Today, I’m highlighting a couple different items in brief succession. First, this week I got an e-mail with this announcement from UC President Michael Drake (the former UCI Chancellor, so someone I’ve personally met before) concerning the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs, which overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. While Drake is certainly entitled to his own opinion, I was horrified to find that the statement makes his views the official UC position, commenting:

The Court’s decision is antithetical to the University of California’s mission and values.

I was relieved, then, to see I’m not alone in the UC in opposing Drake’s statement; UCLA professor Eugene Volokh, whose law blog I read occasionally, takes a very critical stance against Drake’s statement. He writes:

I don’t think that a public university’s “mission and values” should be to promote a reading of the Constitution as securing abortion rights, or as not securing abortion rights, as opposed to promoting research on this and related questions. And while of course a public university that runs hospitals should generally perform legal medical procedures, and train doctors with regard to legal medical procedures, I don’t think that justifies the university taking a stand on whether such legality is determined by state legislatures or by Supreme Court Justices.

Volokh goes on to note:

More broadly, I tend to agree with the 1970 statement by the Office of the UC President:

There are both educational and legal reasons why the University must remain politically neutral. Educationally, the pursuit of truth and knowledge is only possible in an atmosphere of freedom, and if the University were to surrender its neutrality, it would jeopardize its freedom. Legally, Article IX, section 9, of the State Constitution provides in part that “The University shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its regents and in the administration of its affairs…”

He also cites another UCLA professor, Leslie Johns, who wrote eloquently:

Abortion is not a simple matter of access to health care. It is a complex moral and political question that involves balancing fundamental rights to life and physical autonomy. By denying this reality, you are asserting a political position. Yet your employment as a public employee explicitly prohibits you from using your office for political purposes. It is both inappropriate and illegal for you (and for me) to use our official capacity to make claims that specific abortion policies or constitutional interpretations are “antithetical to the University of California’s mission and values.”

I certainly hope Drake will reconsider, as saying the decision is “antithetical to the University of California’s mission and values” certainly seems like it’s saying many faculty’s views are antithetical to the UC’s mission and values.

Belonging and transgenderism

The other day, I wrote about my teenage experience and how deeply I longed for belonging but ultimately found it only in Christ and in being his. Just after writing that, I happened across the article How I was trapped by gender ideology which relates the author’s teenage (and onward) transgender experience and how it resulted in part from a very similar hunger to belong. It begins:

I became a male-to-female transsexual when I was only 15 years old. Bullying at school, instability at home, and a lack of close friends had left me looking for somewhere to belong, and the transgender movement happily provided one — at the cost of my health and sanity… My new identity brought me friends, mentors, and a purpose in life. I went from being a lonely, insecure teenager to a member of a loving community engaged in a heroic battle against an evil society that desired my destruction.

Read the whole short article. Part of what it highlights is that, while this temporarily satisfied the author’s desire for belonging, it still left him unsatisfied, and the solution presented was to transition still more:

Clinging to this fantasy of a happy future where my transition was “complete” let me ignore that the medication made me feel worse, not better… My worsening health had nothing to do with my rejection of my body and identity or the experimental medications I was taking — it was all the fault of the transphobic society that tyrannized me… [After going still further] the euphoria I’d been promised didn’t materialize. Mutilating myself hadn’t made me whole — it had only made me mutilated.

The author gives this very real sense of the frustration and longing to find something that would satisfy. Ultimately, he de-transitioned, but he concludes that many are not able to do so:

Many of them still live in the miserable world I escaped from, hoping that the next step in their transition — a new name, a new set of pronouns, another year of hormones, another surgery — will bring them the happiness they were promised. But, as I learned, it never can.

As I wrote previously, true belonging is found only in Christ – not in belonging to the right group or even in finding my true “self”.

Do certain gender gaps leave people prone to extremism?

I ran across a Twitter thread recently which makes some rather interesting points. It’s essentially an answer to another thread that said that most white middle school boys are, at one point or another, headed towards alt-right extremism. That may or may not be true, but the response was thought-provoking and basically argued:

  • As an eighth grade white boy, imagine you’re being told, over and over again, that you’re extremely privileged as a white male
  • Yet the girls around you are are getting better grades, advanced classes are dominated by girls, and the girls seem better prepared for college, more driven, etc.
  • And as time passes your friends are addicted to porn, using drugs, or unmotivated and consumed with videogames
  • Then as college rolls around, more girls than boys are being accepted to the top universities, getting scholarships, etc. Yet you keep hearing girls are underrepresented…
  • For scholarships, there are many which are restricted to women, and you hear a lot (as you tour colleges) about student organizations for women, etc.
  • “You start doing research. You discover that men are more likely to be homeless, go to prison, become alcoholics, struggle with isolation/loneliness, die of a drug overdose, and commit suicide.”
  • “Eventually, you find out that the only people who seem to talk about the issues facing men—the only people who appear to sympathize with how you feel—are so-called “alt-right” figures …You start listening to them. For once, you feel like you’re not alone.”

Now, I am not very aware of who is or isn’t drawn to the alt-right, nor do I pay much attention to it at all. But – all of these seem like excellent points to me. The gender gap in higher education is real and has been growing, with now 46% of women ages 25-34 having bachelor’s degrees and only 36% of men. Currently there are roughly three women in college for every two men. And these other issues are worth discussion, too. Some of these are real problems facing our society, and ought to be acknowledged as such. It’s not healthy to sweep these issues under the rug and paint all non-minority men with the “privileged oppressor” brush.