How do you effectively tell a young man that his behavior on campus won’t be tolerated, and yet convince him that he can do a lot better?
Strategically, and empathetically, recommend campus officials with experience in employing a “masculinity studies” approach. The goal is to get disruptive male students to look at the cultural and developmental bases of their behavior.
“When you take a gendered approach, it results in good things happening,” says Jason A. Laker, a professor of counselor education at San Jose State University, where he was formerly vice president for student affairs. A founder of the Men and Masculinities Knowledge Community at NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, he has long urged colleagues to study not only how students of varied racial, ethnic, income, and gender categories succeed or fail, but also why male students struggle.
He describes an approach he developed early in his days in student-affairs administration, when a young man would turn up for a conduct hearing.
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.
“First, I spend five to 10 minutes just getting to know him,” says Mr. Laker. “And then I say: ‘We have business.’ That phrasing is intentional, rhetorical. I say, ‘I have this report,’ and I read it out loud; I don’t inflect. It describes how he called a security guard ‘a bitch,’ or whatever.
“He’s squirming a little, but I’m not shaming him; I’m just reading it.
“Then I do the dumb face, and say: ‘Can I ask you a question?’ (Guys who are steeped in that masculinity script like to be asked questions.) I say, ‘Can I be candid?’ (That’s co-conspiratorial; this is all intentional.) And I point to the report, and say, ‘I’ve gotten to know you for just five or 10 minutes, and you seem like an interesting guy, a nice guy; but the guy in this report seems like an asshole. Help me understand the difference.’
“And first they respond, ‘Well, I was just stupid.’ And I say: ‘No, I won’t accept that answer; I’ve just noticed, talking to you, that you’re not stupid; so what’s really going on?’
“Then they say something like — this happened a lot — ‘I’m kind of shy, and when I drink I loosen up, and I tell jokes and people think I’m funny, and want to hang out.’
“I have a counseling background, so I look them right in the eye and say: ‘Can you tell me when you first decided you’re not worth being around unless you’re drunk?’
“And they’d start crying.”
The door was then open, he says, to helping a student understand the shortcomings of adherence to such characteristic “guy culture” notions as “it’s cool to be transgressive.”
That kind of approach can also help influence behavior in, for example, fraternities and sports teams, says Joseph Boehman, dean of Richmond College, which is the University of Richmond’s historically all-male division, now with about 1,400 students. He says he always asks, during presentations at fraternities, “What are your organizational values, and are you living into those?” That approach has traction because plenty of fraternity members care about their organizational branding.
What I find, working with a lot of young men, is that many are looking for direction, and mentorship, and a set of values that they can live into.
And that, he says, helps initiate “conversations about ‘how do you really want to be men?’ I say, ‘You can still have fun and party, but when you do that, are you doing it in ways that are harmful to others?’”
The good news, he says, is “you don’t need a ton of money for this programming. You might just need a little money for pizzas and T-shirts with a message on them, to get the ball rolling.”
Then, the response is often rapid, he says, again echoing colleagues at other campuses: “What I find, working with a lot of young men, is that many are looking for direction, and mentorship, and a set of values that they can live into.”
Helping them find those can require challenging students’ beliefs about manhood, he says. “One first-year student said to me, ‘I’m not sure I buy into your brainwashing,’” and I said, ‘You’ve actually been brainwashed for 18 years; I’m just trying to provide another narrative.’”
Crucial, says Mr. Boehman, is to “build cadres with other individuals who might connect better with some guys than I will.”
The approach he advocates echoes interventions that are gaining some attention in American society more broadly, through the likes of the activist Tony Porter, with his A Call to Men campaign, and the “Be A Man” motivational lectures of Joe Ehrmann, a former National Football League player. Also current, of course, is the sudden broad attention to abusive behaviors by powerful men in politics, entertainment, sports, religion, education, and other walks of life.
Mr. Boehman allows that some will find the language used in masculinity campaigns to be cringeworthy. But he says the stakes are high: “If we don’t start to talk with our men about toxic masculinity and try to offer them alternatives, we’re going to continue to see problems of misogyny and racism and homophobia.”
One sign of greater acceptance of “masculinity work,” says Mr. Laker, is that it is increasingly not solely a male domain of research and programming. For example, Rachel Wagner, an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at Clemson University, has argued in scholarly articles that working on such issues is a feminist act because studies have shown “the correlation between college men’s problematic behavior and adherence to gender-role traditionalism.” Taking stock of gender formation, she writes, advances the acceptance of diverse populations on campuses.
