An Australian student* found an obstacle between him and his final grade that he didn’t anticipate.
There was no way around it, under it, over it. The deal was that in order to see his grade, he had to obtain a grade of 100% on the quiz before he could move on.
The requirement of ideological training in college has become commonplace. Students are often required to take a course that teaches cultural respect, anti-bullying and, as here, “consent.” Many will react with “so what?” as each of these things serves a salutory purpose. Is there anything wrong with students learning how to be, as advocates would frame it, better human beings?
And indeed, that was one of the first reactions to this coercion.
Putting aside the simplistic assumption that any course that includes the word “consent” must be inherently wonderful, without the slightest clue what is being taught about consent, it completely ignores the salient point of whether it’s appropriate to teach it at the end of a gun, to refuse to give a student his grade unless he gets a score of 100 in ideology.
Such ignorance is similarly commonplace, as it’s a tenet of social justice that its outcomes be achieved by any means possible. If they have to deny a student his grade, contractual obligations notwithstanding, in order to mandate he be indoctrinated into a non-legal belief system, so what? Isn’t it worth it?
These courses aren’t mandated by Title IX, no matter what college administrators claim, either because of their ignorance of the law or their presumption that their students are ignorant and will accept their claims. Even the unlawful manipulation of Title IX by a Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights bureaucrat with unchecked power to dictate to colleges how they should sex police their students as part of her radical social engineering agenda never went so far as to suggest the authority to require physics majors to pass a class in feminist sexual methodology. Never did it authorize an administration to use grades as a weapon to force students to endure propaganda consumption.
Don’t let the titles of these courses fool you, as it did to Shane Herbert, although it’s hard to imagine anything would have prevented his enthusiastic approval. Nobody is suggesting that it’s acceptable to be culturally insensitive, a bully or a sexual abuser. But this fails to answer the question of what these fashionable words and phrases mean, and what indoctrination is being forced down students’ throats in the process of being turned into what progressives deem a “better human being.”
These are not courses about the law; there is no viable law as to what “consent” means. Some teach students, male students, that when alcohol has touched a woman’s lips, she cannot give consent. Some teach that a woman can withdraw consent at any time, including the next day or a year later. Some teach that a woman who enthusiastically consents in the moment may be doing so because she feels coerced, or has no choice, or harbors some feelings of ambiguity in the back of her head, thus making her enthusiastic consent a mask for her lack of consent.
None of these things are real. None make any sense. And yet, these are believed by many and taught by some.
But even if the “consent matters” course that was required of this Australian student was brilliantly done, entirely accurate and filled an indisputable need to teach young male students how to conduct themselves properly, by what authority does a college refuse to tell the student his grade, for which he paid his tuition, he went to classes, he studied, he tested, unless he also, without warning, without agreement, also suffers ideological education?
There is an irony in coercing a student to be indoctrinated about coercion, and whether that’s a sound pedagogical method if the goal is to teach students, but that too begs the question. A student attends college to learn a course of study, whatever that may be, not to be politically indoctrinated at the end of a gun.
Whether you agree with the sentiment that “Heaven forbid people should learn something…,” what they are there to learn isn’t how to be an acceptably progressive man. Yet, that’s not merely what they’re teaching, but what they’re extorting from students if they want to be a college graduate in whatever field of endeavor they’ve come to study. It’s no longer enough to offer students such courses, but to dictate that they will learn it, 100%, or they will never obtain the degree.
In the twisted vision of what constitutes “good,” this is worthy of extortion. The means by which colleges can coerce their students to be the sort of people they want them to be is merely the price of producing ideologically pure students. Only the outcome matters. And as long as the outcome is ideologically approved, so what?
*Before anyone gets hung up on the student, his college, his being Aussie, or any other petty details, this isn’t about him, but about the nature of what was done. Focus.
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Harvard did a similar thing for the first time this fall: students were barred from registering w/o completing a university-created “consent” module. Link below:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/9/18/sexual-assault-module/
As goes Harvard…
Robert Heinlein.
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
In fairness, it’s because they RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT!!!
No! It’s because they are STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
As the old saying goes “the inmates are now running tbe asylum.”
Might be past time to grab the shockshields and water cannons and for e them back to the padded rooms the belong in.
So close to the edge, but not quite over it. Excellent self-restraint, OM.
Problem is that we can’t tell the inmates from the staff anymore. Who to put in the padded cells and who to put at nurses station? Is there an option to medicate them all into their private happyland and choose a new set of custodians?
You mean without… consent?
I’m sure they actually still assign his grade, he just doesn’t get to know what it is. Perhaps at the end, they follow up by telling inquiring employers, state bar authorities, etc., that his transcript cannot be released due to a “Consent Matters Sanction.”
The purpose of the training is to add a data item to every student’s file showing that they were educated and warned. This data item will be used in pleadings in later Title 9 litigation.
It is a data item that the University (1) can use to protect itself from a Title 9 lawsuit for not protecting women generally, and (2) can use against a male charged in a University Title 9 action who argues that the girl “consented”.
Similar quizzes are routinely used by all major corporations to “teach” employees the law of bribes, kickbacks, fraud, deception, self-dealing, nepotism, etc.
If, for example, a corporation is charged with offering bribes, they can point to the “bribe training” that all employees were required to take, thereby avoiding corporate liability and (hopefully) limiting liability to the bribe-taking employee.
Ah, the conspiracy theorist approach. Interesting, even if completely wrong as that’s never been a data point in any Title IX suit ever.
The company I work for does regularly require the types of tests he mentioned. I have no idea what they do with the data, but the general assumption is that it’s for legal CYA.
I suppose it is also possible that they believe it will teach some hopelessly clueless employees that bribes are bad, m’kay?
Businesses aren’t colleges. They are subject to Title VII, not Title IX. Complaints are adjudicated by the EEOC, not campus tribunals. In other words, one thing has nothing to do with the other, even if you don’t understand why.
Bad news, folks. (1) Title IX is a US statute, it is null and void in Australia. (2) In the US, Title IX doesn’t cover curriculum. For example, one can take action under Title IX if the school has a pro-female Women’s Center (or a Gender Center) but no equivalent pro-man Men’s Center. Or provides services to females without offering equivalent services to men. One has no grounds for action under Title IX if the school has a pro-female Women’s Studies class but no counterpart pro-man Men’s Studies class because those are curricular matters. See?
The last I checked, the Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights Enforcement has a web page one can use to file complaints of possible Title IX violations. [Web link redacted per this web site owner’s rules. Man up and ask the Internet for it.] I recommend that college men use it. Heavily. Put your tax dollars to work doing something useful for a change, gentlemen.
I get what you’re saying here and would agree if it’s the case that this requirement for graduation was added AFTER the student was accepted and began taking classes there. Alternatively, it could have been a pop-up message to click ACCEPT on when he was signing up for classes the semester after the requirement was added for graduation. It’s not clear from the article whether that’s the case or not. In any case, it could be from the “nudge” school of behavioral science, where, in the case of that pop-up, the students see a million of them and always click without reading. Just spitballing here, but I would want to know clearly what the student did or didn’t agree to, however surreptitiously.
While anything is possible, and I wouldn’t put it past a college student to mindlessly click without reading, it’s a little hard to imagine this was just a random pop up where he hit the wrong button. Let’s go with, you know, horses rather than 6-legged zebras.
Still, despite Shane Herbert’s conditioned reflex of scolding men, at least Shane Herbert admitted in his backhanded way that men are people too. So there’s hope yet that Shane Herbert hasn’t completely submerged into assimilation by the feminist goop-blob.
Oh, the irony of requiring a course on consent.