The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ivy League Administration Reacts Quickly to Ivy League Sexual Harassment Charges

Posted on | April 5, 2011 | 13 Comments

“Because the budget is so last week,” Wombat snarked in sharing the headline this morning:

White House targets sexual assault on campus

Wombat and other readers can be forgiven for wondering why this issue suddenly popped to the top of the administration’s agenda. But then again, we can’t afford to send our kids to Yale University and don’t usually read the New York Times, which reported last week:

A group of 16 people who filed a Title IX complaint against Yale University last month said on Thursday that the federal Department of Education had launched an investigation to review Yale’s policies for dealing with sexual harassment and assault cases.
The group, which includes current and former students, noted an episode in October when they said members of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon marched around chanting misogynistic and sexually derogatory slogans.
On Thursday, the group said the school’s “inadequate response” failed to eliminate a “hostile sexual environment on campus,” which violated the federal gender-equity law Title IX.

See? Our nation’s elite do not spend $49,800 a year to send their daughters to a world-class university with the expectation that their girls will hear crude chants from the Dekes. This urgent issue has been boiling under the surface since October, when the Yale Daily News reported:

Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers shouted offensive chants as part of a pledge process on Old Campus Wednesday night.
The Women’s Center deemed the actions “hate speech” and “an active call for sexual violence.”
Around 9:30 pm, students were seen chanting, among other things, “No means yes, yes means anal.”
The students, some of whom were blindfolded and being led in a line with their hands on each others’ shoulders, were also heard chanting “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f— dead women.”

Our Ivy League president (B.A., Columbia ’83, J.D., magna cum laude, Harvard Law ’91) is keenly attuned to the concerns of students, parents, alumni and faculty at the nation’s elite universities.

And he was never a Deke.

So forget about Libya, forget about the budget, forget about everything: The executive authority of the United States will now devote its legal and administrative resources to ensuring that no Ivy League coed ever has to hear fraternity pledges chanting obscenities.

The only hope for the Yale Dekes? Eric Stratton’s historic defense of Delta Tau Chi at Faber College:

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg — isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America.

Category: Education, Scandal, Sex

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