An epidemic of male-bashing, coming from humanities classes and women's studies departments and women's centers. On every college campus, there is always a small group of angry women who have taken one too many women's studies courses and are willing to believe the worst about boys and men.

Most girls do not accept this gender warrior ideology, but a few do. Many young men will sooner or later encounter young women who view them as proto-harassers or rapists or batterers. And it's ridiculous to have young men face that in college. There are already too few young men in college, compared to young women, and the ones who are there face this censorious attitude from young women.

Can you elaborate on why you believe that men have become a statistical minority on college campuses?

Some college admissions officers are already calling it "the problem that has no name." This is the era of the disappearing male on the college campus. Now, overall, colleges are 56 to 57 percent female. There are many schools that are already 60 to 62 percent female -- University of Georgia, Boston University, American University.

So college admissions officers are grappling with the problem of how to attract young men. At Oberlin, for example, one of the college admissions officers suggested ways to make its Web site a little more male-friendly. His colleagues said, "Men are part of the oppressor culture. Why should we do that?" That mentality, I think, is very harsh. I believe that Carol Gilligan created this by drawing attention to this faux girl crisis.

Given that Gilligan is moving to NYU, who would you anticipate teaching in the gender center? Do you believe that Gilligan's ideas will still hold sway in her absence?

The problem with gender studies is that, of all the fields, it has the lowest research and scholarship standards, because a lot of the experts come from education and from the humanities. What they need are people from neuroscience and from behavioral psychology and endocrinology and evolutionary psychology. That would be good. It would be interesting to study sex differences with respect for the idea that some of the differences may be hard-wired, and that there are positive as well as negative qualities to both masculinity and femininity.

But I don't expect to see that. I expect to see more divisive gender propaganda.

Do you consider yourself to be a gender theorist?

Well, certainly I have taught philosophy of feminism.

Do you see a positive place for gender centers in universities? Do you believe that they should exist at all?

There already exist -- within neuroscience and psychology -- studies about sex differences. And that's fine. That's an important part of social science and biological science. Gender scholarship has tended to be based more in propaganda: Gender scholars tend to believe that gender exists as a social construction; they tend to take a negative view toward masculinity, as though it's some sort of disorder that men need to recover from. We don't need more of that. We've had enough; it hasn't gone anywhere. And I'm very worried that this center will give it new life.

Fonda seems to have a need for self-expression that exceeds her grasp of social reality. A few weeks go, she was giving $1 million to Eve Ensler, the author of "The Vagina Monologues." That's a poisonously anti-male tirade. So Fonda seems to have moved over to this more hard-line feminism, which is unfortunate, because she can fund her anger. And little boys are going to bear the brunt of it.

What kind of research is left to be done on men and masculinity? And should men be attracted to doing work in the field of gender studies?

You're going to find very few men who want to go into a gender studies program. It's just not going to happen. It's going to attract people who are carried away by gender ideology. I'm not saying we shouldn't study gender. I think we do study it well -- in biology departments, neuroscience departments and some psychology departments.

But this proposed center is really in the tradition of women's studies, which tends to be more ideological than scholarly. The problem with women's studies is that it tends to draw on women from the cultural left. There was a litmus test: If you are politically moderate or libertarian or, heaven forbid, conservative or religious, you don't have a right to interpret the lives of women. They're not interested in you in women's studies. So the system of quality control called "criticism" has broken down in gender studies and women's studies.

This is why the gender studies research has not been taken too seriously -- except in schools. And that is why I'm concerned. Carol Gilligan may not be held in high regard by most research psychologists, but her work is taken very seriously in schools of education.

What do you see as the vanguard problems or crises that are worthy of study in the context of a gender studies center?

First of all, there is no crisis in masculinity. There have always been men. Men aren't going away, and men and boys are not going to change that much. There are enough cross-cultural studies to show that there are certain characteristics common to men: They are greater risk takers; they are a little more competitive, especially little boys -- the one group of Americans who aren't talking about their feelings all the time.

Yes, there is something called hypermasculinity that is dangerous. Sociologists have identified a kind of masculinity in which young men prove their manhood by being violent and destructive. This is a pathology, not healthy masculinity. With healthy masculinity, young men prove their manhood by growing into responsible human beings, by striving for excellence and, yes, by being competitive and assertive and taking risks. There is so much good that comes out of those qualities. I would like to see some of these gender scholars concede that the vast majority of men are healthy, as are most little boys. They do not need to be refashioned according to strict feminist specifications.

I'm sorry to report the good news that little boys are healthy. They are neglected academically. Boys could be doing a lot better, especially in reading and writing and simply caring about educational achievement. But they are not pathological. Being a boy is not a disorder; it's not something you need to recover from.

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