Dear One and All:

I attended the Class of 1973 Reunion recently and was, as always, impressed with the school and its standard and capacity to prepare children for life in our current world. While I am generally pleased, I note a deficiency that I also noted a decade ago and that seems to persist. Due to a bad divorce, what I am about to say is extremely important to me. But I won’t apologize for saying it; my intent is to teach and protect our students and not to get faculty and administrators upset.

There is a gender studies facility and program on campus. The issues of being male or being female or having some other (uncommon) gender identity, and the consequences of such an identity in modern society, are important. But there is a severe lack of a particular component that should be in such a program.

How to screen someone as a potential boyfriend or girlfriend, to protect against being abused, is totally lacking. At the Reunion, I asked the moderator who was giving a presentation, firmly, about such instruction and was told only that if people feel upset or confused then they could seek help at the health center. The existence of help after the fact is good, but I would much rather prevent bad events than merely contrive to react to the consequences. Bad marriages, divorce damage, and unwanted children are common. We should do our part to prevent them, which means preventing bad relationships from forming in the first place.

Also, the emphasis within the gender studies program is geared toward supporting the female mindset. Important gender issues exist for men (such as how men in media are portrayed as buffoons and assaulting men is comedy, whereas portraying women as buffoons and assaulting them is prohibited; many other examples exist). An unbiased gender studies class would include many men; most of the people I saw at that presentation were female.

After the presentation, I mentioned to some women there that I thought there was some distortion: it seemed that men were portrayed as the dominant sovereign neuter people and that only women had gender issues; men have gender too. When I saw their faces light up as if they had never before encountered that concept, my fear turned out to be justified: the gender studies program is not gender-neutral and does not address gender issues as affecting men and women alike. The problems that men and not women face are substantial. Proof: men who are abused physically and monetarily are common, but there is no textbook for the mental-health student on how to treat abused men. Other evidence exists and can be found online easily with an Internet search engine.

Anticipating future college experiences to be encountered by current students is prudent; the education our beloved school provides does not occur in a vacuum. Due to some extreme policies on various college campuses, it is not only prudent but I think vital to teach our students how to react to them constructively and, when assessing colleges, how to anticipate such policies and avoid them if they are in fact prohibitive.

I am not sure what you can do about this problem. I do know, from a bad experience at Haverford College shortly after graduating, that it was a generally accepted practice there for faculty members to decide that they wanted to teach something and to put together a list of subjects that they wanted to teach, then have the administration require students to choose one of those courses as a requirement for graduation. USA history teaches us the need for separation of powers (good work, history department!), and trusting faculty members to decide what to teach is potentially very dangerous. At Haverford, I wrote some articles in the college newspaper saying that trusting the faculty that way is hazardous for the students and was firmly asked by the dean of the faculty to drop out. That’s not the right attitude.

My web page http://harshman.name/High_School_Reunion_2018_Politics.html provides more observations in case you are interested. A difficult divorce (fought all the way to the state Supreme Court) has left me unable to help out with money. I must be content with offering my wisdom, which I admit is imperfect and arguably biased. But I am trying to save future students from suffering my fate, at college and in divorce court, and hope you will understand if I seem bitter or biased.

May I talk you into commencing appropriate changes in the gender studies program?

Very truly yours,

Edward J. Harshman
Class of 1973