Ladies and gentlemen, we need to discuss a disturbing trend, one that will shock and appall you more than having to sit and watch back-to-back videos of last year’s Syracuse football team.

I speak, of course, of the recurring appearances of freshmen on North Campus. I thought we quarantined them in the Skyhalls once and for all. Word has it DPS will pay $50 a head for those captured without harm.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to another potentially devastating trend-the increasing imbalance of the male/female ratio at America’s universities. According to the American Council on Education, the percentage of female undergraduates has steadily increased over the last several years, to the point where women now constitute a full 58 percent of the American student population. That’s almost 90 percent!

I came face-to-face with this burgeoning crisis in my cardio kickboxing class this semester. When I signed up for classes last spring, my eyes jumped right to the word kickboxing. I envisioned myself studying under visiting professor Jean-Claude Van Damme and enjoying guest lectures from ninjas. The final exam would be a fight-to-the-death tournament, with the winning pupil receiving an A and all others receiving shallow graves.

I strode into my first class session wearing only camo paint and a Rambo headband, only to see the classroom was full of women, mostly in spandex.

‘Ah-ha,’ I thought. ‘So the first test is to determine which of these ‘women’ is actually my instructor in disguise. A clever ruse — but there is only one solution.’

I had roundhouse kicked my way through five or six of my classmates when the actual professor showed up: a short woman wearing a microphone headset. She explained this was not going to be a ‘kickboxing’ class so much as ‘cardio kickboxing,’ which is another way of saying ‘watered-down dance aerobics.’ We were told each class would start with us discussing our feelings (which may not include ‘I feel like roundhousing my professor,’ I was informed). The required textbook is ‘How to Not Eat Carbs.’

It’s true, my fellow college men: the higher education world of our fathers is long gone. Universities today are less ‘Animal House’ and more ‘Legally Blonde.’ Don’t get me wrong, I think women have just as much of a right to a college degree as men, so long as it’s a nursing degree.

And what about all the non-academic traditions that may disappear under a female majority? Before you know it, 25-cent wings and $1 drafts at Chuck’s will be replaced with salads and Cosmos. SU’s colors will change to pumpkin and cerulean. Men’s sports like football and basketball will be replaced with women’s sports like Jell-O wrestling and competitive outfit-coordinating.

OK, OK, maybe I’ve gone too far. Perhaps the increasing number of women in higher education is the result of more equitable admissions practices and the struggles of previous generations of women to give their daughters the opportunities they deserve, leading to overdue recognition of the valuable contributions from women at all levels of society. Maybe the glass ceiling is slowly showing itself to be an archaic, regressive social constraint, one that will soon become a thing of the past.

Yeah, and maybe I’ll watch ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ instead of the Cowboys this Sunday.But seriously, the huge numbers of females on campus can mean only one thing, best articulated by the Beach Boys: ‘Two girls for every guu-uuu-uuy!’ Just think-one to cook, and one to clean.

Jaykay, homegirls!

Obviously both would cook.

Seamus O’Connor is a lover, not a fighter. Email him at sroconno@syr.edu, but be gentle – he’s sensitive.

Published on September 5, 2006 at 12:00 pm