” Kohlberg then asks his subjects to consider whether Heinz should steal the drug for his wife.
Perry Glanzer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Baylor University and the author of The Quest for Russia?s Soul (Baylor University Press). He attends First Baptist Church in Woodway, Texas.
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