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Still, the last two times the event’s sponsor hosted speakers at the nearby University of Toronto, police were called to protect a classroom, and a fire alarm was pulled in a vain attempt to stop a lecture. Black-masked activists protested both events.

This is not by accident. Though skirmishes erupt in elementary schools and divorce courts, universities are the primary battleground in the war over men’s rights.

University gender studies, which is closely allied with education studies, is dominated by courses on male/female issues seen through an “activist female lens,” Prof. Tiger said, and discussed in language that “coerces the mind and destroys the loveliness of thinking.”

One result is that schools now educate boys so much more poorly than girls that “if the ill-educated group was black or Jewish or Swahili or right-handed [instead of male], there would be a public outcry.”

One factor is the use of anti-hyperactive drugs, such as Ritalin, which is far more commonly given to boys than girls.

“What I think is happening is schools are drugging boys to turn them into girls,” he said. “It’s not my insight, per se, it’s that males are harder to discipline because they’re males. They move around a lot. You cannot get another primate in the world, who’s male, to learn from sitting still. Females are different. There’s a lack of sympathetic perspective on the lives of males that has yielded this dreadful result of drugging boys.”

On the flip side, he said academically successful boys can be ignored in favour of encouraging girls, a trend he was tipped to by mothers of boys, who gave the warmest reception to his 1999 book The Decline of Males.

“I’m not an activist. I just want to know why what’s happening is happening,” he said. “But the fact is that there is a fundamental shift in the most important intimate human relationships that have been clouded by a fog of ideological certainty and uncertainty.”

“I’m not sure that we realize the enormity of the change.”

National Post

jbrean@nationalpost.com