Photos St.John's football Vice President Gar Kellom "Men's Lives" lectures bring male programming to campus View full slideshow (7 images) Resources St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict St. Cloud State University Respond to this story Talk about this story in the MPR News Forum Submit a commentary Help us cover this story

You've got male: College focuses on educating men
by Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
November 20, 2002

St. John's unique approach to men extends even to its celebrated football team. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

More than two decades ago, women became the majority of American college students. Since then the gap has widened, and today just 43 percent of college students are men. There are also signs that men who are in college get less out of the experience. They are less likely to study abroad, join in activities like community service or seek counseling help. They are more likely to transfer, drop out or even commit suicide. Educating men is the specialty of one small college in central Minnesota. Its success has caught the attention of other schools around the country.

Collegeville, Minn. — St. John's University in Collegeville is one of just four all-male schools in the U.S. The men do share classrooms and many aspects of social life with a sister school down the road. This distinct mixture of single-sex and co-ed environments has been a good laboratory to address the challenge of educating men.

"What we do seems to be working," says Vice President of Student Services Gar Kellom. Kellom just got off a morning phone call with the University of Richmond. The Virginia school wants to know what St. John's does to produce and keep well-adjusted male students. Kellom says it's more a matter of priorities than any magic formula.

	Vice President Gar Kellom

"Just pay attention to men. It's not that hard. We have spent a lot of time and done a really good job increasing opportunities for women in education. One possibility is that we just forgot about guys," he says. "We just didn't spend time thinking about them."

Kellom points out a few psychological rules-of-thumb. First, most 20-year-old men are not natural go-getters, so plan to spend some serious energy recruiting. At St. John's, that goes for everything from health care to community service to father-son maple syrup-tapping day.

And slip in under the radar if you have to. For example, mental and career counselors pass out freebies and pal around with students during orientation.

Kellom also says you can turn peer pressure to your advantage. Don't market events and services to men individually; instead make your pitch to a table in the dining hall, or a full dorm room.

"The secret with first and second year students," Kellom says, "is that if the group goes, they'll all go."

	"Men's Lives" lectures bring male programming to campus

Indulging men's "group" mentality can also help change behaviors. St. John's administrators guessed that men drink a lot because that's what they thought their friends were doing, so last year the school produced a survey showing the average St. John's man did not drink nearly as much as students thought. Students actually drank less when the social standard was debunked.

Kellom used a similar survey to attack one of the most persistent stereotypes of young men.

"Do you want to share your emotions, and do you think your friends want to share their emotions?," Kellom says. "As it turns out, guys have said, 'I would really like to share my emotions, but I don't think my friends want to.' But if you can show that data to guys, it says basically, 'Everyone would really like to share their emotions.' It gives them the permission to open up. And that's one of the things we think happens here."

On this point St. John's thinks they've ripped down one of the greatest obstacles for college men: a reluctance to talk about their problems. College stirs up new emotions and insecurities for everyone, but women seem to weather the experience better than men.

No one knows this better than Nathan Church, the vice president of student life at a quite different school down the road from St. John's. St. Cloud State University is a co-ed public school of nearly 16,000 students. Enrollment is weighted slightly toward women, and Church says behavioral differences show up across the board. Women make up 60 percent of those who use the health service. They are 65 percent of those using the counseling center.

	St. Cloud State University

"This gives you kind of the contrast or the dilemma that student development professionals across the country are facing," Church says. "You can expect pretty uniformly that men are not going to seek out help at the same rate that women are going to seek out help."

Differences show up in everyday situations, like a dispute between roommates. "Female residents are more likely on their own to go access the resident advisor and say, 'We need your help," he says. "A real common reaction for men in roommate disputes is simply to say, 'I'm moving.' And it's like, 'Why are you...' 'I just want to move.' And you keep probing, 'Do you have conflict with...' 'No, I just want to move.'"

Church ties this reluctance to communicate directly to male student retention. These may be ancient male cultural habits, but Church would like to change them if he could.

Back at St. John's, the men are proud of their ability to talk openly with one another. Many chalk it up to the climate on campus.

"I live in an apartment with six other guys, and for the last month I have had a conversation with at least one of them two or three hours long," says senior Brandon Borgos. "Just a very intimate conversation about life, and how we live and what is driving our actions. It seems really deep and thoughtful to me that I can connect with a lot of different guys on all these different issues, and I think I wouldn't necessarily get that in an environment that was coeducational."

	Senior Jim Mulrooney (left)

Administrators here believe men benefit from time when women are not around. When guys have time to just be guys, the result is often the opposite of the macho bonding you might expect. Another senior, Jim Mulrooney, says deep conversations can start while digging into a pizza and watching ESPN.

Mulrooney and two other students have spent two years studying what they call "the St. John's experience." They've been surveying and interviewing students to paint a psychological profile of the St. John's man. "That's something that I think St. John's can really educate society on, really take the lead and say, you know what, we need to focus on not the traditional type of masculinity, but on a new type of masculinity: An understanding, compassionate, successful man that can be a leader, that can be athletic, that can be powerful, that can have influence, but that can just as easily stay at home with his three children and clean clothes and be just as respected in society," Mulrooney says.

St. John's has gone out of its way in recent years to encourage students to explore academically what it means to be a man. They are developing only the second men's studies minor in the country. A "Men's Lives" speakers series sponsors well-attended lectures on topics like "Men and War," "Men and Sex," and "Being a Man of Faith." A first of its kind "men's center" is in the works.

But evidence of the novel approach to men here also appears where you might least expect it. St. John's celebrated football program is run by an unorthodox set of rules: No one gets cut from the team, no whistles, no chewing out or belittling players, no skipping class for practice, no mandatory weight-training.

For freshman Marty Morud, the practices are less pressured, less violent and less confrontational than anything he remembers from high school. "All the hitting and stuff, you don't see any of that here," Morud says. "I came from a school that did hitting drills. Every five minutes they'd do a different one, monkey rolls and all that stuff. We have no sleds, no hitting , no tackling, you don't wear full pads in practice, practice is only an hour and half."

	St. John's football practice

Coach John Gagliardi would never claim his philosophy was about anything so mushy as male identity or encouraging healthy gender roles. In fact, he didn't even want to do an interview on the subject. He says it's a formula for winning football games, and he's right: The team has not had a losing season in 46 years.

But few of these players will go on build a life out of football. Like much else at St. John's, the training on the field is ultimately designed to leave men mature and well-adjusted when the real game begins.

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