Deborah K. Lambert

Keep Your Daughters in School?

Okay, the fun’s over. This year’s "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" was a massive yawn. Even the normally pro-feminista Washington Post said in a front-page piece that "a growing number of educators have soured on the annual event, and some schools have written to parents, asking them not to participate."

It’s not that teachers and administrators are opposed to girls learning about their parents’ careers. According to Patricia Chamberlin, assistant development director of DC’s Maret School, they would simply "prefer that those visits take place on a school holiday."

Faced with the prospect of assigning make-up tests and homework for absent females, school districts throughout the country are also taking a dim view of this annual excursion. However, the Ms. Foundation, sponsors of the six-year-old event, laments that the symbolism of girls staying out of school would be diminished if they went to their parents’ workplace anytime they felt like it. And, as Ms. Foundation President Marie Wilson points out, "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" has far more value than other less educational activities sanctioned by some states, like taking boys "out of school for a couple of weeks to go hunting."

Healthy, Wealthy, & Wise

Feeling under the weather these days? Maybe you should go back to school. A new survey by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) found that college grads felt good an average of 26 days a month, while high school dropouts felt up to par only 23.8 days a month.

Of the 431,996 people surveyed, Insight magazine said that college grad\residents of South Dakota topped the health and happiness scale with 28 good days per month while the same group in Kentucky scored only 23.8 upbeat days.

Researchers attributed the difference in scores to the fact that college educated respondents paid more attention to their health and also had better jobs with greater earning potential.

Is 60 Minutes Homophobic?

CBS’s Mike Wallace recently ventured onto unfamiliar turf by devoting a segment of 60 Minutes to a discussion of courses offered by college and university gay and lesbian studies departments. After flashing the "mature audiences only" warning on screen, Wallace launched into his report on courses about S&M relationships, lesbian sex, and masturbation. He also spoke to an historian who stated that Abraham Lincoln had a gay relationship before he got married.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the gay community was incensed by the 60 Minutes segment, especially the Internet set, many of whom called the segment "sensationalistic, banal, and homophobic."

Political science lecturer Steve Sanders viewed it as a "selective hatchet job," saying it didn’t mention anything about the less titillating subjects in the field, such as the course he teaches on gay politics.

Mr. Sanders, an assistant to the chancellor at Indiana University, also blasted the show’s parental warning, saying that there had been no such warning when Kathleen Willey appeared on the program the week before, "talking about putting her hand on the President’s genitals."

60 Minutes spokesman Kevin Tedesco took exception, calling the segment "fair and accurate."

School Choice for Gays?

Teacher Nadine Maurizio recently got a shock when she discovered that her assignment at an alternative high school for homosexual students wasn’t going to happen.

In a mixup that angered gay activists and stunned parents, the administrators of a school district in Long Island, New York had to step in and quash rumors, which had been circulating for a couple of months, about a new school for gay and lesbian high schoolers—the first of its kind on Long Island.

"I couldn’t care less if the Pope said it was true, it ain’t true," said school board president Bruce Brodsky, who explained that the subject hadn’t even been discussed by the board. "To say we have a school for gay and lesbian kids is absurd," he said.

How this controversy erupted in the first place is still far from settled.

David Kilmnick, executive director of the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth, Inc., in Bay Shore, said he’d been meeting with school administrators for months, and even claimed to have gotten the go-ahead from School Superintendent Ed Milliken. Superintendent Milliken vehemently denies approving the concept, arguing that the proposal was totally unauthorized.

Milliken did recall that Galvin suggested establishing a school program for gay and lesbian youths, but says he responded that "enrollment at our alternative schools was not based on sexual orientation."

Some who looked forward to attending the new school may drop out altogether, saying they’ve been harassed at school after proclaiming their homosexuality to their peers.

Kevin Colpoys, a superintendent of the nearby Huntington school district, said: "If we’re teaching tolerance and learning to live together, then I would ask why anyone would want to isolate themselves?"

R.I.P. Your Parents

Nicholas Christenfeld of the University of California-San Diego, might very well control the academic graveyard shift, now that the results are in from his tombstone study.

Christenfeld recently told Reuters that, according to his graveyard survey, men with positive initials, such as V.I.P., W.O.W., J.O.Y., or W.I.N., lived an average of 4.48 years longer than a control group with indifferent initials. On the other hand, the people with negative-sounding initials like P.I.G., U.G.H., and D.I.E., died 2.8 years earlier than the group with the meaningless initials.

Christenfeld took his work seriously. He studied 2,287 examples of negative initials and 1,200 examples of positive initials to reach this conclusion.

"It now appears, rather suprisingly, that the names our parents give us also alter the cause and time of death," said Christenfeld. "People are usually pretty careful not to name their kid, ‘Knucklehead,’ but I guess it’s less easy for parents to notice what’s going on with the initials."

Striking Diversity

When Bob Ferrando, associate admissions director at the University of California-Davis, saw a male colleague wearing a skirt, his immediate reaction was: "Take it off."

Jerry Griffin, a school admissions counselor who works for Mr. Ferrando, did as he was told, but not without getting his Scottish dander up. After all, it was April 6th, National Tartan Day, which celebrated the signing of a Scottish sovereignty document in the year 1320 that later influenced our Declaration of Independence (Remember Braveheart?). Griffin was wearing the blue, black and green kilt of Clan Donald, the largest and most powerful of the Scottish highland clans.

Bob Ferrando told the Sacramento Bee newspaper that since it was also Welcome Week at UC-Davis, he thought that it set the wrong tone for incoming students and their parents to see a man wearing a skirt on campus.

What was Mr. Griffin’s response? Since the school dress code only prohibited offensive T-shirts or cutoffs, the deeper issue was that European diversity was not welcomed as much as other types of diversity. After he alerted the media to the situation and posted it on the Internet, the school chancellor called Mr. Griffin’s dilemma "very unfortunate."

But that’s not enough for Mr. Griffin, who said he’s not looking for blood, but he would like an apology from the university to compensate for the violation of his civil rights.

In the meantime, The Washington Times reports that the local branch of Clan MacLean offered to "station naked, blue-painted soldiers—a custom highlighted in battle scenes from Braveheart—in front of the campus admissions building as a lesson to the university."

Endnotes

The influence of the headline-grabbing Paula Jones sexual harrassment suit against President Clinton apparently grabbed the attention of college administrators.

From the UMass-Lowell Mathematical Sciences Newsletter of April 2nd comes word of a recent meeting during which people were notified that "starting next semester all faculty and staff will be required to attend sexual harassment prevention training sessions."

We were told that "if anyone is named in a sexual harassment lawsuit and has not attended one of these sessions, they will not get legal representation from the university."