As abusive sexual behavior by powerful men makes headlines, some colleges are experimenting with strategies that they hope will reduce harmful male behaviors, on campus and beyond. Progress is hard to measure, but at least one metric seems to be improving: men’s on-time graduation rates.
On a small but growing number of campuses, student-affairs reformers are drawing on 40 years of research showing that distorted cultural notions of masculinity skew the psychosocial development of many male students, leading them to be disruptive, threatening, self-harming, and sometimes dangerous. Male students are far more likely than female students to face campus conduct hearings, and more likely to graduate late or not at all.
At Stony Brook University, Charles L. Robbins, dean of undergraduate colleges, found that male students there had a four-year graduation rate 17 percent lower than that of female students. The gap was unusually large, but the troubling trend is national and layered atop a gender disparity in college enrollment to begin with. In response, Mr. Robbins, who has specialized in domestic-violence social work, has met with about 100 male students, individually or in small groups, and sought to draw them out on issues like alcohol and drugs, sexuality and pornography, immersive video games, financial stress, and what he describes as their “inability and unwillingness to ask for help.”
Male students enroll less, graduate less and more slowly, and misbehave more. With insights from “masculinity studies,” colleges are trying to teach them constructive ways to be a man. Critics on the right call the effort male-bashing. Critics on the left say it coddles an already privileged population.
He found the young men initially hesitant to talk but soon eager and grateful for the attention. Many revealed much about their lives, including how uncomfortable they were with the pressure to conform with common college-age expectations of masculinity — drinking copiously, maximizing sexual encounters, and so on. Significantly, he says, few could nominate role models; even fathers rarely rated. He says most of the young men appreciated the opportunity “to really talk and to validate their better instincts” about more-sound notions of masculinity.
A “male-success team” at Stony Brook has set up workshops for academic advisers and for residence-hall directors and assistants. The idea, says Mr. Robbins, is to alert staff members to “what they should be listening for” when helping struggling male students. The project has included messaging for students on video screens and fliers at information tables in the campus recreation center about resources to deal with problem behaviors.
In just one year, Mr. Robbins has seen the male-to-female four-year graduation disparity drop three points, to 14 percent, which he says suggests that the program is beginning to have the desired effect.
Administrators of these programs say that when male students act up, their academic progress often slips. At the University of South Florida, “we’ve eliminated the graduation gap by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status,” wrote Paul J. Dosal, vice president for student affairs and success, but “the six-year rate for males is seven points lower than for females, and while that is a significant improvement over last year, when it was a 12-percent gap, we have much more to do.” He has appointed a special assistant for male-student success. One key, he believes, is to ensure that more first-year students, men and women, feel comfortable and secure enough on campus to return for Year 2.
We’ve eliminated the graduation gap by race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status,” but “the six-year rate for males is seven points lower than for females.
Joseph Boehman, dean of Richmond College, the historically all-male division of the University of Richmond, says he has found that male students, “when they run into a wall, whether that’s academics harder than they’ve ever experienced or an emotional or personal issue, it’s really hard for them to be vulnerable. It runs counter to the narrative of ‘be a man, be tough.’ "
He believes that cultural dictates such as “man up” can whiplash into aggression and other unruliness. He is often struck, he says, by how commonly entering students — some female, most male — expect that college will match Animal House-like pop-culture depictions of college: a venue for self-indulgence and irresponsibility.
As president of the Richmond College Student Government Association, Abbas Abid, a senior from Harrisonburg, Va., has worked on the campus’s masculinity project with Mr. Boehman, including by taking awareness programs to the college’s nine fraternities, including his own, Theta Chi. The effort includes placing boxes outside residence halls where students can suggest ideas for discussions of masculinity, hosting discussions within fraternities about the ethos of “male identifying” groups, and shaping the college’s adoption of the White Ribbon Campaign, a global project to confront violence against women, around discussions of masculinity.
Mr. Abid says reception of the programs has been “slow but steady. … You’re essentially asking young guys, who already have so much on their minds, to question their identity.”
At fraternities and other male organizations, “you’re in an environment where the negative aspects of masculinity present themselves a little more intensely,” he says. “But in every organization there are guys who are willing to ask these big questions, about themselves, about their organizations.”
His college rugby team illustrates that, he says. “It’s probably even more of a hypermasculine environment than others, when every weekend you’re considering how hard you can crack someone and how hard you can crack the beer afterwards. But it’s the same thing there as with fraternities: Even if you have just a few guys who are willing to have these conversations, who are willing to develop their perspectives, they bring that back to the team.”
Mr. Boehman is among a growing group of scholars studying masculinity, both stereotypical and non. He and others argue that college administrators’ most common response to bad behavior — to punish and suppress it by, for example, suspending fraternities — may not be optimally effective. They suggest that, rather than “shame and blame,” officials should hold students accountable — criminally, when appropriate — but also seek to help offenders understand the developmental shortcomings of their conduct.
Punitive crackdowns are understandable, because administrators face a barrage of challenging student behaviors, mostly by men. More than 40 percent of American college students engage in binge drinking; it kills more than 1,800 of them each year and injures 600,000, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Sexual harassment and assault plague campuses. Studies also show that most fraternity initiates experience demeaning hazing, as do many members of sports teams and other student organizations.
Colleges — and, for that matter, responsible students — must also combat drug and sports-supplement abuse, rowdiness, unsafe driving, unsafe sex, fighting, and reckless possession of firearms.
Student groups and student-affairs offices, not surprisingly, face skepticism when they propose to help disruptive students investigate their notions of “manliness.” They are consistently decried both for “male bashing,” as Duke University’s Duke Men’s Project was last year, and, conversely, for coddling men who are already perceived as overprivileged. Advocates of interrogating “guy culture” are also asked: Does your approach reduce problematic behaviors? What is the connection between disruptive behaviors and academic progress?
Reformers point to data like the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s finding that one in four college students report that drinking causes them to slip academically. Similarly, research shows that male students spend far more time playing video games, watching television, and going to the gym than female students do, but participate far less in campus and community organizations. They are also less likely to seek assistance from tutors, advisers, counselors, and potential mentors.
“I often talk about men who are underenrolled, underpersistent, and underretained,” says Keith E. Edwards, who for 15 years has worked with colleges around the country as a consultant on men’s identity issues. He has no doubt that it helps to ask disruptive students to take stock of what drives their behaviors.
Some student groups examine what is often — somewhat contentiously — referred to as “toxic masculinity.” But those efforts often fizzle when committed student leaders graduate and move away.
Better, Mr. Edwards and others say, to include “masculinity work” in the job descriptions of staff members in counseling and violence-prevention centers.
A few institutions have established centers of masculinity research and counseling. Among them are the Center for the Study of Masculinities and Men’s Development at Western Illinois University and the Men and Masculinities Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At Stony Brook, Mr. Robbins and his colleagues work with one of the most prominent figures in the field, Michael Kimmel, who runs the university’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities and who, thanks to such best-selling books as Guyland: the Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008), has been dubbed by The Atlantic as “The Bro Whisperer.”
Masculinity is increasingly discussed at meetings of such organizations as Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education and ACPA: College Student Educators International, which this year held a joint conference on college men. Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University and an expert on hazing, chaired a national committee of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, where “one of the conversations we had, specifically, was how do we redefine what being a man is, because some of these archaic notions of manhood lead to behaviors that are not healthy.”
I often talk about men who are underenrolled, underpersistent, and underretained.
Often speakers at such meetings come from programs designed to improve academic progress among students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, has Project Males: Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success. There, Victor B. Sáenz and colleagues act on findings regarding “male gender-role conflict” — for example, how machismo makes some male students too proud or afraid to seek academic support.
Increasingly, however, programs aim to reach male students more generally. At the University of Redlands, Reggie Robles, associate director of campus diversity and inclusion, directs Dudes — Dudes Understanding Diversity and Ending Stereotypes. Its activities have included a “dialogue series” in which students responded to presentations by professors, student-affairs officials, and a campus minister on such topics as pornography, guns as totems of masculinity, and “hook-up culture.” That series was so successful, says Mr. Robles, that Dudes has expanded to include individual and small-group counseling for male students, as well as programming for clubs and fraternities.
Encouraged by a drop in the attrition rate of male students, Redlands now even offers a one-unit credit course called “Dudes: Understanding Male College Student Journeys.” It centers on Mr. Edwards’s theory of the “man mask.” He describes it as a pattern of concealing emotions amid confusion and insecurities about conforming to a cultural script of masculinity that, ironically, encourages self-sabotaging, rebellious nonconformity.
On large campuses, scaling up masculinity-related programs involves concerted efforts to change the whole campus culture. To help, in its CollegeAIM guide and website, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism provides 60 strategies that campus leaders can deploy when seeking to stem excessive drinking. The measures include alcohol bans at fraternity houses, campus-safety plans, sobriety programs, social-media campaigns, and training students and employees to prevent sexual assault. The guide includes tips on policing, enforcement, punishment, and containment, as well as appeals to respect and honor. But what it doesn’t do is directly address the issue of how dangerous behaviors may stem from warped male-identity formation.
That’s not surprising, says Mr. Edwards: “I think the reason we don’t see college presidents coming out and talking about issues of masculinity, even when they’re disbanding their entire fraternity system, is that they’re worried about how that is going to play in the media, and with political folks, saying, ‘You’re just male-bashing.’ "
Or, on the other side, coddling.
But sound reasoning drives masculinity programming, says Mr. Robbins, of Stony Brook. “Obviously,” he says, “this kind of work will help the men. They’ll be better off if they can look inside and understand some of the consequences of this negative behavior, and frame it in a way that makes sense to them.” But beyond that, campuses become improved places for learning and living. “You devote resources,” he says, “because you need a result for the sake of everybody on campus.”
