oh...

My Special Friend wants me to post on the Va Tech/Saudi Arabian school thing where they are ceding to the Saudi's by having gender-separate classrooms for the teachers but I'm just not in the mood. So here's one of the few links I can actually find on the issue; please entertain yourselves and leave comments as necessary.

Okay, so I will say one small thing because I just read this:
Eloise Coupey, an associate professor of marketing at the Virginia Tech, filed a complaint with the school Tuesday alleging the single-sex classes created a hostile environment for women.

I"m going to be completely honest here. How in the world is having a classroom with only women in it "creating a hostile environment?" If anything, it'd be much safer. Here in the U.S., men are required to have a modicum of respect for the women in their classes but in Saudi Arabi, the men aren't. So, again, I think it would be much safer.

Then I saw this:
"The presence of these segregated classes on campus indicates to me that the university doesn't place a strong enough value on women's rights," Coupey said Wednesday. "This makes me feel that the university holds me in less regard than my male counterparts."

They aren't separating the genders to be spiteful, they are separating them because Saudi Arabia is paying for the students (or teachers?) to take these classes at Tech and in their culture, women and men cannot be educated together.

I don't take offense to the genders being separate but that could also be baggage from bad experiences with having guys in certain women's studies/sociology classes of mine.

So that's my $.02. I wanna hear what others think on this issue and I do know you're all out there.

(Side note: I googled this same phrase last night and got nothing so I was shocked to see it make the WashPo today."