By Charlotte Allen

It's a well-known fact that there's a severe gender imbalance in undergraduate college populations: about 57 percent of undergrads these days are female and only 43 percent male, the culmination of a trend over the past few decades in which significantly fewer young men than young women either graduate from high school or enroll in college. It's also a well-known fact---at least among college admissions officers---that many private institutions have tried to close the gender gap by quietly relaxing admissions standards for male applicants, essentially practicing affirmative action for young men. What they're doing is perfectly legal, even under Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination by institutions of higher learning receiving federal funds. Title IX contains an exemption that specifically allows private colleges that aren't professional or technical institutions to prefer one sex over the other in undergraduate admissions. Militant feminists and principled opponents of affirmative action might complain about the discrimination against women that Title IX permits, but for many second- and third-tier liberal arts colleges lacking male educational magnets such as engineering and business programs, the exemption may be a lifesaver, preventing those smaller and less prestigious schools from turning into de facto women's colleges that few young people of either sex might want to attend.

Now, however, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has decided to turn over this rock carefully set in place by admissions committees. The commission launched an investigation last fall into the extent of male preferences in admissions decisions at 19 various institutions of higher learning. These include public universities (where such preferences are illegal under Title IX); elite private institutions such as Georgetown and Johns Hopkins; smaller liberal arts schools (Gettysburg College, with 2,600 undergraduates, is on the list); religious schools (the Jesuit-run University of Richmond and Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.); and historically black Virginia Union University, also in Richmond. On May 14 the commission's general counsel, David P. Blackwood, announced that four of the 19 schools--Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Gettysburg, and Messiah---had raised legal issues concerning compliance with the commission's subpoenas, and that Virginia Union, while responding politely, had not complied in any way. Blackwood said that the commission might have to ask the Justice Department for help in obtaining admissions data from Virginia Union.

Joanne Creighton, President of Mt. Holyoke College, makes several worthy points on the behalf of women's colleges in The Boston Globe today, but her case for the knowledge they convey is rather bizarrely ordered.

Consider the admirable facts that she could cite first:

1. Mt. Holyoke has produced, in the last forty years, more graduates that went on to earn doctorates in the life and physical sciences than any other liberal arts college in the country.

2. Women's colleges enroll larger numbers of low-income students than peer gender-mixed institutions.

3. Graduates of women's colleges include such estimable figures as Nancy Pelosi, Elaine Chao, and Madeline Albright.

Yet, before all of this, her first argument on these colleges' behalf is:

Graduates are more able to see gender-repression when they encounter it and to distinguish between personal and systemic barriers to success.

A sophisticated grasp of gender repression? So that's how Mt. Holyoke grads get into Physics PhD programs? And I had always imagined that they key was a sophisticated grasp of thermodynamics. Where does that factor in, President Creighton. Lower?