Sex and the Multiversity
David Clemens, Monterey Peninsula College

The rejection arrived on 29 November 2004. The University of California had denied transferability to my course English 10, "Literature By and About Men," finding "narrow focus" and "no comparable course in lower division" at any of U.C.'s nine campuses. But U.C.'s findings are so patently false and hypocritical that the rejection appears based on gender politics rather than on education.

Regarding "narrow focus," the course outline that U.C. analysts supposedly read either falsifies their own conclusion or exposes their unique and incomprehensible definition of "narrow." The catalog description for English 10 reads, "This survey explores multiple sources, enactments, and depictions of maleness, manhood, and masculinity in essays, films, short stories, and poetry either by men or about men." In addition,

• course materials represent a broad spectrum of authors (Japanese, Chinese, African American, European, European American, Jewish American, older and younger, gay and straight, ancient and modern, male and female);
• the reading/viewing/listening list includes works by Alison Lurie, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff Sommers, William Faulkner, Leonard Gardner, Robert Hayden, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, E. O. Wilson, Amy Clampitt, Ernest Hemingway, Kryzstof Kieslowski, George Will, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Larkin, James Dickey, Homer, Joan Didion, Seamus Heaney, Sam Shepard, Herodotus, Akira Kurosawa, Bob Greene, Harry Crews, Deborah Tannen, Leonard Michaels, Camille Paglia, Yimou Zhang, Isaac Clemens, Rick Reilly, Nikos Kazantzakis, Harvey Mansfield, and Debora Gregor;
• the course outline describes 16 lecture topics including theories of sex or gender difference, the nature of boyhood, the experience of fatherhood and the experience of sons, men and war, male codes, misandry and machismo, competition and teamwork, the man of letters, love and marriage, and manly aging, manly death.

Furthermore, the implied requirement for a "comparable" course at U.C. is questionable, a dodge used not to insure educational consistency but to restrict development of a curriculum perceived as unacceptable to U.C.'s prevailing orthodoxy. On 1 July 2004, I spoke by phone with Robert Holliday, Coordinator of Educational Policy at U.C. Berkeley. Without even seeing the course outline, he concluded that "Literature By and About Men" would certainly be transferable and that I did not have to establish course-to-course articulation since transferability is based on courses-in-kind. In his words, "U.C. offers literature surveys so a literature survey qualifies; U.C. does not offer auto tech so auto tech doesn't qualify."

Holliday's explanation must be correct given the variety of literature surveys U.C. accepts for lower division transfer but that's not the way U.C.'s analysts see it in this case. A survey of "literature by and about women" qualifies for transfer yet a course-in-kind concerning men does not, even one which originates in feminist theory. As stated in my Course Data Sheet:

I contend that feminism has usefully interrogated the categories of maleness and femaleness, yet while classes postulating a separate and distinct female experience proliferate, few, if any, classes specifically address and foreground the literary and cinematic presentation of maleness as a discrete and unique state of being. When men are treated academically, it is in terms of their public enactments, not in terms of their interior lives. English 10 not only expands student knowledge of literature and cinema but also their knowledge of experiences and states particular to males as well as the sources for those experiences and states . . . . English 10 creates a fruitful pairing with English 11, "Literature By and About Women," since experiencing otherness is beneficial to the development of virtuous tolerance.

While I don't question U.C.'s woeful admission that not even one campus offers a course in literature by and about men, U.C. does accept, for lower division transfer from community colleges, such English courses as "Images of Women in Western Literature" from Saddleback, "Contemporary Women Writers" from Santa Barbara, "Women Writers" from Foothill, "Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Multicultural Voices in Literature" from Diablo Valley, "Women in Literature" from Santa Rosa, "Images of Women in Literature" from Santa Monica, "Changing Images of Women in Literature" from Butte, "U.S. Women's Literature" and "Her Story: Women's Autobiographical Writing in Multicultural America" from Chabot, "Literature By Women" from Sierra, and "Literature By and About Women" from Shasta, among dozens of other clearly thematic literature surveys.

By what process can U.C. analysts find "Literature By and About Men" not comparable to "Literature By and About Women"? Apparently, U.C. sees comparability as defined only by gender, not by level or type of course, thereby applying a standard of gender discrimination that produces an inequitable, politicized curriculum and differential treatment based solely on sex.

NAS3:21 PM