The undergraduate course “Men in Literature” was taught eight times from 2005 to 2015 at Springfield College in Massachusetts. It drew healthy enrollments and was reviewed favorably by a large majority of the students who took it. In 2010, the course was formally approved by the college curriculum committee as an addition to the offerings of the humanities department.
But in fall 2013, trouble began—not yet for “Men in Literature,” but for the man who devised and taught it, tenured English professor and South African expatriate Dennis Gouws. He had become interested in the emerging field of “men’s studies,” and had helped to found a Springfield College men’s group. The group created a Facebook page that irritated some campus feminists. Gouws had gone further by replying to the proliferation of feminist anti-rape posters on his colleagues’ office doors. He put on his own office door flyers that presented statistics on rape that contradicted the widespread claim that one in five women are raped during their undergraduate years. His materials were torn down by a departmental colleague, and later, his door was vandalized.
Gouws was called to a meeting by Springfield’s director of human resources and subjected to a harangue by a group of college officials. At the meeting one of the college officials complained that the posters created a “hostile environment,” and the dean of his college called the organizations that had produced the flyer “a hate group.” Thus began Springfield College’s campaign to suppress Professor Gouws’s freedom of expression on the topic of how men are treated in contemporary higher education.
Elsewhere I’ve written a blow-by-blow account of what happened as “Springfield Purges Men in Literature.” What follows here is the concise version.
Springfield
Springfield College is a small place. It has 2,171 students on its 100-acre campus. Most of its students (85 percent) live on campus, and it has an 82-acre forest nearby, used mainly for “outdoor research” and recreation. The college has a modest but positive reputation, ranking 29th in the 180-member cohort of institutions in the U.S. News & World Report’s “best regional universities.” The U.S. Department of Education’s “College Scorecard” says it has a 67 percent graduation rate and average annual costs to students of $27,672—both figures well above the national average. (Tuition and fees are officially $34,455. U.S. News pegs the four-year graduation rate lower, at 62 percent.) The median earnings of former students who received federal financial aid, ten years after entering the school, is $45,100, slightly above the national average. Seventy-one percent of the students who apply are accepted. Classes are small. The student to faculty ratio is 13:1. The largest major, encompassing 34 percent of the students, is “Health Professions and Related Programs,” followed by the 20 percent of students enrolled in “Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies.” Women make up 52 percent of the college’s enrollment.
In short, Springfield is a small college doing a respectable job of pre-professional training for students who are not greatly interested in the liberal arts. It isn’t an intellectual powerhouse and doesn’t aspire to be among the elite New England colleges. It would be a mistake to compare it to, say, Bowdoin, Williams, or Middlebury.
What does it matter that Springfield College has cancelled “Men in Literature”? Partly it matters because we need to know what is happening at second-tier colleges, and partly because Professor Gouws’s travails epitomizes how the new Title IX regime is affecting college curricula.
My organization, the National Association of Scholars, is better known for calling out top-tier colleges and universities for their divergence from key academic principles. Vastly more American college students, however, attend Springfield-like colleges. And relatively little information about the politicization of these colleges ever reaches the public ear.
Hostile Environments
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education unleashed its now infamous “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011. A small part of the Department of Education bureaucracy, OCR assumed for itself the power to dictate to almost all American colleges and universities how they would henceforth handle allegations of sexual assault. Physical attacks on individuals had ordinarily not been considered to be part of OCR’s mandate. Rapes and sexual assaults are police business. But OCR imaginatively stretched the idea of “hostile environment” to create grounds for using the 1972 Title IX Amendment to the Higher Education Act as a pretext for granting campus bureaucrats the overriding power to investigate and adjudicate allegations of sexual assault. OCR also lowered the standard of evidence for finding a person guilty of assault. Henceforth, the lowest legal standard, “preponderance of evidence,” or anything a shade over 50 percent in the judgment of the campus authority, would warrant a verdict of guilty.
Some consequences of this new regime have been widely reported. Colleges and universities, fearful of OCR’s power to curtail their access to federal funds, rushed to adopt the new rules. Generally that meant granting astonishingly broad new powers to “Title IX Coordinators,” some 83 percent of whom are women, and apparently, as a cohort, women who are enthusiastic about the new project. Under the new rules, there has been a spiral in the number of allegations; a spiral in guilty verdicts; and a spiral of legal complaints by men claiming that they were denied “due process.”
All of this is important, but the coverage has missed a secondary consequence of the new Title IX regime: that it has handed a powerful new tool to campus feminists in the form of a virtually unlimited concept of “hostile environment.”
The significance of Springfield College going after Professor Gouws’s course, “Men in Literature,” is that we now have a tightly-documented instance in which “hostile environment” has been extended to the curriculum as grounds for eliminating an academic course that, the day before yesterday, was perfectly acceptable.
Springfield College will, no doubt, defend itself with a brigade of evasions. Its principal excuse is that Gouws’s course in the English Department focused on non-literary readings. That is true, but that hadn’t been a problem before the “hostile environment” accusations started to fly. Anyway, Gouws had expressed his willingness to add literary texts. The real problem was that Professor Gouws was enunciating a point of view no longer welcome to the administrators at Springfield College.
I wrote privately to the president of Springfield College to persuade her to reverse course. She did not bother to respond, which is why I now publish this account. Colleges such as Springfield that are tuition-dependent and vulnerable to shifts in enrollment patterns care a great deal about how they are seen. This, then, is an opportunity for the general public to register its view whether canceling “Men in Literature” was a good idea.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.
