I haven’t come up with anything quite as shocking as the Justice Department’s obliteration of sex differences (discussed by Nathan Harden), but I’m disturbed by what I just learned about the treatment of women.
Jonathan Imber’s Minding the Campus article focuses on the conflict over the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate. But he includes a remark about Wellesley College (my alma mater).
In the 1970s, Imber writes, “federal law dictated that graduate programs in both private and public institutions could not discriminate on the basis of sex. Rather than admit men into those formal degree programs, Wellesley dropped its graduate program.”
Wellesley dropped its graduate program to placate federal busybodies? It’s news to me that the federal government can proscribe an entire educational program at a women’s school by insisting that it accept men. But then, women’s schools probably remain single-gender only through the indulgence of government bureaucrats and politicians (their wives may be alumnae). When the rules began to change, women’s colleges — by then mere supplicants — must have forgotten to beg for graduate programs, too.