IT'LL ALL WORK OUT IN THE END


if harvard will just listen to one of its own.

By now you've probably heard about the decision of Harvard University to ban men from one of its gyms for six hours each week so that women -- particularly Muslim women -- can exercise without being ogled by them. (Something you have not heard is how they plan to prevent women being ogled by women, but that's another post for another time.) The responses, both for and against, have been as predictable as the sun rising in the east, the demonizing of political correctness on the right, and the propagating of hoary melodrama on the left: it's un-American, because the needs of a whiny few are trampling the rights of the entitled many; it's holistic and developmental, because Harvard has a moral and ethical responsibility to make sure our students can stay healthy. (I'm not making that up. Of course, if you've worked on a college campus in the last fifteen years, you already knew that. Though I'll bet you didn't know that Harvard students could only stay healthy by setting foot and breast in a university-sponosred gym.)

The story got some prime airtime on the Today Show this morning, demonstrating once again that no issue is too minor for Matt Lauer to moderate, that no controversy can ever by solved in four-and-a-half minutes of sound bites, and that a perfectly fair and reasonably solution to this problem already exists, but no one's paying any attention to it, perhaps because the female Harvard undergrad who proposed it -- in writing! -- is neither shouting at the top of her aggrieved lungs nor publicly grinding her ideological axe. Here are some of the highlights of the broadcast:

• NBC News correspondent Mike Taibbi, who covered the story but missed the point, noted that No one at Harvard is saying how many actual complaints there have been from males who wanted to use that gym during those six segregated hours and couldn’t. As if segregation is only a bad thing if enough people complain about it.

• Taibbi reported that the restrictions are in place so Muslim women can exercise without men present as Mulsim religious guidelines require. That sounds good, and would certainly be a fine defense of the policy if it were true. But it's not.

• Hussein Ibish, executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership, corrected Taibbi's claim a few minutes later during the live interview segment, when he wasn't making silly assertions like this one: This is about expanding the range of choices. (Tell me, Mr. Ibish, what range of choices does this expand for Harvard men?) Or this one: You can’t convince me that this is gonna be an onerous discrimination. (The same could be said, of course, about that whole riding-in-the-back-of-the-bus thing. I mean, those folks were still allowed on the bus, and they still got to go where they wanted to go, right? That doesn't sound too onerous to me.) Or this one: [This is about] expanding the range of freedoms. (Well, except for the freedoms of the men at Harvard. But that's only for six hours a week, so hey, I guess it really isn't that onerous. Suck it up, boys!)

• An unidentified female Harvard student, demonstrating she's at the right school but still has a lot to learn, suggested that the policy wasn't a problem because it's open to any woman at all, even Christians and Jews. (No word on Hindus or atheists, but we figure they're good too. As long as they're women.)

• Another female Harvard student, Lucy Caldwell, spoke on camera and was not identified, presumably because NBC did not want to single her out as the only person in the story making complete and total sense, defused the problem so deftly that -- once again -- no one seemed to notice: In my column, I suggested that Harvard implement men’s only hours during the same hours that there are women’s only hours in a different gym.

What Ms. Caldwell proposed, in short, was a policy of fairness and equality for all. So you can see, of course, why no one's paying any attention to her.

Posted: Mon - March 10, 2008 at 11:33 AM          

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