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  • 2018-05-01 (xsd:date)
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  • Do 'Liberals' at the University of Texas Want to Designate Masculinity a Mental Illness? (en)
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  • The plans and utterances of academics are a longstanding source of outrage for some right-wing and libertarian commentators in the United States, who often see college campuses as hotbeds of political correctness and the corrosion of traditional values. One related episode took place in the spring of 2018, when an initiative by the University of Texas (UT) prompted claims that liberals at that school were calling for masculinity to be designated as a mental illness. For example, the Constitution.com web site wrote: The conservative PJ Media web site similarly reported that the program amounted to treating masculinity as if it were a mental health crisis, and the popular morning television show Fox & Friends claimed UT was now treating masculinity as a mental health issue: In reality, nobody at the university's Counselling and Mental Health Center, liberal or otherwise, called for masculinity to be designated a mental illness or treated as a mental health issue. That characterization of the new program came from the Fox & Friends TV program and the PJ Media web site, not from those behind the initiative itself. The emphasis on mental health in all three reports appeared to stem from no more than the fact that it was the Counselling and Mental Health Center that was behind the program. In response to these misleading and sensationalist reports, the Counselling and Mental Health Center at UT took the step of directly refuting the mental health issue claim in a statement posted on the school's web site: Based on the promotional material and information on the MasculinUT web site, the closest the program's designers came to treating masculinity as a mental health issue was one section which listed emotional and mental health problems as one of four or five possible negative consequences of espousing very restrictive aspects of masculinity: The MasculinUT program's web material described restrictive masculinity, a target of particular scorn for critics of the program, in the following way: Since 2015, MasculinUT has been run by Voices Against Violence, an initiative overseen by the Counselling and Mental Health Center at UT, which produces programming to prevent and respond to interpersonal violence, including sexual assault. The program appears to have come to prominence in April 2018, because of the launch of a new MasculinUT poster campaign, and because the University of Texas began advertising the position of healthy masculinities coordinator at that time. In its article, PJ Media claimed that UT did not respond to a request for comment to clarify. However, a spokesperson for the university rejected this, telling us by email that the university had agreed to an interview about the program before PJ Media cancelled it. (en)
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