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Quote:

Cecilia Sanders, a senior who is studying Earth and planetary sciences, called the comments “a really troubling sentiment, and I think it’s a really dangerous idea that men- and women-identified people can’t be in the same space and behave with equal respect and regard for one another.”

No word on transgendered otherkin.

Seriously though, for the last several years, Harvard's administration has been quite busy dismantling male privilege and promoting equality at the school. Like all Iib arts programs, it has a sizeable SJW student population campaigning for fossil fuel divestment, rape, and the such.

Take it from Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/4...s-college/

And now see this in-depth article about the school's leftist administration (a great long-form read):
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/edu...quity.html
One of the biggest arguments of the article - surprise! - is that women wish to not only further their education, but meet someone who is their "equal" and settle down with children after a while, while men's careers keep going.


Students' feedback on the regular, mandated, discussions on equality:

Quote:

That was only one out of 10 sessions. At most of the others, the men contributed little. Some of them, and even a few women, had grown to openly resent the deans’ emphasis on gender, using phrases like “ad nauseam” and “shoved down our throats,” protesting that this was not what they had paid to learn.

“I’d like to be candid, but I paid half a million dollars to come here,” another man said in an interview, counting his lost wages. “I could blow up my network with one wrong comment.” The men were not insensitive, they said; they just considered the discussion a poor investment of their carefully hoarded social capital. Mr. Erker used the same words as many other students had to describe the mandatory meetings: “forced” and “patronizing.”

That week, Andrew Levine, the director of the annual spoof show, was notified by administrators that he was on academic and social probation because other students had consumed alcohol in the auditorium after a performance. (His crime: dining with visiting family instead of staying as he had promised in a contract.) He was barred from social events and put on academic probation as well.

Amid all the turmoil, though, the deans saw cause for hope. The cruel classroom jokes, along with other forms of intimidation, were far rarer. Students were telling them about vigorous private conversations that had flowed from the halting public ones. Women’s grades were rising — and despite the open resentment toward the deans, overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they had been for years.

Ms. Frei been promoted to dean of faculty recruiting, and she was on a quest to bolster the number of female professors, who made up a fifth of the tenured faculty. Female teachers, especially untenured ones, had faced various troubles over the years: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunities to write papers with senior professors, and students who destroyed their confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the spot or commenting on what they wore.

Now Ms. Frei, the guardian of the female junior faculty, was watching virtually every minute of every class some of them taught, delivering tips on how to do better in the next class. She barred other professors from giving them advice, lest they get confused. But even some of Ms. Frei’s allies were dubious.

At the end of every semester, students gave professors teaching scores from a low of 1 to a high of 7, and some of the female junior faculty scores looked beyond redemption. More of the male professors arrived at Harvard after long careers, regaling students with real-life experiences. Because the pool of businesswomen was smaller, female professors were more likely to be academics, and students saw female stars as exceptions.

“The female profs I had were clearly weaker than the male ones,” said Halle Tecco, a 2011 graduate. “They weren’t able to really run the classroom the way the male ones could.”

By the end of the semester, the teaching scores of the women had improved so much that she thought they were a mistake. One professor had shot to a 6 from a 4. Yet all the attention, along with other efforts to support female faculty, made no immediate impact on the numbers of female teachers. So few women were coming to teach at the school that evening out the numbers seemed almost impossible.

Ms. Navab, who had started dating one of the men — with an M.D. and an M.B.A. — from the Ethiopian dinner, had felt freer to focus on her career once she was paired off. She was happy with her job at a California start-up, but she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves.

At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. “Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present. Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.

Some of the current administration. The one leading the charge for equality is...well, take a guess:

(yes, third one. Confirmed by the article to a lesbian)

Arguably, some of the changes might have a positive impact on the school and the world as a result. The problem is that these changes come in an environment where suspicion of men is de rigueur.

In a sane world, meritocracies and recognizing differences between people should win out. If a "minority" is good enough to compete in an engineering program of her own talent, let her do so. She will get good grades, not drop out or change majors, get a job in the field, and be respected for her ability to pull her weight. (Which seems to be the case outside the west.)

If she gets into school by virtue of lower requirements via affirmative action, she will flounder in her classes, perhaps change majors, not work in that field (or require further affirmative action just to get in the door), be passed over for promotions, and be resented for dragging down the rest of the team. Multiply by millions of cases, then throw in the legal fees for allegations of discrimination at every step of the way.

Here's the scary part: the fact that Harvard hasn't yet fallen down the ranking ladders might just be testament that other schools are keeping pace.