President Obama’s offering of himself as the commencement speaker for Barnard College, the venerable women’s college affiliated with Columbia, the president’s alma mater, has, as the Daily Beast reports, sparked a war among women.
It seems that the president has repeatedly rejected offers to speak at Columbia, and his reaching out to Barnard, where he undoubtedly hoped to push the notion that Republicans hate women, has engendered some hate on campus:
At first, some of the sniping was understandable. …But then commenters started attacking Barnard, Columbia’s all-women’s sister school across the street, and accusing its students of academic inferiority and much, much worse. Using terms like “feminazis” and calling Barnard “Barnyard,” commenters said the school was just a back door to Columbia, and its students deserved neither Obama as a speaker nor affiliation with the university as a whole.
What was perhaps the most troubling to [graduating senior Mary] Faherty and others was that many of the nastiest comments came from women themselves. “Try using your Daddy's hard-earned cash in a respectable way if you want to be an ACTUAL role model for Women,” wrote one female Columbia student. “Unlike Barnyard financial leeches, I have NO intention of pursuing a Mrs. Degree. I came here to make myself successful, not try to plead at the knees of a Columbia boy to marry her.”
I won’t pretend that I didn’t hear some blue language back in the day, when I was in college, but the vitriol and bad language being tossed about by these young women who are being so expensively educated is depressing.
I can’t quote the really bad posts, but I can’t help thinking that this is the post-Vagina Monologues generation of college students–and it shows. Needless to say, Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author quoted in the article, blames Rush Limbaugh, undoubtedly being listened to at this very moment by every Columbia and Barnard undergrad.
The report concludes:
The events of the week, Faherty says, left her feeling personally attacked in a way she had never felt before. But, she adds, “what I really felt the most was that it was the first time in my life I felt my need to defend my place as a woman, here or in the world. My generation has grown up not having to do that. It was scary as a realization to see that equality was still not there.”
Wrong lesson, Ms. Faherty.
You do not need to “defend your place as a woman,” you need to get the heck out of that atmosphere of Ivy League vulgarity.