Matthew Stefanko is the founder and CEO of a company called MANUAL, which runs a digital engagement engine for young men built around on-demand, evidence-based content and live coaching.
MANUAL has a growing number of partnerships with colleges and universities.
In this video Matthew shares a message that’s important for faculty, staff, and student leaders in the higher education community to hear. This is in the context of concerns about enrollment and graduation rates among America’s young men.
The difference between good and great programming for male college students
Below is a partial transcript of the video above, lightly edited.
Matthew Stefanko (opening teaser clip): If the only message you’re sending to young men out of your gender resource center or out of your institution is we’re interested in talking to you as a man, but only if it’s about your toxic masculinity…forget about whether that’s right or wrong — I don’t think it’s pragmatic. What 18-year-old wants to feel safe in a space where they’re immediately being presumed as toxic? It doesn’t mean that programming couldn’t be valuable or that there aren’t good versions of that, but it feels very limiting.
Blair Daly (voiceover intro): Matthew Stefanko is CEO and Founder of a company called MANUAL, which is an innovative men’s resource and engagement engine, thoughtfully designed to meet the unique needs of men. MANUAL has a growing number of partnerships with colleges and universities, and in this video Matthew shares a message that’s important for people in the higher education community to hear.
Blair Daly: In your line of work you have exposure to men’s programs that are put on by colleges, and there is variety among the kind of programming that colleges and universities are up to. I imagine that some of the programming is just okay — at least it deserves credit for the school doing something focusing on a target population of males — whereas other programming goes above and beyond.
Can you talk about what those two categories look like, and what you’d like to see more colleges do in terms of programming for their male students?
Matthew Stefanko: I have exposure to a few dozen schools that we work with directly and then hundreds more that I’ve interacted with.
Despite what I think the public narrative is around some of the work being done around the LGBTQ+ community or Black and Hispanic students…from my perspective I think a lot of the work we’re doing out LGBTQ+ centers, women’s resource centers, resource centers around Black and Hispanic students are really powerful motivators of change. They’re places that I do think are generating a really profound sense of community and belonging for a lot of populations that don’t necessarily always feel those things.
The challenge that I have around the way that some universities respond with male programming is that you just don’t see that same level of nuance and thoughtfulness and depth of understanding what is going on with that particular group of students, even though much of the data is often suggesting that those students are the struggling the most to graduate. For example, the lowest graduation rate of any population is Black men. I don’t necessarily always think that institutions — and this isn’t universally true, but that they’re taking the same level of nuance.
See related: The University of Oregon has a Men’s Resource Center | Our Interview with Dr. Arian Mobasser
You might see out of a gender resource center a really fascinating and important complexity and depth around the programming that they’re doing for trans students or the programming that they’re doing for female-identifying students. And then they’ll offer one program for their male students, and the program is around toxic masculinity.
It would be the equivalent of saying the only thing we want to talk with women about on our campus is, for example, healthy eating habits. It’s like, well, teaching healthy eating habits to any student might be a good thing. But if that’s the only thing that you thought was valuable programming for your female students, we would find that to be like…Aren’t there other things that you’d want to talk about? Aren’t there other ways that we can create community and space for this population? And by the way, universities do a very good job of having that kind of nuanced programming for other student populations. Where I see the difference between great programs and programs that are good but leave a lot sort of lacking is that depth and that nuance.
A program that I love is the Men of Color Academy at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. They’re doing programs around…[Continued in the video]