By Professor Doom
Every few years,
some prankster passes around a petition and tries to get fools to sign it. My
favorite is when there’s a petition to remove “dihydrogen monoxide” from our
lakes and rivers, as “these sources are just full of this chemical, which can kill
you if you inhale enough of it.” There’s even a whole website devoted to discussing the
dangers of this chemical. Even the semi-competent (at best) chemistry
professor at a fake school I taught at signed it (unwittingly?). Way too many
people fall for this kind of stunt…but not everyone knows the chemical name for
water, after all.
On a college
campus, however, people should be a tad more educated, a little less willing to
put their signature on a petition they don’t fully understand. I’m not even
sure the following is a joke, but it should be:
This is just
so…ignorant. Already our institutions of higher education do a great deal to
attract female students; my own discipline in particular has endless programs
to attract female math majors.
Complementing all
the female favoritism is a distinct
anti-male bias on campus, again with whole classes where a male would feel
distinctly uncomfortable.
The end result of
this is males, of the two “common” genders, are the minority gender on campus
by far. There are nearly 3
females for every 2 males. While such a ratio would be pretty good for a
retirement home (where the somewhat shorter lifespan of a human male becomes
readily visible), it’s pretty atrocious for the college age set (where the
shorter lifespan of males is not nearly so much of a concern).
Government always
does things backwards. When the public transit systems aren’t making enough
money…they raise prices. When commercial transit systems don’t make money, they
lower fares—that’s how a real business gets more sales, you see, although
government does the opposite, causing even less people to use the transit
system.
Perhaps another
example will emphasize how devastatingly backward government planning is.
The reason
elephants are going extinct is because their ivory is very valuable—poachers
are willing to risk their lives against armed gamekeepers to kill the beasts
and get that precious ivory. The government seizes all the ivory it can, taking
it off the market—driving the price still higher! When government has
confiscated enough, the government burns the
ivory! It’s insane, because if they just dumped a colossal amount
of ivory onto the market, the price would fall…and nobody would be willing to
risk death for a tiny sum of money.
And so I present
as evidence that there’s too much government in our higher education system: in
the face of an obvious disparity in the sex of students, we keep slapping down
more programs to make the problem worse.
Now, I don’t expect
students to know about this disparity, but surely most faculty know…how did
they end up signing this petition? In the culture of fear that defines academic
life, faculty should be reluctant to identify themselves for anything. Even in
the case of “virtue signaling” like this, it must have been tough to find and
trick faculty into signing such a hoax petition, right?
The petition garnered 40 signatures in just over an hour, including those of several faculty members, and just two students declined to sign.
That’s not exactly
a flood of signatures, and I totally respect that a student will sign any
petition that in any way has a slight chance of reducing tuition. The hoax was
performed to mock the Women’s Day stuff that was going on:
To find out
how far college students are willing to go for gender equity,…
It is funny how
lost we are now, that “equity” can actually mean the same thing as “one gender
should pay 77% for the same thing another gender pays.” Part of the pitch was
the ol’ “women are paid less than men” canard, even though this has been heavily debunked, and is
quite obviously rubbish (as the linked video points out, if this were really
the case, we’d see most businesses hiring only women, because it would give a
huge increase to profits, something every business wants).
It’s rather like
that “97% of climate scientists agree” rubbish—again,
heavily debunked, and still repeated over and over again. Admittedly,
it’s less obviously a lie than the gender wage gap…unless you’re an actual
scientist and know that real scientists are deeply reluctant to swear an
unproven conjecture is absolutely true.
Anyway, clearly
students and some faculty still fall for that gap myth, and still think we can
solve a possible problem by actively trying to make it worse.
While “give
females a tuition discount” sounds good, we really need to think things through
here. What do you do about the males who identify as female? I suspect their
numbers would jump quite a bit, eh? I know I’ve considered it myself, as I’m up
against the glass ceiling in higher ed.
What about the
females who identify as male? They’d probably get special dispensation to
classify as both genders, just so they can win both ways…but if you do that,
then you now open the door for the males identifying as females to get the same
double-dip treatment.
Or, we could, you
know, actually think about petitions before we sign them. Just sayin’.
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