It’s perfectly acceptable to design college courses, and even entire degrees, around women or minorities, but devote one course to how men are treated in literature — not even in society, but specifically in literature — an uproar ensues.
That’s what happened to Professor Dennis Gouws at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass. Since 2005, Gouws has taught a course titled “Men in Literature” eight times. The course didn’t seem out of place when classes titled “Women and Literature” and “Native American Literature” were also being taught. But Gouws suddenly found himself on the wrong end of political correctness.
In the Fall of 2014, Gouws was also teaching two level-one writing courses. The final essay assignment was reminiscent of his literature course, and required students “to write about how men are treated in their respective academic environments.”
Gouws had 31 students in his writing class, and four wrote critical evaluations of the final assignment. One of the students merely noted that they “would suggest a different topic for paper #5.” One suggested that including women on campus in the assignment and another called the paper “absurd.” The final student wrote that they found the assignment “insulting” and that they did “not appreciate having to write about how men are treated unequally on campus when there is no unequal treatment.” But of course, the assignment didn’t necessarily suggest there was any inequality, at least not in the negative sense. The student very well could have written an essay about how men are treated better than or equal to women on campus.
The other 27 evaluations were generally positive, but because four students had gendered complaints about the assignment, Gouws was eventually forced to cancel the course.
The dean who lead the charge against Gouws, Anne Herzog, already seemed to have it in for him. She had denied his request for leave in late 2014, likely because he would be working on projects that included teaching male-positive literature courses. She also reprimanded him for missing a “sexual harassment prevention” seminar, even though he had previously been excused.
Gouws was already disliked by Herzog and the colleges director of Human Resources, Rosanne Captain, because of his reactions to campus posters dealing with rape. The campus had a poster that said “Men can stop rape.” Gouws put up a poster next to it that said “Women can stop false rape accusations.” He also posted flyers that included statistics about rape and false accusations.
For this he was said to have created a “hostile environment.”
The National Association of Scholars, the academic advocacy association that first publicized the Gouws story, described Springfield College as favoring “a feminist view of the relations between the sexes.” When such a faction was exposed to a competing view, such as Gouws, they acted to silence him, using language similar to what is found in Title IX, a law designed to prevent sex discrimination.
The school administrators used the four students’ evaluations as a pretext to silence Gouws and get him to stop teaching a course that dared to focus on men. Gouws was told he needed to add more “traditional literature” to his course, without defining the term. Gouws didn’t argue; instead, he agreed and suggested new readings to the departmental chair. Gouws would now teach The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Martian by Andy Weir. Dean Herzog responded by cancelling the course.
After futile attempts to reason with the school’s administration, Gouws reached out to NAS for help. Its president, Peter Wood, took up Gouws’ cause, writing that the school’s administrators, “once they understood that Professor Gouws was marked out as the Enemy, were tireless in their efforts to discredit him,” and “should cease to treat him as a public enemy.”
“A moment has arrived in American higher education when the fear of complaints from students that a male bias lurks somewhere in a course is sufficient reason for slashing the course from the curriculum,” Wood wrote. “A pernicious ideology has been let loose, and it is all the more pernicious because its proponents congratulate themselves for striking a blow for gender justice every time they narrow the curricular choices to their own preferences.”
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
