On the subject of role models, I remember thinking back in high school that there must be some unbalance in my psyche as a result of growing up with very few male role models, while I had all these awesome independent women in my life (my mom, my surrogate grandma, my therapist, my teachers). I had so many cool women showing me how cool women were, but I never had any men showing me how cool men could be (let’s just say my father, while in the picture, was more absent than not). These days I think that imbalance has a lot to do with the strangeness I see in men. Sometimes it’s almost to the point of sexism, where I can’t seem to see men as real thinking creatures, but other times it’s a minor point. It all depends on the dynamics of the situation. What complex creatures we humans be. @.@

Also, Jane Goodall + hyenas sounds awesome. I didn’t realize that she’d done hyena research. I saw her on The Daily Show recently, though, which was also awesome.

Do not sing the Nelson lullaby to the 4th grade.

Not long after women were allowed to go to college, men were worried about them being too good at it. Coed policies got rolled back or capped, and the “Feminization” argument reared its ugly head.

And here I thought I’d never have the pleasure of living in the early 20th century. My bad.

One thing to keep in mind about this issue is the financial agendas of the colleges and universities making what amounts to an argument, however contrived, for maintaining some artbitrary level of diversity. An unwritten bias toward male applicants without a ban or a public cap on female admits means encouraging more men to apply without discouraging women from same. This adds up to more application fees and an even more impressive admit ratio, in addition to a not-so-tacit shoring up of the patriarchy.

Just another twist in the games people play with equal rights…

I’ll be watching to see what the US Commission on Civil Rights digs up in its investigation. I did think the NPR piece was abominably shallow, and I’m an NPR addict.

Not unrelated, did you guys see that Women Are Overtaking Men in the U.S.? Combine all those degrees with the BoL stats, and we’re apparently in charge of everything. Who knew?

(P.S. I think this might be my first comment, although I’ve been lurking for a long time. Hi!)

And now you have me singing that line in my head along to lullabies I know. XD It must not be a very well-known one.

Thanks for the clarification. I wondered about the actual program objectives versus the way in which they are actually implemented. I know there is often push back from program coordinators when asked to “broaden” the scope when administering the program. As a part of TRIO, which has the same mission, but is still administered in the same narrow way, I wondered why students who meet other program criteria aren’t accessing the program. It seems most programs have become de facto programs for students of color, which is not entirely a bad thing, despite not being the original mission.

Though the programs policies are written in coded language (conflating race with class) and that probably explains why it wouldn’t immediately occur to other qualifying groups to apply.

That said, I have observed the way in which these programs tend to provide a remedial component/college readiness blah blah blah and often that effort is focused primarily on students of color, without regard to class status. In a similar way that International students of color still are required to provide TOEFL scores despite originating from countries where English is the primary language.

It’s early, so my brain is still booting up.

Thanks for clarifying McNair for me. It’s one of those programs I understand, but don’t really understand. In the sense I don’t always believe it is actually doing what it was designed to do, but haven’t always paused to consider why.

HiddenTohru, hooray for knowing that Jane Goodall is totally great. I’ll raise your envy, because that time when I was nine and went to hear her lecture and got to shake her hand, Berke Breathed, the guy who drew Bloom County was there for the lecture too, and he just happened to be seated next to me and my mother and, uh, my psychotherapist, whom I had invited because this event was actually my birthday ‘party.’ It was great. Only thing that would have made it better was if she’d been talking about hyenas instead of chimpanzees.

Additional comedy: Jane Goodall was a bad influence. In her book about her research concerning hyenas, _Innocent Killers_, she mentions how she had a baby and she would sing her notes into her tape-recorder to get him to sleep while she was watching hyenas from the land rover, and thus produced the amusing lullaby line, “Nelson gives a hysterical giggle as the twins lick his penis.” No doubt she put it in the book because the contrast of seeming sexual reference and lullaby is funny. I just couldn’t figure out how it could possibly metre correctly with any lullaby I knew, and so I repeated that phrase under my breath, setting it to various tunes, for a long time and in, well. The wrong places. I still can’t make it metre as a lullaby.

And I still want a poster of her. Darn it.