The Other McCain

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

True Love Is Always an Exception

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 11 Comments

“She was 15 and he was 28 and her teacher at the Ferrer Modern School in New York, when they met, and married, in 1913.”

That sentence, from the 1981 obituary of Ariel Durant, is an important historic note to keep in mind when considering prohibitions against professors dating their students. Kelly Anders, an administrator at the University of California-Davis, writes at Prawfs Blog:

In several law schools where I have worked, there are professors or employees who are happily married to former students, whom they began to date while they were students. Perhaps schools turn a blind eye because law students are adults — in contrast to undergraduate students — and, in theory, they are thus freer to make decisions about whom to date, much like people who date co-workers. But what about unwanted attention or a perceived inability to say no?

The reference to “unwanted attention,” of course, brings us onto the legal battleground of sexual harassment. It has always struck me as absurd that anyone could be expected to know their attention was “unwanted” prior to actually expressing that attention. It is one thing if Employee A continues to make overtures toward Employee B after the latter has made clear that the interest is not reciprocated, but it is not rarely the case — and one hears horror stories about these cases — that the very first attempt at flirtation lights the fuse on a powder keg of resentment that leads to a sexual harassment complaint.

One typical scenario is that you have a male and female who are friendly co-workers until the moment when the male says or does something to indicate that he would be interested in being more than friends. This suggestion — and it may be conveyed indirectly, by a joke or a gesture — suffices to poison the friendship, at least from the female’s perspective. She had believed her workplace friendship with this man to be a strictly platonic and professional relationship. The moment he hints at a romantic interest, however, she suspects that the whole “friendship” was just an angle, a scam, a Trojan Horse ploy to get close to her so he could make his move. She feels deceived and betrayed, and perhaps rightly so. But if you are familiar with how sexual harassment complaints are handled, you see how what is basically a personal misunderstanding can turn into a Kafkaesque nightmare, where a guy finds himself accused of a civil rights violation for what seems to him entirely innocuous behavior.

In some cases with which I am familiar, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the complainant is just an opportunist looking for an easy payday, because it has become standard practice in corporate policy — and everybody knows this — to pay “go-away money” to sexual harassment complainants. Basically, if a woman can make a remotely plausible claim of discrimination or harassment, and she has any evidence at all (e.g., a rudely worded e-mail) to support her claim, the lawyers will always advise clients to settle the case. It doesn’t matter if the woman suffered no actual harm, or if the person accused of harassment insists his innocent actions have been unfairly interpreted. The cost of defending against a discrimination suit is simply an expense no company wants to pay, and so standard practice: Pay the complainant a lump sum (usually a year’s salary) in exchange for her leaving the company and signing an agreement not to pursue further litigation.

Everybody in business knows this kind of stuff happens and, because everybody knows it, the potential threat of a sexual harassment complaint casts a large shadow over the 21st-century workplace. It is not merely that male-female interactions tend to become almost ritualistic in their androgynous formality — for no male with half a brain would dare even acknowledge a female co-worker is female — but that every managerial decision has to be second-guessed as to whether it might inadvertently suggest discrimination against females. A sort of tokenism creeps into personnel decisions. If the last two employees you hired or promoted were male, the next time you have an opening there will be a certain amount of pressure to hire or promote a female in the name of “diversity.” And there are innumerable ripple effects of that mentality.

We return, then, to what Kelly Anders says about law professors dating their students. One reason for my low opinion of academia in general is my knowledge of ulterior motives of the “permanent student.”

Well do I remember from my own college days those graduate students who had apparently realized that staying in school forever — which seemed to involve a lot of time hanging out at the off-campus pub — provided them with sexual access to a continually renewed supply of undergraduate females. The graduate teaching assistant, or the newly-minted Ph.D. striving to attain tenure, was quite often involved in furtive affairs with students. These affairs were seldom entirely secret; friends of the students involved would at least suspect what was happening, even if the student did not tell them; and rumors about such affairs fostered widespread suspicion of favoritism. Any reasonably attractive female student who seemed friendly with a male instructor was presumed to be either having an affair with him, or else dangling the bait in front of him with the hope of getting a better grade.

When “male feminist” Professor Hugo Schwyzer was revealed to be a womanizing psychopath, I was not really surprised, and I suspect similar (but not so egregious) behavior is far more common among university faculty than is generally acknowledged. As far as I know, for example, I’m the only journalist who noticed that Professor Lisa Johnson apparently married a “butch” lesbian who was formerly her student.

Anyway, Professor Glenn Reynolds says about the student-professor dating question: “The interesting discussion is in the comments,” and I will quote some of those comments here:

Professors should not date students. Schools, including law schools, should forbid this behavior, full stop. . . .

My official stance is that faculty and students should not date — period. . . . Regardless of age, students are students, and the teacher-student relationship should be held in the highest esteem, without being diluted or prejudiced by non-professional (and unprofessional) feelings. . . .

No one should think he/she has a right to use the workplace for romantic pursuits, and in a situation of older adults having authority over younger ones, there are lots of potential issues that could arise which would complicate consent issues. . . .

I agree with those comments, and view with profound suspicion anyone who is arguing to the contrary. A policy that generally forbids romantic involvement between faculty and students makes sense in so many ways that you have to wonder why anyone would be trying to carve out loopholes and exceptions in such a wise policy. However . . .

There are cases which seem genuinely exceptional, and the amazing love story between Will and Ariel Durant is one of those. Where these truly exceptional cases occur, there is no need to create a loophole in a policy that generally forbids faculty-student romance, because even if the faculty member were immediately fired under such circumstances, this would seem a small price to pay to have obtained true love. And I think that’s really the appropriate standard: If you really love somebody in that happily-ever-after way, you’d quit your job to be with them if the rules of your job stood in the way.

 

Category: Education

‘Operation Stalk My Girlfriend’

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 10 Comments

Kevin D. Williamson has a column about NSA employees who were caught using the agency’s surveillance technology for personal purposes:

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. . . .
In a free and open society, there is a generally unspoken understanding between the citizens and the intelligence forces: We the people understand that they’re going to necessarily conduct themselves in a nefarious fashion from time to time, bending or breaking some laws along the way. We know this: That’s what spies do, being a necessary evil that is no less evil for being so acutely necessary. The spooks’ end of the bargain is: being good at what they do, not comporting themselves like a bunch of jackasses, and getting really bendy with the situational ethics only when doing so advances some legitimate national-security interest. Operation Mincemeat we can live with; Operation Stalk My Girlfriend we cannot. . . .

Read the whole thing. Kevin’s a brilliant writer.

 

Category: Corruption, Crime

Your Future (or Lack Thereof)

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 60 Comments

“Male and female created he them” (Genesis 5:2) seems obvious enough. “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) is not a difficult commandment to understand or obey. However, in the modern world, so many people actually think they’re smarter than God that they manage to persuade themselves that extinction is “progress”:

A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 percent…
Forty-nine percent of women under 34 are not in any kind of romantic relationship, and nor are 61 percent of single men. A third of Japanese adults under 30 have never dated. Anyone. Ever. It’s not that they’ve stopped “having sex”… It’s bigger than that: It’s a flight from human intimacy. . . .
The Japan Times . . . quotes the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research as saying that the country’s population is expected to decline between 26% and 38% by 2060.

That information comes from Mark Steyn, whose ancestors were on a first-name basis with the author of the commandments previously cited, and here’s more of the same:

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

It’s really simple, but some folks think they’re smarter than God.

 

 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Japan, Planned Parenthood, Religion

Are You Certain You Don’t Want to Consider Homeschooling Your Kids?

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 26 Comments

If you think it’s a good idea to send your children to public schools, you probably aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening in public schools and who is in charge of public schools. Saturday, I searched Google News for the words “teacher + arrest” and — in addition to the usual stories about teachers raping and molesting their students — found an interesting variety of criminal mayhem:

Just a small sample of what you’re getting for your public education tax dollars — and what excellent role models for your kids!

 

Category: Education

Worse Than Dinkins

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 10 Comments

The tenure of David Dinkins as mayor of New York City is universally remembered as the absolute nadir of that city’s history, but Bill de Blasio is making a strong claim to the title Worst Mayor Ever:

NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of officers outside the church where a funeral was held for a policeman killed along with his partner in an ambush shooting turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke during Saturday’s service.
The reaction from officers watching Officer Rafael Ramos’ funeral on giant TV screens followed comments from police union officials who had said Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust that contributed to the killings of the two New York Police Department officers.
Inside Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, however, mourners gave de Blasio polite applause before and after his speech.

(Via Memeorandum.) Oh, he got “polite applause” from people mourning a dead cop. Way to go, Mayor Golf Claps!

 

Category: Crime, New York

No, The Homo Bureaucratus Infestation Is Not A Representative Sample

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

USA Today is closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution:

Yet to look around the USA is to see fear and anxiety. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a nation of wimps.

Take, for instance, the response to the Ebola outbreak. Millions of people worked themselves into a panic over a disease that has claimed the lives of fewer Americans this year than unsanitary caramel apples.

Or take the many universities so afraid of offending people that they have muzzled the very debate that is reputed to be one of their hallmarks.

You’ve had Godless Commies attacking our institutions for decades, and there are some external effects. The President is incontinent in the face of, well, anything job-related. Brian Williams sounds like a voice of authority, for all he lacks hair #1 anyplace that matters. At UVA, Teresa Sullivan practices fact-free fascism with a Nurse Ratched smile.

However, as Senator Mike Lee noted, the recent shenanigans with CROmnibus aren’t going unnoticed. While it would be silly to think that the country is going to escape at least a partial crash before the No-Talent Rodeo Clown leaves his final mess on the carpet, total collapse seems kind of Chicken Little.

Sure, the Commie twerps are doing everything they can to get a race war going, but pesky facts keep revealing them for liars, right, Sullivan? Lies have a  transient effect at best. The fallout of the lies may take longer to clean up. Indeed, unwinding a century of Progressive collapse is going to be the ultimate test of American Exceptionalism.

via Instapundit

Category: Culture, Instapundit

The Fraternity Initiation Rape Story

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 50 Comments

“Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process.'”
— Annie E. Clark, Feb. 28, 2013, Huffington Post

When I saw that sentence, it struck me as weirdly similar to the story told in Rolling Stone by Sabrina Rubin Erdely:

  • A prestigious public university in the South.
  • A freshman girl raped during a fraternity initiation.
  • An activist’s story about administrative indifference to victims.

You may not recognize the name Annie E. Clark, but in January 2013, she was one of five complainants who accused UNC of violating the civil rights of female students in the handling of sexual assault charges:

Three UNC students, one former student and one former administrator filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday morning, claiming that the University facilitated a hostile environment for students reporting sexual assault.
The complaint, more than 30 pages in length, has emerged just one month after sophomore Landen Gambill and another female student revealed to The Daily Tar Heel how the University handled their rape cases.
Their stories — rich with what they called unequal treatment from administrators, inappropriate questioning in UNC’s Honor Court and blatant violations of rights — reflected what victims say is a deeply rooted problem at the University.
That problem prompted junior Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, who graduated from UNC in 2011, both of whom are sexual assault survivors, to spearhead the filing of the complaint in an effort to seek justice for survivors and change what they say is UNC’s culture of hostility. . . .
The complaint was also signed by Gambill, the female student who asked that her name not be used for safety reasons in the December [Daily Tar Heel] article, and former Assistant Dean of Students Melinda Manning, who stepped down from her position in December after 11 years at UNC.

 Now, it is certainly not my intent to defend UNC’s administration or to claim to know what happened in any particular case. All I know about any of this is what the complainants themselves allege:

When sophomore Landen Gambill made the decision to press charges against her rapist through the University Honor Court in the spring of 2012, she assumed the process would be easy.
Armed with what she said were pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt of her accused student-attacker, Gambill thought she was just a hearing away from getting the justice she deserved.
She had endured months of sexual abuse from a long-term boyfriend.
But she said not even that abuse could have prepared for her for the kind she suffered during the University’s handling of her sexual assault case — a process she said was fraught with a clear violation of her rights that left her psychologically damaged and her ex-boyfriend innocent.

Uh, “a long-term boyfriend”? Stipulate that people sometimes get into relationships with partners who abuse them. Still, if Landen Gambill had “pages of convincing evidence that proved the guilt” of her ex-boyfriend, why did she take her case to the University Honor Court rather than presenting this evidence to the police? The account Gambill gave the Daily Tar Heel of how she “was continually abused — sexually and verbally — by her long-term boyfriend” as a freshman at UNC, followed by “months of stalking, threats and harassment” after they broke up, is lacking in detail. Yet if his treatment of her was as bad as she says it was, why did she not pursue criminal charges against him?

That question must be left dangling, unanswered, because if Landen Gambill has ever explained this, I can’t find the explanation and it would be wrong to speculate. Therefore, let us return to Annie E. Clark’s Huffington Post column from February 2013:

Weeks into my undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a friend told me she had that been raped a few days earlier as part of a fraternity “initiation process.” I was a young advocate; I had heard stories of assault and I knew how to respond to survivors, but I had no idea what to do within the UNC university system. Therefore, I just went into action mode; my friend and I sat down in the wooden chairs in my residence hall room and began to Google resources and options for reporting… hours later, we still couldn’t find the proper university protocol.
When she asked me about my involvement in violence prevention, I shared that I was a recent rape survivor as well. We brainstormed, and together we came up with an idea: I would go to an administrator and report my assault the following week. I would figure out the resources available, and then I would share with her the process so that she could report as well.
We made a pact.
The next week I tried to report my assault. I was incredibly confident in my story as well as my new university home, and why wouldn’t I be? I was raped. It was violent. He was wrong.
“So why are you here today?” the administrator asked me.
“I want to report what happened and get counseling. I was raped.”
The response which I received left me both speechless and confused:
“Well… Rape is like football, if you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback, Annie… is there anything you would have done differently?”
I was then handed a multiple page-survey to fill out about my rape.

You can read the whole thing, but surely I am not the only one who senses there is something distinctly weird about Clark’s story:

  • This occurred when Clark was a freshman in fall 2007.
  • Her friend tells her she was raped at a fraternity.
  • Clark had herself already become a rape victim at UNC.
  • Clark also describes herself as an “advocate,” someone involved in “violence prevention.”
  • After her friend reports being raped at a fraternity, Clark and the friend “brainstorm” and decide that — rather than report that crime to the police — what she needs to do is “figure out the resources available” by reporting her own “violent” rape to a university administrator.

Do you see what I mean in saying this is distinctly weird? I am not saying that Clark is lying, I’m saying that her story contradicts any common-sense understanding of what victims of rape should do. The reaction she describes from the UNC administrator — “is there anything you would have done differently?” — also seems distinctly weird, but here I will risk a speculative explanation: University officials hear stories like hers quite often, criminal prosecution is impossible, and all they can do is to attempt to comfort the victim and help her avoid repeated victimization.

It’s always a “he-said, she-said” situation, you see. The college girl and the college boy hook up, usually when both of them are drunk, and in the aftermath — often several days or weeks later — the girl declares that what happened between them was rape. There is no way to prove as a matter of criminal law that a rape occurred, however, and so the girl (and I use the word “girl” deliberately, because these stories almost always involve a teenage victim, usually a freshman) turns to campus officials and becomes involved in an extra-judicial administrative process like UNC’s Honor Court system.

One suspects the “Unfortunate Sexual Incident” files are stacked to the ceiling at a large public university like UNC. How many times a year do officials hear some variation of the stories told by Landen Gambill and Annie Clark? And how many times does it have to be explained that, in any “he-said, she-said” situation where (a) the victim was voluntarily alone with the accused rapist, (b) there is no clear evidence of rape, and (c) the accused rapist does not confess his guilt, it is impossible to prosecute the Unfortunate Sexual Incident as a crime?

Surely no one would seriously contend that officials at UNC or any other prestigious institution of higher education are pro-rape, yet these officials are in effect being accused of enabling rape and thereby violating the civil rights of their female students. Short of returning to an old-fashioned system of curfews and chaperones, or at least a determined crackdown on underage drinking, however, it’s hard to see what universities can be expected to do about the campus environment within which the Unfortunate Sexual Incident typically occurs.

The law of large numbers is at work here. Every fall, tens of thousands of teenage freshman girls show up on the campuses of colleges and universities. They go to parties, get drunk and hook up with boys. Some percentage of those hook-ups will be unpleasant, including some which are clearly criminal. Yet among those many hundreds of Unfortunate Sexual Incident files which pile up in the offices of university administrators, only a few will contain the kind of testimony and evidence that can lead to a successful criminal prosecution. This will leave the majority of complainants feeling that they have been betrayed by the system. Here were can cite the account of Landen Gambill:

“It’s incredibly clear that those people had no idea what sexual assault is, what consent is,” said Landen Gambill, a sophomore whose assault case was processed by interim procedures.
“They were not only offensive and inappropriate, but they were so victim-blaming.
“They made it seem like my assault was completely my fault.” . . .
In her trial, Gambill said she was forced to answer irrelevant and inappropriate questions.
“The woman student said to me, ‘Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would’ve broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn’t?’” she said.
Gambill said the court used her history of clinical depression and her suicide attempt — which she said was a result of her abusive relationship — against her.
“They implied that I was emotionally unstable and couldn’t be telling the truth because I had attempted suicide,” she said.

As I said previously, Landen Gambill’s account includes no detail of the abuse she suffered from her long-term boyfriend, and it would not be appropriate to speculate. Yet the reactions she describes from the Honor Court officials, and their unwillingness to take disciplinary action against Gambill’s ex-boyfriend, should lead us to pause and ask, “What really happened? Why did she keep dating this guy, if his behavior toward her was so atrocious?”

Here it is helpful to know that simply getting admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an academic honor. Only 29% of applicants are accepted and, among those accepted, 78% were in the top 10% of their high-school senior class. So we may assume Landen Gambill is highly intelligent, and that her ex-boyfriend, a fellow UNC student, is not a lowbrow street thug. How is it, then, that this elite young man sexual brutalizes this elite young woman who endures his brutality for many months as part of their relationship?

Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I simply lack the sophistication to understand the habits and attitudes of these elite students. Or maybe I could make an educated guess about what’s happening.

Never mind my guesses about that, however.

Right now, my suspicious mind is focused on how Annie Clark describes hearing a fellow UNC freshman’s tale of being raped “as part of a fraternity ‘initiation process'” in 2007. Clark told that story in a January 2013 Huffington Post column and then in the fall of 2014 we find that the story of a freshman at the University of Virginia being raped as part of a fraternity initiation becomes the focal point of Rolling Stone‘s story about campus “rape culture.”

If this is not merely a coincidence, what kind of non-coincidence is it? The Rolling Stone UVA story has been ripped to shreds, but what about this seemingly similar UNC story told by Annie Clark? Is it possible that some fraternities at some universities actually do encourage sexual assault as part of their initiation process? If so, why would these (hitherto unsuspected) practices be reported as having occurred at two quite prestigious southern universities, in stories appearing in two different liberal media venues, within the span of two years?

Is this just an Atlantic Coast Conference problem, or what? Are there no rape initiations for fraternities at second-tier state universities? Are freshman girls not being raped by frat pledges in the Midwest, or at private schools in the Northeast?

There is something distinctly weird about this, and I don’t know what it is. However, I can report that Annie Clark has turned her activism into a full-time career as co-founder of a non-profit group called End Rape on Campus: “After directly working with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, she helped write the Bi-Partisan Campus Safety and Accountability Act.” Do you suppose that Annie Clark and her group had any contact with Sabrina Erdely or Erdely’s UVA liaison Emily Renda? I mean, we already know that Emily Renda’s anti-rape activism led to her testifying in June at a Senate hearing chaired by Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin:

“A range of sanctions is about getting survivors through the door,” Emily Renda, a special intern in the Office of the Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer, at the University of Virginia, said before the committee. Renda spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism and worked with a White House task force that investigated campus sexual assault. . . .
Some of Harkin’s fellow senators, including Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have been leading reform efforts.

So, Kirsten Gillibrand is “leading reform efforts,” and Kirsten Gillibrand worked with Annie Clark’s “End Rape on Campus” group, and Emily Renda (who “spent much of her time at college working on sexual assault-related activism”) turns out to be the official UVA contact for Rolling Stone‘s Erdely, who told this story about a freshman girl being raped as part of a fraternity initiation.

Maybe this is all just a coincidence, but it is distinctly weird.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism

Feminist Logic

Posted on | December 26, 2014 | 16 Comments

Never let facts get in the way of a useful narrative:

When President Obama announced in September his “It’s On Us” initiative to combat college sexual assault, he declared that “an estimated 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted in her college years.” . . .
But now, in the wake of a new federal Department of Justice report showing the incidence of rape and sexual assault on campus at far lower levels and trending down over the last decade, that statistic is being called into question.
An initiative to combat college sexual assault, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., also is under fresh scrutiny. . . .
“Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate,” said McCaskill, whose legislation also calls for a national survey of campus assault. . . . “This will always be an underreported crime.”
Using data from the Census Bureau’s Crime Victimization survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ new report, released earlier this month, states that between 1995 and 2013, 6.1 female college students of every 1,000 reported being a victim of rape or sexual assault the previous year. The 2013 report of 4.3 rapes or sexual assaults of college women per 1,000 was half the roughly 9 per 1,000 reported in the early 2000s.

Glenn Reynolds observes:

Old narrative: The statistical proof of our argument is overwhelming!
New narrative: Our argument is too important to be undermined by mere statistics!

Feminist ideology requires that rape be a pervasive problem — “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” to quote Susan Brownmiller — in order to justify their continued war against patriarchal oppression. Therefore, it does not matter if a highly-publicized atrocity tale turns out to be a hoax, nor does it matter what actual trend the data show. Facts and logic are tools of the patriarchy, and disagreeing with feminists is hate.

 

Category: Feminism
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