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Megan Thiele Strong is a sociology professor at San José State University and a 2023-24 public voices fellow at the The OpEd Project. This column was first published by the Chicago Tribune.
Another football star has gone viral for his actions off the field. In the media, many people are railing against Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker for his comments in a spring college commencement address. In short, he rails against diversity, equity and inclusion and the LGBTQ+ community and advocates for traditional gender roles for women post-college.
That Butker has these beliefs is not surprising. Butker’s points, which devalue categories of people as less than worthy compared with the categories he falls under — straight, white and male — are in line with conservative talking points. Anti-DEI advocates have made significant gains to keep anti-racist education out of mainstream society. Their efforts are paying off with educational gag orders and the elimination of DEI programs broadly gaining steam both on- and off-campus. And cisgender heterosexual men marginalizing the queer community is nothing new. And feminism, the idea that women are equal to men and should be treated as such, is still considered radical by many.
As a sociologist, I could examine the structural problems in the system, such as lack of sociological knowledge in K-12 schools, that lead men such as Butker into believing tired, uninformed and harmful rhetoric. Instead, I think it is more important that we move beyond the spectacle of Butker and seek clarity into the mechanisms at play at Benedictine College that allowed him to receive the platform as commencement speaker.
First, it is important to know that Benedictine College has a majority-female population, with women making up slightly more than 50 percent of the student body. Despite women’s significant presence on campus, the student body at Benedictine College reflects national and gendered patterns of undergraduate major sorting, with women vastly underrepresented in majors such as computer science and mechanical engineering and overrepresented in women-dominated fields such as nursing.
Second, there is a 53 percent four-year graduation rate, which jumps to 68 percent in six years. These figures also trend with national patterns of delayed time to degree. However, these figures emphasize a point. The culminating experience of commencement represents years of hard work.
Just as the male graduates did, the female graduates in the audience at commencement had spent four or more years sitting in classes, writing papers, intently listening to faculty members and generating student projects while envisioning their future. They did their jobs as students.
And the work they did to become college graduates was disregarded and rendered less-than at the exact point when they were set to celebrate these accomplishments. The allowance of this washing away of their education during such a peak honorary experience is what really needs to be understood and reviewed at the administrative level. From a sociological perspective, we should recognize critical moments that can have a disproportionate impact on the perpetuation of gender-based conditioning.
This microcosm of the university experience at Benedictine College showcases how sexism propels itself forward: Women in 2024 can do the work, show up and lean in, and the powers that be can allow those gains to be devalued by one man. Beyond focusing on Butker, we need change from the administrators who invited him. From perusal of the school’s site, for example, if I were considering sending my daughter to Benedictine College, it is not immediately apparent that the university intends for there to be different tracks, postgraduation, for students as far as gender is concerned.
For female graduates of Benedictine College, I wish there were a way for them to get their money back. There is no integrity to the bait-and-switch method employed by the administrators who arranged for a male athlete to sideswipe them at graduation.
