Dowd Nearly Had It Right: How about "Are Men Necessarily Leaders?"

Maureen Dowd's mother early on told her that men are necessary, for reproduction and heavy lifting, although even those practicalities might be viewed as a pre-technology viewpoint. The sub-title of Dowd's book Are Men Necessary? is When Sexes Collide. In car insurance terms, that means the insured is covered even if the "other party" is not. Were it so in academe. Tenure might be considered academic collision insurance, but, as is the case with car insurance, if you don't have it you can't use it. One hundred years seems like a long time to wait for equality and equity for those who do not yet have itwill everyone except mostly white males please stand-up? Only one hundred years, you ask! It's been at least since the Indo-Europeans terrorized and changed the peaceful farming community lives of matrilineal cultures, right? The one hundred years mentioned here is how long the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (the AEJMC) has had to diversify the academic and professional field of a societal institution that is now as important as education, possibly more important-the mass media and their electronic derivatives. One of the premises of Dowd's book is that the mass media and popular culture have feminized men, making them act like the stereotypical women of the electronic mass media, in business and politics, complete with emotional outbursts, catfights, cosmetics, and fashion. In general these men exhibit "shrewish, scolding, clawing, vengeful, sneaky, vain behavior that is anything but reasonable and impersonal. Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day." We have another premise for academe that would slightly change Dowd's book title to reflect the idea that the mass media, especially television, have not affected the scholarly types much-they are much too educated and cultured to pay serious attention to the popular media. Therefore, university administrators and senior scholars, mostly white males, act much like pre-electronic media people. Their idea is that television and related products "dumb down" the general public. The persons in this type of important societal leadership have had about forty years to "rigidify" and codify their traditional positions. Thus, in spite of whatever encouragement affirmative action and women's studies and other area studies have brought to the advancement of white women and minority women and men in academic leadership positions, such advancement has largely been slow, if not stagnant, for the last three decades. A recent newspaper article about rising pay packages at colleges vaulting five presidents past $1 million exemplifies this notion of steady state stagnation. Of the five private university presidents who reached the million-dollar mark in 2005, one appeared by the name to be female. In the five highest-paid public universities, where salaries ranged from $724,604 to $659,670, one woman also was included and amazingly was the highest paid. Thus, in the ten colleges cited, we have two women, or 20%. That percentage is even less than the Ratio of Recurrent and Reinforced Residuum discussed below would suggest. We would re-title Dowd's book for academic audiences Are Men Necessarily Leaders? Academic leaders have an extra layer of stuffy, traditional good ol' boy networking arrogance that reminds one of the saying about Douglas MacArthur in his time that "Old Generals Never Die, They Just Smell That Way." At the beginning of her second chapter, Dowd writes: "There is a growing school of thought among those who study the American political landscape that men may be biologically unsuited to hold political office and leadership positions." Guess where those who study that landscape are located-in universities where politics are played harder than real politics but largely without public or private accountability. Dowd notes that new research into sex chromosomes suggests that the Y chromosome may become extinct, and that in "only another hundred thousand years-or ten million, if you believe the Y optimists-and the male chromosome could go the way of the dial-up connection. …