There’s been an exciting outcome to a seven-year battle against an Australian university in Victoria that torpedoed a man’s Ph.D. This tenacious man—I’ll call him “Philip”—has just achieved a confidential settlement, which is a tribute to his fighting spirit but also a lesson to us all about the importance of fighting back against anti-male prejudice.
All was looking good in March 2014 when Philip submitted his Ph.D. on workplace male age discrimination. It was a solid piece of work, nothing remotely inflammatory and included information about discrimination against both older women as well as men.
Phillip was a mature student who had already spent years teaching in Japan and in Australian universities prior to spending 7 1/2 years doing the Ph.D. research part-time.
After all that hard work, he thought it would be smooth sailing. But then the trouble started. Somehow his research school failed to submit the thesis for over four months, then finally did so using a version with a distorted format that apparently screwed up when the supervisor added some last-minute changes.
This mangled version of the thesis was submitted to poorly qualified examiners unfamiliar with key aspects of the methodology, who then failed it—somehow claiming the format problems amounted to plagiarism.
The saga continued over two years with all sorts of anomalies in the way examiners were selected—with a total of seven being brought in before the university reached their final decision.
The person pulling the strings during this whole process was a self-described feminist professor who claimed she had the discretionary power to make the final decision, overriding all the problems which had emerged during the long ordeal. She ultimately failed the thesis.
Throughout this process, Philip desperately tried to alert university authorities to what was going on. He contacted the university’s ombuds, all the relevant complaints bodies, wrote to politicians, higher education complaints bodies—all to no avail. There was an appeal, but the result remained unchanged.
Eventually, he applied to another university and completed the Ph.D. there submitting virtually the same thesis, and this went through without a hitch. But as a result of the whole fiasco, he lost two overseas teaching jobs he’d been offered and his health suffered. It all took a huge toll.
He’s spent the last four years trying to take action against the university for the way he was treated. Lawyers told him it was all too hard, far too expensive but he did his own homework, dug up relevant legal precedents and ended up achieving court-ordered mediation which led to a confidential settlement with the university. Sadly, this now prevents Philip from talking about his story.
But what’s been obvious to me from the start was the key role played by a feminist academic who appears to have misused her position of power to destroy work that challenged her ideological view of the world.
Here’s a young man who launched complaint after complaint against American universities, exposing their blatant anti-male policies, the billions of dollars spent on affirmative action promoting women throughout the universities, despite females outnumbering males in almost every course and department.
American colleges discriminate against men in every area possible: college admissions, recruitment and employment preferences, women-only dorms and study spaces, affirmative action for women in STEM, Women’s Centres, Women’s Studies.
Kursat conducted a very serious hunger strike, lasting over 32 days, which ended up persuading the Department of Education to investigate Yale for their abundant, exclusively female programs and scholarships.
Interestingly, Kursat’s coalition used the argument that men are a minority in colleges, which shifts the logic of affirmative action. The result set a precedent—the first time the department had taken action against an Ivy League institution over discrimination against men.
The publicity surrounding Kursat’s hunger strike also led to him challenging the allegedly anti-male civil rights attorney, Laura Faer, who headed up the San Francisco Office of the Education Department, which had never resolved a single complaint from a male student. Faer was fired from her job.
Kursat was having some serious wins, but that made him a target and he suddenly was faced with a ludicrous sexual harassment charge, when a fellow student he had turned down romantically accused him of “manipulating her emotions” and lying by saying “he was not attracted to her.”
The college investigation into the charge clearly didn’t take this very seriously, sentencing him to a single counselling session.
During all of this Kursat was working on his Ph.D. in the English Department at the University of Southern California, an epicentre of campus wokedom.
Kursat is an inspiration to us all. Now what we need is thousands like him—and Philip—brave, tenacious men and women prepared to start challenging this bias against men that is currently disseminating through our universities and societies.
