Scott Yenor, a professor of political philosophy at Boise State University in Idaho, created a furor on campus by comments he made at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando. The professor stated that “our feminist culture leads us to want less male achievement. Their excellence, after all, creates inequities. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men to become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade. Efforts should be redoubled to encourage more men to enter the medical field, space exploration, mining endeavors, and every other high-end and even low-end profession.”
Yenor later tweeted that “making special efforts to recruit women into fields where they don’t seem to want to be” should cease. But he also said that women who want to pursue careers in these fields should proceed.
The university issued a statement that said “Boise State University understands that the open exchange of ideas, which is fundamental to education, can introduce uncomfortable and even offensive ideas. However, the university cannot infringe upon the First Amendment rights of anyone in our community, regardless of whether we, as individual leaders, agree or disagree with the message. No single faculty member defines what Boise State – or any public university – endorses or stands for.”
Ally Orr, a senior at Boise State, responded with a GoFundMe campaign that raised $70,000 for the Women in STEM, Medicine and Law Scholarship. The scholarship will help fund the education of women in these fields at Boise State this fall.
“I thought with the little that I can control about the situation, at least I can help the people that he’s hurting, and those are the women at Boise State,” Orr said in a television appearance on Good Morning America.
Professor Yenor’s speech can be seen in the video below.