Feminist Teacher Likely to Retire -- 02/26/1999

Feminist Teacher Likely to Retire

26 February, 1999

By Dorothea Cooke
CNS Managing Editor

(CNS) – A spokesman for Boston College has told CNS that radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly, who refused to allow two male students into her class, will retire from the Jesuit college.

Daly who teaches "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" refused recently to allow two male students to take the class. Daly said their presence would be "distracting and disruptive" to the female students.

"Right now Professor Daly is on a self-appointed leave and she has cancelled her classes because the university had insisted she admit male students into her class," said Jack Dunn, spokesman for Boston College. "Her classes are cancelled for the semester, therefore we view her as having broken her contractual obligation to teach so the likelihood is that the issue will be resolved by Mary's retiring."

Dunn continued by saying, "We are not going to acquiesce from our position that she admit male students because all the university's resources have to be available to all student regardless of gender and she apparently is choosing not to accommodate that request."

This isn't the first time Daly has objected to teaching male students.

Daly came to Boston College when it was still an all-male institution in 1966. When the school became coeducational in 1971 Daly had received tenure. However, in 1974 Professor Daly said she only wanted to teach women, said Dunn. But male students protested and the university supported them and Daly was forced to men and women in her classes.

"In many cases Ms. Daly has taught one class per year with perhaps 12 to 20 female students and her objection to men has only come up when men tried to sign up for it," Dunn told CNS. "When the issue came up again she would take a leave of absence and then when she would come back the issue would kind of fade away. There is a history of this occurring every decade."

Daly told the Washington Post, "Boston College has wronged me and by caving in to right-wing pressure and depriving me of my right to teach freely and depriving them of the opportunity to study with me. I choose to stand my ground."

But to Boston College it is a fairness issue. "It is inherent in the educational challenges for professors to try and motivate diverse student groups to gain access to their opinions and we think her class would be enriched by their presence," Dunn told CNS. "To deny access to a group of students on the basis of their gender is illegal, archaic, and its wrong and we can't stand by it, it just wouldn't be fair."

That may not matter to Daly who has been openly critical of Boston College, and the Catholic Church, on numerous occasions. She has referred to the administration as "bore-ocrats" and in 1975 when she was denied a full professorship she created a Forum on Women in Higher Education and greeted the other participants with the cry, "Sisters, we meet on bloody Jesuit ground!"

In an article about her, Mary Daly described herself to the New Yorker as the "eminence terrible of religious feminists," and her relationship with the college as a "radical feminist pirate, Cultivating the courage to sin."

According to an editorial in The Observer of Boston College, a student newspaper, entitled "Why is this Nut-Job Teaching at my School?" Daly said when she studied theology and philosophy at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland it was to equip herself with the knowledge necessary to "reverse the reversals inherent in Christian dogma and decode its doctrines with precision." It goes on to say Daly has written, "the doctrines of the male-god and of the trinity are revealed as distorted reflections of ancient female images of divinity. So also the ancient female images of the 'virgin birth' of Jesus is exposed as both a pale derivative and reversal of pre-patriarchal myths of parthenogenesis."

Daly, who is an associate professor in the Department of Theology, has been called a pioneer in the field of feminist theology and philosophy. At the heart of her work, Daly has written, is to get to "the root of the mess in society" which she said is "patriarchy. What I'm trying to do is get at the core of what oppresses women."

CNS phone calls to Professor Daly were not returned.

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