FEMINISM AT KNOX COLLEGE: A RECENT GRADUATE'S ACCOUNT

 

 

 

David R. Usher
October 18, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

I have taken issue many times with the dominance of intolerant feminist organizations, operating under the authority imbued by �Women�s Studies� programs, which frequently control all academic thought and campus activities on colleges and universities in the name of �diversity.�

I became aware of this about five years ago when I visited my alma mater, Knox College. I was quite distressed about the invisibility of any perspective that might disagree in any way with feminist lesbian/gay agenda.

My insistence that Knox permit other thinking and to devote minimal educational resources to the establishment of a legitimate men�s studies program resulted in a letter from Roger Taylor, President of Knox, informing me that my email address was banned by Knox. This was done because campus feminists deemed my email messages to be �harassing� or �offensive.�

This issue still looms large and will not go away until Knox finally lives up to its own mission statement: Today�s male students are being systematically denied the right to seek �the same rights to be in the family as we have been granted to women in the workplace� and the knowledge to do it with.

The due-process rights of men have been eliminated under no-fault divorce, child support laws, and the Violence Against Women Act. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that women initiate slightly more than half of all serious domestic altercations, but under VAWA receive primary or sole custody of �families� in approximately 85% of divorces and nearly 100% in cases of illegitimacy. Our forty-year-old pogrom against men and marriage is funded by a half-trillion in annual federal expenditures stolen from the taxpayers to serve the perverse anti-family agenda of the National Organization For Women.

While women are forced to wear burkas and denied an education in some countries, American colleges forcibly brainwash men to hate each other and to meekly cow-tow to the demands of feminism. All writing, thinking and political activities that oppose radical feminism in any way are punished heavily.

When a young man is brought up to destroy other men, while knowing he most likely also faces a similar future as nothing more than a �deadbeat dad,� stripped of everything he earned since he graduated college, can this be America?

All social change begins on college campuses. This is why feminists have gone to extraordinary lengths to seize control of them. All current college men (and equalitarian-minded college women), who do not want to be destroyed later in life by feminist law and policy must organize now and demand change on their campuses.

To be successful, you must form a group of at least five to ten level-headed men and women (it is important to have women involved). You must stick together, and act factually and rationally. You must keep an extremely clean slate, because feminists will dig up every piece of dirt they can find about you and make it public. You must involve your parents and they must support you if the college administration reacts inappropriately.

You should coordinate your work with the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education. FIRE vigorously opposes campus censorship, will apply pressure for you, and may file a lawsuit on your behalf if the college behaves inappropriately.

Your work should be factual. You will do best if you model your advocacy on the work of credible organizations such as RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting).

Many college alumns now understand that feminism is not about equality. The best way to force your alma mater to restore a vibrant educational system is to refuse to donate to it until it agrees to install some form of free-standing Men�s Studies program (not in any way associated with or controlled by anyone in the Women�s Studies programs), and to change campus policies so they cannot be applied to punish honest academic debate or disagreement over gender or homosexuality. You must be firm about this. It is wise to involve your close alumnae friends, many of whom may well agree with you if you have them read this article and my others.

Shaun Williams, a recent Knox graduate, related his �Knox Experience� to me. His experience precisely describes what I witnessed. I urge all college students to take his message to heart and take action now, while you still have an opportunity to change your own future. Now is the time for you to reverse the horrid mistakes and insane thinking of the �free love� generation now running your college campus.

Here is Shaun�s message to us:

"I write in response to an opinion column you wrote more than a year ago about feminism at Knox college. I myself have just graduated from Knox college and I first encountered your article several months ago while searching the internet for outside sources about what I perceived as problems on campus. The Knox community is often referred to as the "Knox Bubble" as one can completely forget the outside world in that small, idelogically deviant, self-contained world. When I discovered your article, I got a much needed reminder that most people in the world are not ultra-leftist feminist radicals and that just perhaps I was not crazy to find myself so vehemently in opposition to the default assumptions and values that dominated all discourse.

I had graduated from a very liberal private high school and considered myself to be extremely liberal when I first arrived at Knox college, but at the end of four years I find I have become much more conservative in nature in reaction to the extreme environment to which I was subjected.

Over four years, I had to endure constant rhetoric and �Violence Against Women Day� (also known as Valentine's day) and the underlying attitude shared by both sexes that men were superfluous if not outright evil.

I was at first indifferent to the feminists; an organization to promote and protect women did not seem that bad. I hadn't even been there one term, however, when I realized that the feminists expressed by implication a certain revulsion towards men and maleness. There was the constant desire to spell women as 'womyn' and otherwise remove the man from the English language wherever it suited them(leaving words like 'manslaughter' intact, of course'). Then, an early turning point occurred when I noticed the campus feminists had written on every one of a series of posters inviting people for an audition.

The poster had invited people to try out for a "two-man show" and even though the poster specified that both available parts were male roles, members of SASS had scratched the word 'man' wherever it occurred on the poster and replaced it with 'person.' I was amazed at the pettiness of this; that they would waste their time and energy on those posters when they were supposedly out saving all the women in the world from domestic abuse. At this time, I still saw their fervid devotion to PC policing as a matter of comedy.

I began to see just how serious the matter really was when I began dating a Knox student in my Junior year. She was a freshman and really was a nice girl; I counted myself very fortunate to have met her. That she had some feminist tendencies did not bother me, because she was a moderate compared to everyone else in her suite.

Over time, the influence of her radical friends had its impact on her. She was taken to see all manner of feminist plays on campus and at least once to a performance of the Vagina Monologues, a college favorite. She mentioned the play often and I had seen posters about it all over campus, so my curiosity was aroused. It was a small matter to obtain a copy of the play from the school library and I read it. The play seemed a bit off the deep end to me, but I dismissed it as entertainment for ladies frustrated with the opposite sex. Men certainly expressed their frustration about women.

What really got my attention was the fact that some ideas my girlfriend had expressed as if they were her own were direct quotes from the play. I never brought it up with her, but it started in me a kind of internal alarm.

I eventually broke up with her. I would not have cited her growing feminist behavior as a reason at the time, it was for many reasons, of which her ideologies were just one. However, I had spent a few months of my life on the inside of a group of feminist women and read some of the works they virtually worshipped. The experience got my gears turning. In the ensuing months the set of pieces I had gathered slowly began to interlock until on one fateful day my roommate showed me an article he had found on the internet. It was an article by Christina Hoff Sommers methodically demonstrating how malicious and dishonest the Vagina Monologues were. I had read the work for myself, and I found that it had all come together. The Vagina Monologues were indeed arrogant, selfish, pretetentious, and terrible. It was a work that professed men to be vile, insensitive, and unnecessary, the veritable bible for a large and growing number of women.

That I had been able to read it with a straight face the first time, without any great sense of indignation, demonstrated just how strongly I myself had been influenced by feminism. I tried to imagine a similar play about men and realized such a work would receive only the laughter and derision it deserved. This was when I really began to realize something was terribly wrong.

In my senior year, my feeling of fear turned into dread. I began doing research on the internet and found myriad sites protesting modern feminism and the behavior of American women. Some of these sites were aimless chat rooms or evangelical pulpits, but a good number presented rational arguments well supported with evidence. It was on these pages, that I read the words that finally completed my transformation into an ardent anti-feminist. I would read passages such as "You have to respect her body, she doesn't have to give a damn about yours" and have a feeling akin to being struck between the eyes with a sledge hammer. I wanted to believe everything was all right, that these people were on the internet and therefore not valid, that they were all deluded paranoaics. I examined my experiences all through my life and the last four years at Knox and found that nearly every word rang horribly true no matter how I might equivocate or attempt to ignore it. I finally gave in and I was angry.

Seymour library at Knox college has two or three gigantic shelves full of feminist writings; it is a regular treasure trove. It was here I came to examine for myself the very roots of feminist theory. I found that almost every radical feminist had different ideas, but all had one thing in common.

One way or another, at the core of each interpretation was the assumption that women are perpetually victims and that men are always perpetrators. At best, the solution is to ceaselessly extract things from men, forcefully, if necessary. At worst, men and all male behavior are to be extinguished for the improvement of the human race. No matter how eloquent or sophisticated, that's what it boiled down to. At this point I have specialized in feminist theory, not to embrace it, but rather so that I may know the enemy. I have encountered works by Faludi, Steinem, Friedan, Dowd, Dworkin, and others and plan to continue. Some feminists I have encountered, such as Christina Hoff Sommers seem to be genuinely interested in equality, but those like her are few and far between. They are not the ones dominating the educational system and to an increasing degree, politics and society.

As graduation approached at Knox, I began writing anti-feminist treatises with the intent of posting them around the Knox campus. When the time came to put these posters up, I realized I didn't dare. I had the genuine fear that if I was discovered to have posted such material, my graduation could be in jeopardy. Roger Taylor had already in the last year suspended someone I knew for an entire term over a misunderstanding and I knew that worse could happen to me for violating the institution's principal ideology. You were wise in concealing Jim's real name; the disclosure of his identity could have brought real harm.

I decided ultimately to conceal my opinions so that I would have a bachelor's degree behind me when I fought another day. The fact that I was not comfortable in exercising my rights of free speech made me realize yet again just how bad the situation has become.

This story, though long, only begins to cover my experiences with radical feminism at Knox. I have not even addressed, for example how feminism and politically correct ideologies had hijacked the school's curriculum. That alone would make for another letter.

I would say feminism has become more entrenched during my four years. More young women and men subscribe to its teachings than ever and events such as �Take Back the Night� have become prominent in just the last couple years...

The important part is that the feminists have turned me completely against them and I have not once looked back. I would just like to thank you for your wonderful letter. It provided me with hope at a time when it seemed radical feminism and its adherents were everywhere. You did not hesitate to tell Jim like it is and you probably did him a great service.

Sincerely,
Shaun Williams"

� 2006 David Usher - All Rights Reserved