Last Man on Campus

Somehow I missed this magnificent NYT report last week that asks the terrifying question: what happens in college when all the men disappear? Let's dive right in!

After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night out, it had everything — except guys.

In my experience, few situations are as fraught with peril as approaching a group of girls who are sitting at a corner table, bellowing a Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood song.

Me: Hi, I'm Charlie.
Redhead: 'Cause I dug my key into the side of his Pretty little souped up four wheel drive
Me: I noticed you from across the bar and thought I'd come over and say hello ...
Redhead: Carved my name into his leather seat, I took a Louisville slugger to both head lights
Me: What's your name?
Redhead: Slashed a hole in all four tires, Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats
Me: Please don't kill me.

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education.

Good Lord! Men are disappearing from college! Does this mean USC is turning into Smith? Texas is becoming Wellesely? Surely there are unimaginable consequences to the disappearance of the college-aged male. Who's going to buy this poster? What will we do with all those Family Guy DVDs? And what will become of that hallowed college tradition, the elephant walk?

“My parents think there is something wrong with me because I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t hang out with a lot of guys,” said Ms. Andrew, who had a large circle of male friends in high school.

Maybe your mom thinks that, and her disappointment is pressuring you into settling for the first Joe the Schmuck who wants to do body shots. But your dad? Your dad is thrilled that there are no males around you. Seriously. He's so happy, he doesn't even know what to do with that shotgun he bought on the eve of your first date. If my little girl told me she was "not hanging out with a lot of guys," I'd do a happy dance and break the seal on that 30-year old Scotch.

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Math doesn't lie. Let's imagine that the student population at Small College is 100. According to those calculations, 40 of them would be men. Of those 40, maybe 20 percent can be considered. That would be 8 men who fit whatever arbitrary criteria Miss Math over here is using. Of those, half have girlfriends. That leaves 4 men who "all the girls are fighting over."

This is going to be one hell of a fight. Here's hoping they put it on TV.

Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

Way to throw your boyfriend under the bus. "Yeah, so, like, I'm dating this guy who is basically the sorority bicycle. Everyone's, like, had a ride." And you would really date someone who's dated five of your friends? Five? You can build an intramural volleyball team around that. You should call it, the Ethan Whateverhisnameis All-Stars.

Oh, and dude? High five.

The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”

I went to the wrong school.

The gender gap is not universal. The Ivy League schools are largely equal in gender, and some still tilt male. But at some schools, efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that less-qualified men are being admitted over more-qualified women. In December, the United States Commission on Civil Rights moved to subpoena admissions data from 19 public and private colleges to look at whether they were discriminating against qualified female applicants.

I definitely went to the wrong school.

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

And then she sat on the couch under a blanket and ate a whole thing of chocolate ice cream while crying! See, NYT, I can also make cliche and lazy generalizations to prove a point! Wait. Cats! We forgot cats! Let's shoehorn a reference to cats in there! "... while Mr. Napoleon, her pet cat, licks the melting ice cream off her fingers!" Whee! This is fun!

“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.

The initial version of this article provided that girl's name. As a result of the ensuing Googling scrutiny, she was forced to enter the Grinder Protection Program. Her whereabouts are currently unknown, but rest assured half the internet is still looking for her.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

One time, I met a girl at a bar and brought her home. And when I woke up in the morning, she was in the bathroom, using my toothbrush. And then I got a text from her a week later saying, I was really hoping you were different from all the other guys. And I wanted to answer, I was really hoping not to have to drag myself to the supermarket while hungover just to buy a new toothbrush. But that was too long a text.

And yes, Mom, I threw away that toothbrush.

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

After reading this sentence, my subtext meter exploded. I'm not even going to touch this one. I'm going to cross the street, get on the other sidewalk, and maybe give it a second's glance as I walk away as quickly as I can without running. In short, I'm going to treat it as a leafletter.

As for a man's cheating, "that's a thing that girls let slide, because you have to," said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. "If you don't let it slide, you don't have a boyfriend." (Ms. Kennard, however, said that she does not personally tolerate cheating).

We don't call back. We feel so entitled that we have to force a girl to break her own boundaries in the hope that we'll answer her texts. And we cheat and you have to grin and bear it. Despite all this, girls are fighting over us like we're the bouquet at a wedding.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Women. Are. Crazy.

Faculty members and administrators are well aware of the situation. Stephen M. Farmer, North Carolina’s director of admissions, said that the university has a high female presence in part because it does not have an engineering school, which at most schools tend to be heavily male. Also, he said, more young men than women in the state opt to enter the military or the work force directly out of high school.

Mr. Stephen M. Farmer of North Carolina, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Larry Summers, formerly of Harvard. I'm sure you have a lot to talk about, so I'm just going to go check out the other side of the party.

W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex. Commitment? A good first step would be his returning a woman’s Facebook message.

A good first step is not communicating via Facebook message. If that's the method you use for contacting me, I'm not going to respond. Why? Because I don't date high school girls. Anymore.

Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them, Professor Campbell said. In this way, some colleges mirror retirement communities, where women often find that the reward for outliving their husbands is competing with other widows for the attentions of the few surviving bachelors.

This has to win the prize for worst analogy of the year. Did she just compare guys in relationships to dead octogenarians? Which would make us single guys the leftover geezer in the high-water pants, drooling and trying to remember if it was WWII or the Korean War in which we fought.

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

I can't believe I went to the wrong school. Damn my eyes.

At colleges in big cities, women do have more options. “By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city.

Yes. Because the best men are grown-ups who still date college students.

Several male students acknowledged that the math skewed pleasantly in their favor. “You don’t have to work that hard,” said Matt Garofalo, a senior at North Carolina. “You meet a girl at a late-night restaurant, she’s texting you the next day.”

Who on earth picks up girls at a late-night restaurant? And what the hell is a late-night restaurant anyway? Do they mean Taco Bell, open 24 hours? I got news for you, NYT! Not a restaurant!

But it’s not as if the imbalance leads to ceaseless bed-hopping, said Austin Ivey, who graduated from North Carolina last year but was hanging out in a bar near campus last week. “Guys tend to overshoot themselves and find a really beautiful girlfriend they couldn’t date otherwise, but can, thanks to the ratio,” he said.

You mean like this guy picked up Tina Fey because every other person working at NBC was a man and she had no choice? This article actually makes sense now.

Several male students from female-heavy schools took pains to note that they were not thrilled with the status quo.

Indeed, there are a fair number of Mr. Lonelyhearts on campus. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

Mr. Lonelyheart? That sounds like the name of a Fallout Boy album. Oh, and some advice, Prince Charming: calling a girl "enchanting" is a good way to remain single. These are women, not travel destinations in the South Pacific.

And perhaps still elusive. Many women eagerly hit the library on Saturday night. And most would prefer to go out with friends, rather than date a campus brute.

As (I guess) a former campus brute, I would be offended by this statement. But if the girl is eagerly hitting the library on a Saturday night, I also guess it's best we don't try to date.

But still. “It causes girls to overanalyze everything — text messages, sideways glances, conversations,” said Margaret Cheatham Williams, a junior at North Carolina. “Girls will sit there with their friends for 15 minutes trying to figure out what punctuation to use in a text message.”

I would ask you to restrain yourself to no more than two back-to-back exclamation points. Also, if you can stick to either smiley faces or frowny faces in the same message, that would be great. Although it probably reflects your conflicting feelings accurately, I'm just confused.

The loneliness can be made all the more bitter by the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way.

I curse my parents every day for not having me in the 1950s, when I could ask Mary Sue to go steady with me as we sip on malts at the local diner. Back when, if I was wondering if that blonde I know maybe wanted to "watch a movie" with me at 3 am would require me to go throw pebbles at her window, somehow avoid her dad with the shotgun, and pull out my hand-cranked projector.

That's what she said.