Mary Daly vs. Boston College

So for the time being Daly is out of BC and out of a job. There are several reasons for Daly’s—possibly temporary—fall from academic grace. While these are all reflected in the press coverage of the incident, it is perhaps the hostility and unfairness of the media reporting—so important in her winning her 1970 tenure fight—that has turned the tide against her now.

The most obvious example of this is the media’s insistent portrayal of Daly’s writing and pedagogy as being not so much extreme as crackpot. Most news outlets noted, with barely suppressed glee, that Daly was noted for coining new words (or as a local paper stated it snidely "to speak in her own tongue") and gave examples such as "gynecology," "academentia," and "phallocracy." The implication was that such activity was laughable or rendered her ideas unintelligible. Yet the reality is that almost all philosophers, theologians, scientists and psychologists who articulate new ways to view the world originate new language. Marx, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Russell, Paul Tillich, Ayn Rand all challenged prevailing modes of thought with new words and language yet Daly’s use of such a tactic is simply ridiculed. The reporting and editorializing about Daly’s desire for "women’s only" classroom space was as biased. Almost universally, the idea of same-sex classes is considered drastic and outlandish (if not dangerous) yet there is a large body of educational research that shows that women do learn better in single-sex classes. Two major studies published in the last three years demonstrated that college women did better in single-sex classes and a new book Taking Women Seriously: Lessons and Legacies for Educating the Majority, edited by Elizabeth Tidball, draws on these studies and others to prove the same point. None of these studies were ever mentioned in the news reporting on Daly’s pedagogy or battle with BC. Single-sex classes may not be proper, or feasible, at Boston College, but the media reporting on Daly presented only a highly biased context of her ideas on the topic.

This irresponsible and biased reporting is deeply injurious to Daly’s career and ideas, but more important it is indicative of how the mainstream media has swung so rightward that the standards of "fairness" are completely off-balance. No matter how one feels about Daly’s "women only" classroom space it is important to see her fight with Boston College in the much broader context of attacks on feminism, gay liberation, gay rights, affirmative action, and civil rights that is now occurring.

It is obvious that popular notions of feminism have changed drastically over the past three decades. In the late 1960s and early 1970s writers such as Kate Millett and Robin Morgan were taken seriously by the media. Their radical critiques, often criticized, were still aired and discussed. Now it is mostly neo-con feminists like Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Katie Rophie— more likely to defend patriarchy than try to overthrow it—who are media darlings.

But these are not the only social changes that affect Daly. The very notion of academic freedom—so central to the social change of the 1960s—has changed. This is particularly true of Catholic institutions. A New York Times article earlier this year (February 5,1999) detailed how a committee of American Bishops last November, responding to a Vatican mandate, issued norms and rules to make Catholic Universities and Colleges more answerable to the Church. This is a major change from the post-war period when Catholic educational institutions chaffed under the charge that they were narrow and closed-minded. Three of the stipulations the Bishops proposed were that all university presidents be "faithful Catholics" and take an "oath of fidelity" to the Church; that the majority of faculty positions be filled with "faithful Catholics;" and that all theology professors be approved by Church officials.

The Vatican’s insistence on orthodoxy dovetails perfectly with CIR’s attack on Daly’s feminism, and both are in line with a broader range of conservative trends. For the most part the press has capitulated to the reigning conservative Zeitgeist. There was little attempt to place Daly and her predicament in a critical, broader historical context of changing attitudes about feminism, academic freedom, or the Vatican crackdown on Catholic universities. Most of the media parroted Boston College’s line that Daly had to go because her desire to teach all-women classes was "unfair."

Jack Dunn, Boston College’s spokesperson, grabbed the high moral ground in the media coverage with an air of exasperated hauteur, "We just fear it is dangerous to condone intolerance. You can’t just make an exception for discrimination or intolerance. It’s a slippery slope, it’s dangerous ground and we refuse to do it. If this were a white professor saying ‘I don’t want black students in my classroom,’ obviously we’d take the same position. This [is]...the same issue. It’s fairness. It’s accessibility."

This discourse of "fairness" is fake and corrupt, isolating Daly from a broader framework of "fairness" simply to penalize her. This skewed logic is most evident in the constant replay of BC’s proffering of the racial analogy of a white teacher and black students. The correct analogy—whether you agree with Daly or not—is a black teacher excluding white students from the classroom. That, of course, is a more complicated example, given the current spirited debate about the usefulness (and existence) of all black grammar and high schools in New York City. Framing the question this way might actually encourage debate and thinking.