Gender Segregated Saudi Program Criticized At Va. Tech

http://www.clickondetroit.com/education/4849876/detail.html ^

[lunarbicep]

UPDATED: 9:33 am EDT August 14, 2005

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Virginia Tech professors are complaining that their university is discriminating against women by allowing gender-segregated classes for visiting Saudi Arabian faculty members.

Eloise Coupey, an associate professor of marketing at Tech, filed a complaint with the school's equal opportunity office on Tuesday. The complaint alleges the single-sex classes offered to faculty from King Abdulaziz University created a hostile environment for women.

Coupey said in an interview that the segregated classes indicate to her that Virginia Tech "doesn't place a strong enough value on women's rights."

Several faculty members are unhappy with Tech's decision to offer separate summer classes for about 30 male and 30 female King Abdulaziz faculty members, in keeping with the preferences of the Saudi university.

Virginia Tech received $246,000 from the Saudi school to design and operate the program.

Saudi faculty members said that they were separating by choice, not by force.

The classes are continuing, but the course segregation is now optional.

[cajungirl]

Sort of blows me away that the feminists haven't taken on the Islamic fundamentalists on sharia and the impact on women.

They sure fight the Christians alot. But somehow the Muslims are off limits.

[ClearBlueSky]

Next they'll be papering the windows so no one can see the women. Oh...where are the Islamapologists and their ' they just want to be like us, that's why they came to America!'?

What other 'religion' gets to alter the educational system of a SECULAR college this way?
Can we say--creeping incrementalism?

[ClearBlueSky]

Feminists don't oppose Islam on its treatment of women because most feminists are biologically disordered to hate everything about women. They hate BEING women, want to be more male, yet they hate men too. How warped is that?
But how can they oppose a religion where everything beautiful about femininity is covered up and negated? It's a self-hatred thing- and Islam is THE textbook cult for self-hatred and hatred of everything else too.

[TheForceOfOne]

Virginia Tech professors need to wake up and smell the coffee, Arabs and/or Islamists could give a damn what some Infidel thinks. The agenda is to destroy us and replace our way of life with theirs.

There isn't a middle ground and their use our schools doesn't change anything, just an illusion by liberal academia that they have achieve some great measure of global diversity, idiots.

[Virginia Queen]

True. And you know what? I am surprised the men have not been demonstrating in the streets to bring this practice to an end. Course we all know they don't really care about having women on their teams, but they most assuredly would enjoy the shared, coed showers.

[closet freeper]

I'd be interested in hearing these professors' thoughts on the legality of and/or message sent by the existence of women's colleges, like the one I attended. While I was there any suggestion of opening admission to men was met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Interesting double standard.

[ReignOfError]

This "gender segregation" is ridiculous, and violates the "separate but equal" ruling of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

I don't know how much of this was sarcasm, but I'll treat it as serious. Brown did not strike down the notion of "separate but equal" across the board -- it held that separate schools based on race were inherently unequal, that "separate but equal" was impossible when one group was clearly treated as second-class citizens.

No such ruling has applied to sports teams or restrooms. As far as standing precedent goes, as far as I know, "separate but equal" still satisfies the 14th Amendment outside the narrow issue of public schools segregated by race (other public accommodations were desegregated by the Civil Rights Act, not by SCOTUS).

On the gender-segregated classes, I doubt that there's any need to appeal to the U.S. Constitution -- surely this runs afoul of state law and university policy. If not, then you could make a similar argument to that in Brown -- when a professor from a country that doesn't allow women to vote, hold jobs or drive insists on delivering separate lectures to women and men, there is a rebuttable presumption that he's not bringing his A game to the women's lectures.

[CivilWarguy]

Reign, I'm quite aware that the Supreme Court has not struck down "separate but equal" across the board, and more specifically gender-separate school sports teams. While the Supreme Court in Brown made (in essence) a factual finding that racially separate schools were inherently "unequal", I don't think many scholars, then and now, took the Brown Court's musings on sociology seriously. The Brown court was eager to strike down racially segregated public schools, but realized that if they struck them down on the open basis that segregation is unconstitutional, that principal applied to more popular practices like "boys" or "girls" schools would not be accepted by the public. The Brown opinion, if not the result, was an intellectual sham. And in subsequent cases the Supreme Court has abandoned that sham, to more directly articulate the principal that segregation, at least segregation the members of the court disapprove of, is unconstitutional. I'm merely applying the unarticulated premise behind the Brown decision, and the articulated premise of subsequent decisions, to gender segregated classes and public schools.