Bad press

The media once supported Mary Daly, but it's not 1969 anymore. As the controversial scholar fights what may be her final battle with Boston College, most reporters are parroting the Jesuits' party line.

Education by Michael Bronski

As Mary Daly wages her latest battle with Boston College over her right to teach all-female classes, the message from most of the media is clear: the woman may be well-intentioned, but any reasonable, fair-minded person would agree that she's wrong. Certainly that's the way the college is spinning it. "We just fear it is dangerous to condone intolerance," BC spokesman Jack Dunn said in August, affecting an air of exasperated hauteur. "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 a harder case, but it's the same issue. It's fairness. It's accessibility."

It all sounds so evenhanded. But anyone who buys this line, as most journalists have done, is forgetting a few things. How far the popular definition of what's "reasonable" has drifted to the right since Daly began her career, for one. The way academic freedom has dwindled while mainstream attitudes toward feminism have degenerated from respect to ridicule. And the way Boston College has mistreated Mary Daly, not just during the latest controversy, but for more than three decades.

Daly has taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College since 1966, and she's been at war with its administration virtually from the start. In the winter of the 1968-'69 school year, the feminist scholar, then an assistant professor of religion and theology, was given a one-year terminal contract. In other words, she was fired. It was no great surprise, even though Daly was a popular teacher who held doctorates in religion, philosophy, and theology. She was also the author of the highly acclaimed The Church and the Second Sex, which focused on what she called the misogyny of the Roman Catholic Church -- and that, as she recounts in her autobiography, Outercourse, did not make the conservative administration happy.

But these were the late '60s, when Vatican II was a fresh memory and students were demanding a voice in how their universities were run. Fifteen hundred students staged a protest in her support. The administration was then presented with a petition, signed by 2500 students, demanding academic freedom at Boston College and tenure for Daly. These students were all male, remember -- BC did not admit women until 1970. Yet these young men passionately believed that if Boston College was to be taken seriously, it must value freedom of thought over church doctrine, and free inquiry over church politics. Even more important for Daly, the national media covered her rebellion against the church and academic hierarchies with sympathy and intelligence. Commonweal, a magazine run by lay Catholics, wrote that "no one, not even the administration, has denied Dr. Daly's qualifications as a teacher or writer. . . . Many students feel that most of their theology courses are irrelevant and poorly taught. Dr. Daly's courses were to many students a happy exception." The Boston Globe's news coverage of the controversy noted respectfully that "Dr. Daly is generally considered a liberal and exponent of `modern catholicism' and her dismissal is interpreted by many students as the rejection of that position by the department." Nothing happened that summer, but in September Daly was promoted to associate professor and given tenure.

Daly's tenure secured her job, but her male Jesuit bosses maintained a steady stream of harassment. After being turned down for a promotion to full professor in 1975, she writes in her autobiography, she was told that she had "made no significant contribution to the field" -- even though her 1973 book Beyond God the Father was a required text in universities and seminaries across the country. In 1982 Daly was informed that comments she made in a public speech while on an unpaid leave of absence from BC "amply fulfill the definition of blasphemy" and may "constitute a violation of contractual obligations she still retains toward this University." The administration sent monitors to her classes and questioned her on her lectures, but when it became clear that Daly's speech had been misreported, the school backed down.

This isn't the first time the issue of single-sex classes has come up, either. Daly taught mixed-sex classes in the first years after BC went coed, but after a few classes in which only women enrolled, she realized that the presence of men had been disruptive and the all-women classes were far more productive for her and the students. Although college regulations now called for coed classes, she decided that she would teach male students only in private tutorials. The administration attempted several times to force her to change her policy or retire, but they eventually entered into an uneasy truce that left her women-only classes intact.

Daly has yet to win that promotion to full professor, even though she is a founding figure in feminist studies who has published seven books and has invented new language to think about feminism and theology. According to her attorney, Gretchen Van Ness, her salary after more than three decades at BC is just $43,275. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reports that average salaries at Boston College are $98,900 for a full professor, $68,400 for an associate professor, $58,600 for an assistant professor, and $42,000 for an instructor. (By comparison, according to the AAUP, full professors at Harvard earn approximately $116,000 per year; at Babson College, about $97,000; and at the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis, about $75,000. Assistant professors earn about $60,000 at Harvard and Babson, $50,000 at UMass, and $45,000 at Brandeis.) The bottom line is that BC values neither Daly nor her work.

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The most recent crisis was precipitated in September 1998, when a student named Duane Naquin tried to enroll in Daly's Feminist Ethics course and was denied. (It should be noted that Naquin hadn't fulfilled the prerequisites for the class.) Naquin brought a complaint of discrimination to the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) in Washington, DC, a nonprofit public-interest law firm with a mission to "reimpose constitutional limits on a meddlesome, interest-group-infested government." As an example of the kind of project CIR typically takes on, a year and a half ago it spearheaded a successful attack on affirmative action at the University of Texas. And the group's views on feminism are clear. A piece titled "Against Radical Feminism" in the November 24, 1998, issue of the CIR newsletter stated: "CIR has for some time fought the radical feminist project of subordinating individual rights and constitutional norms (such as due process and freedom of speech) to ideological dictates. In 1999 and beyond, CIR will devote increased energy and resources to this fight."

Without consulting Daly, representatives of Boston College negotiated with CIR to avert a lawsuit. After a series of meetings in January, Daly and Boston College administrators attempted to reach a compromise, and on January 18, Daly was informed that she would have to allow Naquin in her class or sign a prepared resignation form. She refused to do either but said she would consider taking a leave of absence. On February 6, she received, and immediately signed, her yearly letter of employment (an amendment to her tenure contract), giving her a $650 raise and the right to teach during the 1999 fall semester. Boston College claims that Daly's leave of absence was conditional on her resignation and that she made an "oral agreement" on January 18 to step down. Furthermore, BC insists that this "oral agreement" -- which Daly denies having made -- supersedes her signed contract of February 6. Daly has filed a breach-of-tenure suit against BC; the court date is next August. Middlesex Superior Court judge Martha B. Sosman ruled last month that Boston College "had adequate cause to terminate" Daly if she refused to admit men to her classes, but BC is sticking to its "voluntary retirement" story. That way, the school avoids all questions of due process or breach of contract.

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For the time being Daly is out of BC and out of a job. But after 30 years of fighting, how did Boston College win now? It may well be the hostile press coverage, and the social changes it reflects, that has turned the tide. Whereas reporters portrayed Daly favorably during her 1970 tenure fight, they heap ridicule on her now. The Globe's Adrian Walker, for instance, called her an "intellectual crackpot." Many stories noted, with barely suppressed glee, that Daly was known to coin new words (or, as Bay Windows' Beth Berlo put it, "to speak in her own tongue"), and gave examples such as "academentia" and "phallocracy." The implication, of course, is that this is laughable and renders her ideas unintelligible. Yet almost all philosophers, theologians, scientists, and psychologists who articulate new ways to view the world come up with new language to express their ideas. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Russell, Paul Tillich, and Ayn Rand are just some of the respected thinkers who challenged prevailing modes of thought with words of their own invention.

The way the press dealt with Daly's desire for women-only classroom space was similarly biased. Newspapers and magazines approached this issue as though we'd all moved beyond the idea of same-sex education. "How odd that this fire-breathing feminist assumes any man would inevitably dominate the classroom, that students and professor alike are helpless before the awesome power of testosterone to compel feminine deference," wrote Katha Pollitt in the Nation. No one mentioned the large body of educational research showing that women learn better in single-sex classes. (Two major studies published in the past three years support this conclusion, 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.) Single-sex classes may not be proper or feasible at Boston College, but the idea is hardly ridiculous.

No matter how one feels about Daly or her all-female classes, it is important to recognize how popular perceptions of her situation have been shaped by the general backlash against feminism, gay rights, and affirmative action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, writers such as Kate Millett and Robin Morgan were taken seriously by the press. Now, neo-con feminists such as Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Katie Roiphe -- women more likely to defend patriarchy than to overthrow it -- are media darlings. In this context, Daly's influential theories and ideas are easily dismissed (in a column in the Boston Herald, Rita Colorito actually wrote that Daly's brain had "atrophied"), and her creation of an alternative feminist vocabulary is mocked as a sign of lunacy. The mainstream and even the gay media have swung so far to the right that standards of "fairness" and "balance" are completely off-balance.

But the declining stock of feminism is not the only social change that hurts Daly. The very notion of academic freedom -- so central to the social change of the 1960s -- has come under attack. This is particularly true in Catholic institutions, which during the postwar period fought for independence from the Church to combat the perception that they provided a narrow, close-minded education. As the New York Times reported in February, a committee of American bishops issued rules last November -- in response to a Vatican mandate -- to make Catholic universities and colleges more answerable to the Catholic Church. The bishops proposed, among other things, that all university presidents be "faithful Catholics" and take an "oath of fidelity" to the Church; that the majority of faculty positions be filled by "faithful Catholics"; and that all theology professors be approved by Church officials. Goodbye academic freedom, goodbye free inquiry, goodbye Mary Daly.

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Instead of exploring this social context, however, the media have for the most part parroted Boston College's line that Daly had to go because her desire to teach all-women classes was "unfair." By pounding home the idea of "fairness," both BC and the press look reasonable and open-minded. But this way of framing the issue is misleading and false. Given the position of women in the Catholic Church and American culture, Daly's desire to teach women-only classes is not, as BC would have people believe, analogous to a white teacher's trying to exclude black students. It's more like a black teacher's excluding white students. That, of course, is a much more complicated issue; a spirited debate is in fact going on right now about the usefulness (and existence) of all-black grammar and high schools in New York City.

What's more, the focus on "fairness" and "tolerance" seems rather selective when one considers the way BC tailors its student services to meet the needs of heterosexual observant Catholics at the expense of everyone else. Articles about the Daly controversy never mention that Boston College has, for 29 years, refused to acknowledge, fund, or grant official status or space to a gay and lesbian student group. Nor has it put into place any emotional, psychological, or medical support services for queer students. Is that fair?

The media also never mention that Boston College's health service will not dispense condoms or supply information on safe sex or birth control, other than endorsing abstinence. Is that fair?

And what about the institution of which BC is part -- the Catholic Church itself? The Jesuits who run Boston College have many other schools, called seminaries, that are predicated on excluding women, whom the Church does not allow to serve as priests. This kind of unfairness, of course, is why Daly wrote The Church and the Second Sex in the first place -- to effect positive change in an institution that treats women as second-class citizens.

Boston College, as a private institution, can make whatever rules it chooses. And as a religious institution, it is exempt from anti-discrimination laws by which public institutions have to abide. But this does not mean that the school's administration is fair to women, queers, or even -- maybe especially -- independent thinkers. When the Center for Individual Rights and the Vatican set the media's standards for fairness, that may be hard to remember.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin's Press). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.