You might think the case against Daly would be pretty much open-and-shut. The law -- specifically, one of the feminists' favorite laws, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments -- says that educational institutions which benefit from any federal funds cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, except for single-sex schools. Thus, when senior Duane Naquin was told he couldn't enroll in Daly's "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course for no other reason than being male, the law was violated. Daly claims that she offers to teach men individually, but even if she has ever done so (which is in dispute), it wouldn't get her off the hook.

You might also think that feminists would seize on this opportunity to show that they stand for gender equity, not gender antagonism or anti-male bigotry.

Wrong.

Instead, feminists from Gloria Steinem to Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation (former president of the National Organization for Women) are championing Daly's cause. "Boys, boys, boys, settle down," sneers the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara. "You're accustomed to making the rules and then along comes Mary to say that everything is not about you, you, you." An editorial in The Nation titled "Feminist Detenured" depicts Daly's plight as part of a "backlash" against feminist academics.

Daly's supporters hail her as a brilliantly subversive, witty thinker. But a look at her writings, such as the 1978 book Gyn/Ecology, reveals a ranting preacher of hate and paranoia. In a mind-numbing jargon, Daly excoriates men as agents of the patriarchy, "lethal organs" of a "rapist society," misogynists who feed parasitically on female energy and invent evil technologies to compensate for their inability to bear children. The birth control pill and estrogen therapy are denounced as "the poisoning of women," a medical plot to end women's irritating tendency to live longer. The only contraception women need, Daly asserts, is a "mister-ectomy" (that must be her brilliant wit). Women who don't accept her view are mocked as "honorary white males."

For some students, this message apparently has great appeal.

Boston College is such a "patriarchal" place," moans one student who supports Daly: "We had one two-hour class a week just for women, and now it's gone."

Actually, about 53% of the students currently enrolled at Boston College are female. Women make up 29% of the tenured faculty (about the average for all colleges and universities). That may not be a feminist utopia, but it's hardly a patriarchal bastion, either. And I'm willing to bet that not a single one of the male professors excludes women from his classes.

Daly's explanation of her single-sex policy is that men essentially pollute her classroom atmosphere: let them in, and women will be silenced and stifled. (Daly supporters such as McNamara cite research showing that men dominate and monopolize the attention in coed classes; but the minor sex differences found in these studies hardly support this demeaning notion of women as shrinking violets.) Moreover, Daly claims, with men around, women "become caretakers for the men." In other words, they're apt to feel bad for the guys when virulent anti-male rhetoric starts to fly. It's harder to preach hate when your targets are present in the flesh.

The problem of men in the classroom gives headaches to quite a few radical feminist professors. They bemoan such forms of "harassment" by male students as "challenging facts" or "stating the exceptions to every generalization." They want to run cozy consciousness-raising groups undisrupted by dissent or debate. "I want to talk about women," wails another pro-Daly student. "I don't want to teach anyone about why I feel oppressed."

(Sure: if a middle-class girl whose parents are shelling out thousands for her tuition actually had to explain why she feels oppressed, it might not be easy.)

But a classroom from which potential dissenters are barred is incompatible with the mission of the academy. It is ironic that at a Catholic college, the worst intolerance and dogmatism did not come from orthodox defenders of the faith but from a radical feminist. If one of Daly's colleagues in the theology department refused to admit non-Catholics to his classes for fear that they might challenge Catholic beliefs and make Catholic students uncomfortable, he wouldn't have gotten away with it for long.

Mary Daly got away with it for more than two decades. Any principled supporter of gender equality would applaud the fact that anti-discrimination laws have finally caught up with her. The actual reaction of self-styled champions of equality is yet another demonstration that the women's movement as we know it is bankrupt. With feminists like these, you start wondering if the subject of Daly's course -- feminist ethics -- is an oxymoron.