Comments on a disturbing allegory

I was at a seminar this afternoon, and the dean of the college of humanities stood up and presented an allegory for our listening pleasure. Only I found it disturbing. See if you can figure out why. I will give away the answer at the end.

There once was a great department chair father figure. He sent two men down to work at his university. After some time, he would have them come back and report, and the one who did his duty appropriately would earn the hand in marriage of the beautiful princess Tenure. Or something along those lines.

Well, the first faculty member got right to work, but was interrupted by a phone call. It was a student who was failing, and she wondered if she could meet with the faculty to talk about the class. Then a while later there was a knock on the door. It was the star student. And he was wondering if he could discuss graduate schools. The other faculty member ignored all his phone calls and didn't go to department meetings and missed his daughter's soccer game. At the end of the story, the first guy had stellar teaching evaluations and no research results or funding while the second guy had terrible teaching evaluations but an excellent research record. And neither got Tenure because you have to be good at everything to get Tenure.

The End.

Ok. So what was it that disturbed me? Anybody catch it?

Give up?

I'll give you a hint. Check out the genders of each of the participants. The leader guy who is in control? Male. The guys who have a chance at the prize? Male. The stellar student? Male. The failing student? Female. The prize going to the winner? A hot female.

Now, you are probably sitting there thinking, "gee, there are a lot of disturbing things about that story, but I must say the sexism didn't stand out as the most egregious." And Tim is rolling his eyes right now. But you know, with a few changes the allegory might have worked without making me sit up and look shifty-eyed around the room to see who else was noticing.

I'm sure the dean did not mean to be sexist. Or even to appear sexist.

He realized it was a lame story, and he pointed that out early.

I wonder if anyone else in the audience even noticed. (I asked a colleague afterwords and he hadn't, although he could see in retrospect why I might have.)

(Of course, said colleague doesn't know me very well, so he doesn't know like Tim does that sometimes the best response is to roll your eyes.)

Still, I'm kind of glad I'm not in the college of humanities.