Another Reason We Need Men in College

Buried in the back of my American Psychologist (the Journal of the American Psychological Association), in the comment section, there is a blurb from Vicky Phares and her colleagues at the University of South Florida. The blurb comments on a 1992 article entitled, "Where's Poppa? The Relative Lack of Attention to the Role of Fathers in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology." The authors did further studies and found that in the past thirteen years, fathers are still coming up short when it comes to being included in research studies in child and family research.

When dissertations were reviewed, it was found that fathers were neglected significantly in research that focused on developmental psychology and developmental psychopathology. Sixty percent of the dissertations explored mothers only, 30% studied "parents," and 10% explored fathers only. The authors note that few personal or professional characteristics distinguished between those graduate students who did and did not include fathers in their research. The only difference was that male graduate students were more likely to include fathers in their dissertation research.

Why is this important? Because the role of fathers in the development of their children is crucial in understanding adolescent pathology, particularly that of aggression. For example, I believe that fathers teach their children, particularly boys, about aggression and boundary issues during play. Fathers teach boys to wrestle and fight but also how to stop before they hurt someone. We need to explore the father-child dynamic, just as we need to understand what boys need in the classroom to prepare them to go out in the world with some degree of success. And who is going to do that if we do not have a male perspective in colleges and schools to tell us and guide us in helping boys?

Some of my commenters have stated (like Grim) that it is not important for men to go to college, or that they will find their own way regardless, and get high paying jobs in the technical world. ("Men are pretty good at sorting out problems. It's what we do.") I don't know why they think that, as most men don't have high-paying jobs in the technical world. We need men in higher education, though, for the same reasons that gender-diversity advocates have said we need women -- because we miss out on an important perspective without them.