A rchive Date
[ 19-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Feminism claims another victim
By JOHN OAKLEY
Toronto Sun
August 19, 2000
Anyone who has ever doubted that strident feminism is a sinister movement bent on winning the war on culture need only review the case of Prof. Jeffery Asher to lay any misconceptions to rest.
In war, as a wise man once said, the first casualty is truth. The latest casualty happens to be Prof. Asher, who merely attempted to tell the truth.
On Tuesday, Asher, who taught courses on Men's Studies at Dawson College in Montreal, quit his 20-year professorship, citing a feminist putsch that torpedoed him teaching what he claims was only one of a handful of courses dealing with men's issues in all of the hallowed Halls of North American academe.
Asher was a guest on the "Wednesday is Men's Day" edition of my CFRB Radio talk show earlier this week and admitted he no longer had the stomach for the fight after facing what amounted to several years of harassment and a poisoned academic environment.
In fact, one of the members on the college administration's four-person curriculum committee responsible for killing Asher's Men's Studies courses back in May - based, he says, on unsubstantiated complaints - was caught on the school's security cameras in September, 1997, posting feminist literature on Asher's office bulletin board. Not only did she keep her gig, evidently, but there was no storm of protest.
Prof. Asher's egregious academic sin was in providing an alternative view to what has come to be the prevailing and conventional wisdom in gender issues, not just on college and university campuses (an alarming feminist beachhead) but across the panoply of contemporary culture as well.
By his own admission, his job as a teacher was not to proselytize or propagandize, but rather to instil in his charges the intellectual ability to critically assess issues and information for themselves - i.e., give the students the necessary chops to build a formidable BS filter; a lofty ideal that should be the stated goal of any bastion of intellectual honesty.
STATISTICAL SHOCKER
The students were asked, for example, to statistically quantify the number of articles in the school library's periodical section that related to men as compared to those that centred on woman. The shocking preponderance, if you're scoring at home, favoured women by at least a 10-1 margin.
Sadly, Asher's academic enlightenment didn't let up. Students must've been rattled to learn that many of the gender-biased shibboleths of our age now widely accepted as universal truths simply withered under the scrutiny of objective analysis; domestic violence and pay inequity topping the list.
In the case of the former, equally as many women as men are reportedly prone to perpetrate some form of violence in the household. In the latter case the so-called 72 cents-on-the-dollar disparity in women's wages compared to men's is largely a myth. Notwithstanding important mitigating factors such as a woman interrupting her career to have children, or even the minor detail that wage discrimination is against the law, a recent study found effectively no statistical difference in the earning power of male and female post-secondary school graduates.
Asher's unimpeachable source: Statistics Canada.
And yet it's these kinds of falsehoods and this type of misinformation that have become enshrined in gender politics to be casually and uncritically recited as mantras and adopted as cant.
Even the traditionally cynical media have been subverted by the propaganda of the radical feminists, accepting holus bolus that women are universally oppressed or that they're inherently morally superior to men. The tragic outcome of this "big lie" can be seen in the family court system.
By their lack of intellectual rigour, the media too are complicitous in this matter. Or maybe it's just that they feel the chill.
In any event, Jeffery Asher closes the books on what has been, by all accounts, an exemplary teaching career, comforted in his conscience that he merely sought to offer up the truth, absent of any agenda or axe to grind.
It obviously separated him from the pack.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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