Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 18, 1994 TAG: 9406270167
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ART POSKOCIL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
His assumption of male supremacy is so deeply ingrained that the only way he appears able to comprehend the motivations of women who might aspire to attend VMI or the Citadel is that they're seeking some sort of symbolic gender change. ``Shannon Faulkner will never be a Citadel man,'' he needlessly assures us. Then iterating this obvious truth for women more generally, he warns that if they win in court and even can then match the men's performance at these institutions, it will all come to naught because ``it won't make them happy [and] it won't make them VMI or Citadel men.'' Moreover, they'll lose ``the opportunity they already have,'' and, for Bryant apparently, their raison d'etre: ``to help make men better men.'' It would appear at this point that he's reversed his previously trumpeted opinion that women cannot keep up with males. But in the final analysis, it is, nevertheless, imprudent for them to do so!
In view of his unenlightened and incoherent gender theory, it shouldn't be surprising to find that Bryant's other arguments for the status quo are equally spurious. In fact, every point he attempts is based on his premise that the primary question in these cases is whether gender-specific educational programs should be permitted to exist. However, as someone in his position ought to know, the primary issue regarding VMI (as well as the Citadel) is whether as a public institution it affords men a particular educational opportunity not equally available to our state's female population. Were there a public women's college offering comparable education and training to what VMI offers males, the present case would become moot.
If his attitude toward women is at all representative of his VMI colleagues, and I sincerely hope it isn't, then young women should consider with sober circumspection any access they might ultimately gain to that institution. American culture abounds in Ugly Duckling myths of heroic, trailblazing individuals who repeatedly prove to doubting communities that they're not only equal but superior to whatever group has heretofore excluded them. However, as a social psychologist, I have to live with the mundane reality that most of us will achieve no more than parents and teachers expect of us. If these important individuals don't believe in our eventual metamorphosis into swans and butterflies, then we won't either. And it probably won't happen. Just as optimistic physicians see a greater number of their patients cured (it's true!), so do educators bring about their own self-fulfilling prophecies in relation to their students' achievements. This is one reason why ``tracking'' according to inferred ability at the grade-school level is such an abomination. Merely labeling a child a slow learner goes a good part of the way to making her or him into one.
With respect to college students, there's ample research evidence to establish that women's learning experience is tremendously compromised whenever they're in a coeducational setting, even one where women are in the majority and their professors, very unlike Bryant, believe wholeheartedly in women's equal capabilities. In a study conducted at Wheaton College shortly after it began admitting males a few years ago, researchers videotaped classes and found that males quickly came to dominate class discussion. It was also observed that this phenomenon was materially abetted by a tendency for instructors to physically orient toward male students when comments were sought, especially where opinion, as opposed to fact, was at issue. What accounts for such findings isn't any degree of greater innate ability or assertiveness on the part of males, but rather a universal social-conditioning process whereby we all learn to respond to males and females in terms of the very stereotypes we might consciously eschew.
If instructors who had spent years teaching at a women's college - and, as most I know, had developed a philosophy of
education affirming women's abilities - could so quickly fall into classroom conduct that unconsciously favored males, then what can women expect at the hands of professors who think like Bryant?
Art Poskocil is an associate professor of sociology at Hollins College.
by CNB