The Decline and Fall of Brown University

Given that I graduated from the place I am always fascinated to see what Brown University has become. For decades now it was been descending into its own Inferno of politically correctitude. Administrators seem hell bent on devaluing a Brown degree and providing nonstop embarrassment for alumni and alumnae.

Most parents of high school students have figured it out. They refuse to pay for a Brown education, now costing over $70,000. Many alumni have hopefully figured it out and have stopped contributing to the Brown indoctrination mill. Hopefully, corporate recruiters have by now crossed Brown off their lists.

And yet, Brown is still a very popular and prestigious place. It is certainly competitive, accepting only 9% of applicants. If you want to know what’s wrong with American education, you should look to Brown.

Now, the Brown Student Health Service has developed a new program designed to emasculate young men. They have established what they call safe spaces where men can whine, whimper and moan, can flagellate themselves and purge their toxic masculinity.

As you know, safe spaces are usually places where snowflake children can escape from the rigors of competition and be shielded from words that will offend them to the roots of their being. Safe spaces offer lollypops and puppies, to cuddle and to drool over.

At Brown, however, safe spaces are now places for male students to go and be brainwashed. You think I am kidding. I am not. The student health service has decided that “toxic masculinity” is a public health crisis, needing medical attention. 

Already that boggles the mind. If it is that much of a health crisis, why not try chemical castration? Is that the next step these overzealous fanatics will impose on the male population? In the name of health, of course.

Toni Airaksinen has the story for Pajamas Media. (via Maggie’sFarm) Read it and weep:

The Brown University Health Services office now offers “safe spaces for men” to help them “unlearn toxic masculinity” and combat traditional notions of “what it means to be a man.”

Viewing masculinity as if it were a public health crisis, “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity” offers a three-pronged approach for helping male students recover: a weekly discussion group to unlearn “toxic masculine norms,” a biannual magazine, and a video series.

The crux of the programming revolves around Masculinity 101 Peer Education, a peer-to-peer weekly discussion group that convenes male students to talk about issues such as “Cultivating Empathy” and “Harm and Healing.”

Eight students have already been hired to facilitate these workshops, PJ Media has learned. According to the program description, the workshops vow to teach students what “healthier norms of masculinity can and should look like.”

Warns Brown University: “Modern society is quick to bestow unearned privilege on men … there is nothing in place to teach men -- young men especially -- how to avoid abusing that privilege or how to leverage it for good.”

For anyone who has anything like a functioning brain, the norms of what Brown calls healthy masculinity are not masculine. Empathy and healing are traditional feminine values. There is nothing wrong with that, but applying them to men makes men weak. It demoralizes them and saps them of assertiveness, aggressiveness and initiative. They end up living at home with Mom and Dad, playing video games in the cellar. Or else, ironically, they abuse women. What else to they have to offer?

As for “unearned privilege,” it’s astonishingly stupid. In the first place, the American educational system has been showering children with unearned praise for decades now. It’s called the self-esteem movement. As for whether males have earned any privileges, you might ask yourself whether their male ancestors ever accomplished anything. Don't parents want to succeed in order to provide privileges to their progeny. After all, men were instrumental in winning great wars, industrializing the world and building a great nation. What is wrong with that?

The guilt ridden fools who want Brown boys to disembarrass themselves of their manliness are going to make it harder for said boys to function in the world. And, dare I mention, girls are not going to flock to boys who excel at empathy and caring.

Naturally, the health service feels that its mandate extends to reordering American society, by eliminating the gender binary. You can’t make this stuff up:

Unlike programming at other schools, the Masculinity 101 Peer Education program notes that it is open to all students regardless of gender, and especially since its programming also is dedicated to destroying the male-female gender binary.

“Folks of all genders are taught to accept the gender binary as a biological imperative that can never be questioned when, in fact, the gender binary is a social construct that needs to be dismantled,” the website states. “Masculinity 101 rejects the notion of the gender binary as the end all be all and works to promote a more holistic understanding of oneself encompassing one’s many facets and contradictions.”

The Brown Student Health Service believes in the idiocy about the social construction of gender. It does not know that all human beings have either XX or XY chromosomes, thus that the gender binary is written into everyone’s DNA. It does not know that all human societies are constructed around a gender binary… because no one in the past has been stupid enough to pretend that said binary was an arbitrary imposition on a perfectly elastic human nature.

In effect, the Brown program tries to replace the binary with a singular and unitary set of cultural values: those associated with femininity, with women’s work. It is trying to turn young men into young women because it believes that such men will be less likely to abuse young women. As we know, women are saints and angels... their superior capacity for empathy makes it impossible for them to hurt anyone. I have been trying to contact Emmett Till to ask for an opinion on this matter, but so far, he has not responded.

In its infinite ignorance Brown does not recognize that the recent outburst of male harassment has derived from the fact that when boys go to school they enter a matriarchal culture that does its darndest to beat them into submission.

The result, as happens in any matriarchal culture, is that you produce a generation of men who are not allowed any traditionally masculine role— like protector or breadwinner— and who express their resentment over the beating they received in school… by abusing and harassing women.

You cannot get much dumber than the Brown Student Health Service. The university should be embarrassed. It will not be, but we can hope.