The curious world of academia has given us too much love lately to make each piece of pedagogy into its own post, but it would be a shame not to share. So, a quick stroll across campus.
The sadly marginalized students of Harvard Law School have come up with a new demand: Free Tuition!!!
It has been 134 days since we presented you with our demands at the Community Meeting on December 4, 2015. Although we appreciate your efforts in effectuating symbolic change with the removal of the Royall family crest, our concerns regarding substantive institutional change at Harvard Law School have gone unaddressed. One of these concerns is the financial burden imposed on students in order to attend law school here. . . .
Harvard Law School should be committed to creating an environment that is inclusive of students of color and students from low-income backgrounds who want to study here. Enough is enough; fees must fall.
Well, yeah, enough is enough. Now march your sorry butts down to Newbury Street and get fitted with your Brooks Brothers suit for interviews.
And if Stanford wants to see another dime out of adoring alums, it better hop aboard the train too.
As alumni of Stanford University, we write to express our serious concerns about the Stanford Campus Climate Survey on sexual assault.
Both faculty and current students have criticized the Campus Climate Survey. We agree with the concerns they have expressed. One problem is that Stanford did not use the methodology that was adopted by the Association of American Universities (AAU) and used to conduct surveys at many of our peer schools, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, and two dozen others.
What? The Stanford survey failed to prove that the campus was rife with rape?
We hope that Stanford will reconsider its disappointing refusal to administer an improved survey. If it does not, we and many other alumni will be forced to reconsider our voluntary financial support of the university.
Fair enough. So every woman is raped every day. Send money. See how easy that was?
It can be hard to tell what conduct violates the ever-changing demands of campus sexual propriety, but the University of Michigan has gone out of its way to help its male students.
After discussions with students, the university added a section on intimate partner violence, which “includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.”
The terms are neither defined nor used in examples, either to illustrate their breadth or their limits. “Blame” could be understood to mean both objectively accusing a partner of not being faithful by citing hard evidence, or subjectively accusing a partner of not spending enough time together.
There ya go. The answer is everything. Govern yourself accordingly.
But what if they suddenly came to their senses and turned to the police, those “professionals,” rather than the kangaroo courts of academia? Women complain that they’re not believed, so shouldn’t men be applauding?
A few minutes later I received a call from Darrin DeCoster, a Fairfax County, Virginia detective, who revealed the phone call was being recorded. Ordering me to not hang up, he threatened to arrest me on a “slew” of charges if I did not cooperate. As a 20-year-old in college, I was scared beyond imagination.
I was instructed to appear for an interview the next day at the Fairfax County Police Station. Since I was completely innocent, what did I have to fear? I assumed the police would conduct an unbiased investigation of the matter. That was before I heard about “victim-centered” investigations.
The interrogation consisted of repeated attempts to get me to confess to something that I had supposedly done. The detective hinted that the charge had something to do with sexual assault, but he refused to tell me any details. He said that he could work out a deal with me and convince the district attorney to reduce the punishment.
Well, cops gonna cop, you know. But that’s still not good enough.
Though it is important to be supportive of complainants, the group openly berates criminal justice professionals who believe, “It’s not our job to believe victims. It’s our job to find out the facts and determine what really happened.” Instead, the group is advancing the notion that “A thorough investigation must therefore begin from a position of Start by Believing.”
That would certainly warm up the campus climate a bit.
But what is a professor to do about a student who just doesn’t share her politics?
The professor teaches at an unnamed college and used a pseudonym in her article for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Arrogant, intolerant, and oblivious to her biases (and how destructive they are), she is everything that is wrong with modern higher education.
Seriously:
She seems to be a good kid, Sarah. And I don’t know what she really thinks of gun advocacy and political failures that have cost us all these lives and our sense of safety as educators. I don’t know what she does on the weekends. I also don’t know if she understands emotions, or what real rage feels like. It seems to me no person who has truly experienced the full impact of their own emotions would ever go near a gun.
So what do I do? Do I write her a recommendation because I originally said yes? Do I say no and explain myself? Do I ignore her email?
What’s more enjoyable than a brisk stroll around the bucolic campuses of colleges and universities. Just keep an eye out for students with guns, rapists, professors who are pathologically enraged and alumni throwing their Tubbies around.
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While I can sympathize with students who want the government to provide free tuition (still not sure how that could work economically), it makes zero sense to demand free tuition from a university. Even if the university can, technically, afford it, what would be the incentive to bring in new students if those students are not bringing in money? The hope that they’ll donate after they graduate? If they don’t want to pay while receiving the services, why should they want to pay after graduating?
Sometimes, childish ideas aren’t meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes, people don’t realize that and do so anyway.
All UM sexual assault referrals should be reviewed by alums. It’s only fair to have an older person’s opinion.
Since nobody on campus seems to have a sense of humor on such matters. it may be up to me to force change.
UM should start with their most famous alum to hear these cases , a guy with plenty of time for hearings and decisions, the Unabomber (PHd UM). If they were alive, I’d have chosen Leopold and Loeb, however.
Now, I’m off to buy a 2×2 foot plot across from the Penn State campus to erect a statue in honor of Sandusky.
Yeah, I know what you’re gonna say: I’m mean because I never have or will get laid.
Not at all. That’s not why you’re mean.
Looking forward to the first “blame” case.
Jessica: “Hey, who broke the lamp?”
Michael: “Haha you did last night. Man, were you drunk.”
Jessica: “How dare you? I’m calling the Title IX Coordinator!”
Since “blame” is considered “violence,” couldn’t that make accusing someone of a Title IX violation…a Title IX violation?
UM does make it clear that “survivors” can also be male. And I don’t just mean the men with women parts.
Student demands are innately unreasonable, but free tuition is a perfectly reasonable idea. Harvard/Yale’s endowments are large enough that they could afford to never charge tuition again. They are basically hedge funds with no purpose beyond perpetuating themselves. I think once they grow enough they will overthrow one or more governments.
This at least was the gist of my recent conversation, which I had with bankers, not student activists.
Free tuition because the endowments are obscene is a great argument. Because of JUSTICE!!!? Not so great.
CT is trying to tax the Yale endowment.
The University of Michigan’s policy on sexual misconduct makes clear that not all actions that intimidate, etc. an intimate partner is violence. Instead, they constitute intimate partner violence only if “so severe, pervasive or persistent as to significantly interfere with an individual’s ability to learn and/or work or cause substantial emotional distress, when judged both objectively … and subjectively … .” Like the earlier prohibitions on “withholding sex and affection” and “discounting” a partner’s feelings, the new policy is aimed at abusive relationships.
The real issue is the university’s compulsion to treat emotionally abusive relationships punitively. Women in those relationships often stay because the abuser isolates them economically and socially. But women at a public university aren’t dependent on their intimate partners. Their partners aren’t bread winners, and they are in close quarters with 25,000 other people, mostly around their own age. The university would do much more for its female students by teaching them not to be victims than by adjudicating ambiguous conduct under vague principles.
I hate to tell you, but none of it is “violence.” As for what constitutes “severe, pervasive, etc.,” one time does it for almost all sexual violations, because no one should have to suffer sexual violence!!! See what happens when words become meaningless? Sometimes, your indoctrination into social justice blinds you to the obvious. I appreciate that you try to rise above it, but it’s so hard and exhausting.
I’m sorry if my failure to focus on one issue caused you to think I had been “indoctrinated into social justice.” I get that none of it is violence under the usual definition. My discussion of how the entire matter had no place in campus discipline should have made that clear. My particular beef is that, by treating emotionally abusive relationships as a disciplinary issue, the university is again infantilizing the population it says it wants to help.
The usual definition? Like, English?
I love the UMich policy! Especially the part that says denying sex is violence. Threat of Title IX process has gotten me laid so many times.