>But after a lifetime in service of the feminist cause, she took on the case of a friend whose son she came to believe had been wrongly convicted of rape and won his acquittal on appeal.
This is one of the big ways in which sexism is a much more tractable problem than racism and less potentially explosive. Women and men both have members of the opposite sex that they genuinely love. I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases. A lot of the opposition to these title ix courts has come from mothers worried about their sons being falsely accused.
With racism, there is a pretty good chance that in some areas, a person of one race has virtually no one of another race that they genuinely love. This allows racial discrimination to last longer, and has the danger that when base emotions get appealed to by demagogues, there is less resistance.
How would bias toward gay people fit in with that? A lot of people don't know (or at least aren't aware that they know) anyone gay, but bias toward gay people has dramatically fallen over the last couple of decades.
There was a recent episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR that talked about this [1].
This part is particularly interesting:
> In a thought experiment, Mahzarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated. To be clear, this isn't a prediction about what is going to happen. It just shows you the speed at which different biases are changing.
What they found is that this would have anti-gay bias all but eliminated in 9 more years. By contrast, it's about 60 more years for anti-black biases to be eliminated, 140 years for skin tone biases against darker skin to go away. Biases against the elderly and the disabled and the overweight do not go away within the next 150 years.
Most families include the elderly and the overweight, so the idea that familiarity breeds acceptance would predict that those biases should be going away quicker than biases against gays.
(To reiterate, the timeframes aren't predictions of what will happen. They are just comparisons of the rates that those biases are changing right now).
I'm not sure the scenarios "some of my best friends are of the opposite sex" or "some of my best friends are of another race" have much bearing on sexism or racism. Loving someone from a different category doesn't automatically dissolve all antagonism or prejudice—it might just override it in a specific case. Relationships are multidimensional. You would need to provide evidence that these bonds of love/affection somehow erode prejudice toward a given 'other' in general. There are many historic cases of celebrities who have been widely accepted despite massive ongoing prejudice against the group of which they are a member. Affection for celebrities is not the same as familial love, but I do think this suggests that the way people feel about individuals doesn't translate in a simple way to their attitudes to whole groups.
Exactly, racism is much more of a fully-stable equilibrium than sexism, since full dehumanization of the other sex is always going to be impossible, if only due to adjacency. And adjacency can be critical to rights movements: one of the big successes of the gay rights movement was combating the stereotype of evil deviants through a strategy of positioning gay people as neighbors, brothers, sons, etc; regular people who just happened to have a different sexuality.
By contrast, there's nothing stopping racial groups from tending towards being fully segregated from one another, to the point that people stop thinking of the other race as full humans instead of fuzzy stereotypes.
I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases.
Generally speaking, if you want to nail a rapist to the wall, you should fill it with middle aged men, whether they have children or not, and actively avoid women.
Middle aged men remember what Randy jerks they were capable of being. Even if they have no daughters, they have mothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends and they want their women protected.
Women will say to themselves "I wouldn't have worn that outfit/gone to that bar/been in that part of town after dark." Women will try to convince themselves it was somehow the victim's fault so they can feel safe and in control of their lives.
> She asked if it mattered to them that she believed the acquitted to be innocent. The answer she received made it clear that the guilt or innocence of the accused was a matter of indifference. What mattered was that she had sided with the enemy.
I see this in a lot of forums, such as r/twoxchromosomes on reddit
The outspoken members there are women who assume their negative life experience is all women's experience. That they are speaking for the injustice of all women. Disagreeing with that version of reality is the worst sin of all. Offering a different perspective is at best tacit consent for the status quo or at worst advocating for the victimhood of women, intentionally(?) ignoring any other possibility. Offering a different perspective if you do not have two X chromosomes is mansplaining, no matter what the content is.
This is called an echo chamber. People don't realize they don't have as much consensus on reality as they believe.
I think one way to short circuit this is to reveal that the lack of consensus perpetuates the oppression of women. There are men willing to be allies and help create a gradient of collaboration, but given the censorship it is equally as entertaining watching a fragmented cause get nowhere due to its own balkanization that the echo chambers doesn’t even even seem to notice.
And this is all exacerbated because people aren't treating each other as individuals, and instead trying to speak for entire groups. The irony is that you can't even address this conundrum without grouping the people who do this together.
Your thesis presumes some democratic mechanism, as juries ultimately are.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of the laws we are subjected to in the United States are bureaucratic edicts removed several levels from democratic checks and balances. It appears to me that these are more readily steered by lobbying groups -- which by their nature agglomerate polarized supporters.
How else can you explain this Title IX perversity?
True in the sense that it creates a "floor" for the depths to which people might sink. But this process can still sink pretty low.
Consider how women couldn't vote in the US until 1919 -- a half century after blacks.
And a more modern example that was on display for all to see: the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. There were not a lot of facts available -- no date, no place, no witness that could remember. Yet millions were ready to brand him a rapist to the whole nation and pressure him out of political office.
I think that may be because, at least in America, ethnic minorities are over represented in crime and the "under class" in a way that isn't true of gay people.
I'm not saying its right to draw the conclusion "black people are overrepresented in crime therefore black people/culture must be bad", but I think it is human nature to do so. Going further, if an individual has had a negative experience with a person of another race (e.g. being mugged, living next to an addict, etc.) then there is also likely to be an emotional component that is difficult to overcome.
Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that this is right, just that it's human nature.
The notion that fathers who have daughters can't be sexist towards women is taking a really narrow view of sexism.
You can think that women aren't responsible enough to vote, or to hold certain jobs while still loving your daughter. You can kick it back with your black friend on the weekend while still not wanting black people in your neighborhood, your friends is just "one of the good ones".
Most of human society throughout history has been profoundly sexist by modern standards, and we still have entire countries that are structurally sexist by the standards of the west. None of that was destabilized because everyone had a mother, and most fathers had daughters.
Given the popularity of social justice causes, I have a hard time believing this is a material factor. People seem rather up in arms about racism or even just adverse impact on this day and age.
How in the world is the conversation not about the lack of ethics of the teachers and faculty who agree to serve as the amateur judges/questioners in these tribunals?
Hello, I spent a decade of my life learning just how difficult it is to become an expert in my very narrow field. In fact I spend most of my time helping undergrads refine their rank speculation into tractable problems to potentially guide them to a deeper understanding of even a tiny slice of my narrow specialty.
What's that? You'd like me to serve on a jury for the school? No not on a jury, but instead to serve as a kind of combination panel judge and amateur lawyer? For what may be criminal allegations against a student? And you say there's no actual trained judicial expert to lead and constrain the process, but instead a handbook that will teach me in about an hour how to question a witness?
Sorry, it's my minimal sense of civic and academic integrity calling. I really have to take this...
At Baylor a former investigator described believing that because it was a religious school they expected there wouldn't be much for them to do.
I have to wonder how much life experience someone has who thinks that...
At a large public institution near me they had some lawyers review their processes.
The resulting suggestions were pretty shocking. Things like, educating the accused as to what the process even was. Notifying the accused that there was an appeal (they apparently didn't do that all the time). Allowing all parties legal representation. And more detailed recording of testimony, mostly due to cases that involved concerns from accused students that their testimony that was recorded was inaccurate and had only been recorded by hand written notes taken by another student. In some cases their efforts to correct what they said seemed to be interpreted as lying... because it conflicted with the original notes (but not any factual conflict).
It is mind boggling that any of the suggestions were needed.
In the meantime the folks running the department investigating the reports are also tasked with writing the rules, investigating, judging....and on their own time advocating for various policies surrounding sexual assault.
Colleges are crazy places and professors do all sorts of weird things. I’m not sure why.
I was in a student court for something stupid and it was kafkaesque. I had to sit and hear a professor accuse me. I was not able to object or ask questions despite the professor making factually incorrect statements about how the phone company worked. However, when I spoke the professor was able to object, cross examine and refute me.
It was so weird and professors just sat there in the jury tolerating it.
There’s a lot of fake BS in college besides the knowledge. I just avoided all that stuff because how they would make these unjust systems and be totally cool with it.
I ended up talking with the Dean and he said he wasn’t interested in whether the process was fair he just wanted to find out if I “did it.”
If anyone I know gets into a similar situation I’ll advise getting a lawyer and not speaking at all.
Unfortunately, I do not believe these ridiculous university tribunals will come to an end anytime soon. In fact, I think the problem will get much, much worse before it gets better. They are a symptom of a much larger problem.
Without distracting with any specific cases, it's very clear that the modern world is shifting away from the presumption of innocence. This, combined with an internet that remembers forever and a total disregard for free speech, will have predictably disastrous results. The set of punishable behavior is growing wider every day, whilst the standards of evidence are becoming shallower and shallower.
It's infuriating that every major US news site is being flooded with stories about increasing loneliness, plummetting sexual activity, increasing suicides, etc., but seem more than happy to contribute to the new character assassination of the day. Has it clicked for anyone yet that maybe today's youth are becoming shut-in's because they have a brain, and they know one mistake can ruin their entire life?
The commonly repeated reasons for this status-quo are pitiful.
Journalists aren't part of the judicial system, so it's alright if they pick a side without physical evidence --- as if that somehow makes their claims more likely to be true. Does not caring about science make a person's scientific claims more valid? Why even care about the news if the news doesn't care about the facts?
The 1st amendment applies only to the government, not private institutions --- so what? Is having a closed mind now a desirable personality trait? I'd hope that private individuals are working to preserve free speech as well, even if they aren't forced to do so. Besides that, many of the private institutions that this argument is applied to are in fact receiving special government funding / support (universities are a prime example, large payment processors are another). Can the government freely disregard your constitutional rights as long as it uses a private-sector middle-man?
This is amazing, thank you for posting this! I've been thinking along these exact lines for a very long time (especially since I just started at a university), but didn't want to speak up here because I was sure I'd get a chorus of accusations of sexism. But since you put this here, I thought I'd just give you a little encouragement.
This is a very difficult issue. Most sexual assaults happen in private, so there is rarely any evidence a victim can use to convict the perpetrator. Most accusations are real, but some are questionable as to whether a crime was committed, and some accusations are false. Given there is almost never any evidence, victims are at a severe disadvantage in the innocent until proven guilty paradigm. I can understand why some people want to flip the tables and "believe all women" but it's also clear that such a flipped situation has it's own severe problems, and that IMHO there is no good solution. Knowing this I have more empathy for everybody's view on this topic, rather than being in one camp and demonizing the other.
As society reaches a point where the cost of simply being accused of rape leads more and more cases of loss of a degree, job, social relations, imprisonment and that uncertainty over whether it happened or not forces decisions that are not fair or just to either party. We will simply see more and more individuals isolate themselves from the other sex to limit the risk that they will be blamed or look down upon for something.
Folks like the current Vice-President of the US, saying that he will only meet with a woman in the presence of others may become more prevalent and "correct" to limit the risk of liability. In the long run, this may lead us to fall back into segregation of sex similar to Islamic doctrine, where segregation is needed to ensure the protection of families and society.
Most may not be thinking about it, but change can happen slowly, but sometimes it happens abruptly like the changes we have been seen lately. I encourage everyone to use their minds to help build an environment that better suits the current times, before we go back in time and all we have to blame is ourselves.
In my junior year of college (very early 2000s), a senior friend was accused of rape by a classmate. Within two days he had to hide out at my girlfriend's house because a large group of large athletes was on the hunt for him to beat him up. Within weeks he was expelled from school. I don't recall the police ever being contacted.
Turns out the girl was ashamed she voluntarily slept with him. She admitted it to friends a couple months later. That was too late, of course. She received zero punishment. He was "lucky" that the police weren't notified on Day 1.
The way this article conflates sex with sexual assault really creeps me out. The first sentence states:
Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have been telling some alarming truths about the tribunals that have been adjudicating collegiate sex for the past five years.
No tribunals "adjudicate collegiate sex". They adjudicate sexual assault.
I don't know how we get there. I'm incredibly frustrated at how much doors remain shut in my face and I can't get traction, real respect and the money that goes with it.
But after a lifetime of sorting my baggage in the aftermath of sexual abuse and rape, I'm clear that one thing that must happen is women need public lives on par with what men have and women need career options and earned income on par with men.
A whole lot of this BS is rooted in the idea that a woman's sexuality is a prize to be won by an "eligible" male -- ie a man who earns enough to take care of her. There is a subtext of ownership there.
Which is part of what drives women to claim rape after a drunken hook up: It protects their perceived purity in a world where women are still not entitled to take ownership of their own sexuality and must hoard its use and preserve its value to merit future ownership by some worthy man.
Ie some man who makes enough money.
It's a terrible societal poison that seeps insidiously into far too many bedrooms.
Honestly I'm just glad to see this being discussed openly and honestly. It's a difficult subject and it's been suppressed on both sides alternatively depending on the time in history (herstory, whatever).
I'm happy that my daughter is doing so well in college and doesn't have to worry about date rape. But I'm terrified of my sons going to college because I know that consensual sex can destroy their lives. And honestly, they're much less likely to even get there or finish in the first place.
It is a sad thing to say, but the simple solution to this alarming trend of rescinding consent after having consensual sex is to record the audio of your interactions with the opposite sex. A voice-activated recorder that can store months worth of conversations can be purchased on Amazon quite cheaply.
I've even heard of work situations where male managers refuse one-on-one meetings with female employees due to fear of being falsely accused of sexual impropriety. Again, in these work-related situations, recording the interaction may save your career.
I realise the questionable ethics of recording someone when they don't know they are being recorded. I also understand that there may be legal ramifications for doing this depending on where you live.
However, if you are falsely accused of sexual assault, with an audio recording proving consent, you can avoid the complete destruction of your life. You still may have to face the legal repercussions of recording the conversation, but this will be much smaller than the consequences of not being able to prove consent.
> It is a story with which the rise of Donald Trump is fatally intertwined, but it is in fact a story that takes precedence—both temporal and logical—over the anarchic and pathological rise of the demagogue occupying the White House.
All of the elements of this story were in full flower during the Obama administration. Trump's role has been to politically capitalize on the resulting resentments. This is a "this is how you got Trump" story, if just another straw on the camel.
The line you're quoting literally notes that this all happened before Trumps rise, and is logically prior to it. It claims they were "intertwined", which is implying the relation you're asserting (Trump capitalizing on the fallout from Title IX and other such social trends under Obama). Nothing about this is a "This is how you got Trump" story.
That's literally where I closed the article. Up to that point it had been informative and somewhat convincingly written, despite the author taking too much effort to paint his subjects as paragons of fairness and logic.
But he just couldn't resist the urge to pepper a "Drumpf is a Nazi" in there. It's unnecessary to the thesis and undermines his point.
All I want is a world where more people are choosing to have more sex with more people, and as much as I support feminism and liberalism, it makes me sad to see sex become so... formalized and regimented. It's as if people are forgetting that sex feels great and that pleasure is good. I resent the fact that this great country (the US) has one of the lowest rates of sexual encounters per year per person.
For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
If I run a startup, and one of my employees is making other employees uncomfortable, and he keeps getting accused of harassing other employees, and is generally just making some of my best engineers unhappy, hurting productivity, and ruining our carefully constructed culture...
...I can fire him. I mean, obviously I need to go through the proper HR procedures, follow local employment law, respect the terms of his contract, etc., but I have no obligation to keep him employed if I think he's a net negative to my company. Arguably I have an obligation to not keep him employed. And I certainly have no requirement to wait until he has been convicted of a crime; it's not even clear any of the above is a crime.
Similarly, if I run a resort, and one of the guests is so unpleasant they're driving away other guests, or if I run a restaurant, and one of the guests is making other guests uncomfortable, or I run an apartment building, and one of the tenants is behaving poorly.
A university is a business. People come and pay money in exchange for a service, and if someone is interfering with the ability of other people to receive that service, or making people reluctant to come and pay money, it's perfectly fine for them to be asked to leave. If what they're doing happens to be a crime, then by all means, also report them to the police, but it's kind of odd to suggest that you shouldn't expel students except if they've been convicted of a crime.
That being said, I think universities are doing a terrible job here, and I think that given the extreme importance of a university education in modern life, the disruption that being expelled entails, and the stigma that will follow someone if they are expelled, we need to be very careful about the process here. My local dollar store will ban you from the store if they think you shoplifted, and I assume they get it wrong sometimes, but it's fine, because being unjustly banned from a dollar store does not ruin your life. Being unjustly expelled from university could! Things are broken and need fixing. But a world where you can only be expelled on conviction of a crime makes no sense either. The discussion need to be about the correct amount of protection needed.
The court system is a very rigid structure. It's costly, and in the USA inherently has components that make it ineffective to addressing rape accusations, particularly the right to cross examine the accuser and how a good defense attorney will use that right. Oftentimes a victim doesn't want to go through that process and is mostly interested in not having to be confronted with their rapist every day.
That doesn't mean anything, one way or another, about how well these university tribunals work. It's just pointing out deficiencies in the existing court system.
Another way to think of it is balancing false negatives and false positives. The court system, ideally, errs on the side of minimizing false positives, because of how damaging they are for the accused. That inherently means more false negatives, and aspects of the process that are also much more burdensome for victims to navigate. Universities are trying to create an alternative system, where more false positives are accepted and consequences are less severe, and more focused on making sure the victim doesn't have to confront their rapist in day-to-day life than on life-altering consequences for the accused or protecting the public more generally from repeat offenses.
Leaving aside the hot-button topic of sexual assault, there are plenty of sub-criminal or borderline actions that can occur that the college needs to deal with. Not all violations of a code of conduct are criminal violations. They'd much rather "sentence" an underage drinker to an alcohol education session than have all such students arrested. A lot of this is mission-driven: Schools honestly believe their role is to turn some of these types of things into a learning experience.
Now, you might disagree with this approach to any/all of the above, but this is the reason that answers your question.
Source: I work in higher ed technology, at times very closely with some of the disciplinary groups.
Ideally that makes sense to me, but unfortunately courts take a long of time and don't always pursue cases thoroughly. Given that reality, I don't know how an institution is supposed to handle the following scenario without their own tribunal system:
Student A and Student B have a class together. Their dorms are next door to each other. Student A rapes Student B. Is Student B expected to attend class every day with their rapist? To live next door to them? How could one expect Student B to maintain their academic performance in that sort of environment?
The problem is that it is reasonable to expel people (and, indeed, to want to expel people) with a much much lower burden of proof than would be required to lock them in a cage.
There absolutely should be a different standard for “can continue to be in this school”
and “can continue to walk down the public sidewalk”, and also decided by different people.
Institutions often want their own tribunals so that they can
more strongly influence both the outcome of investigations and decisions, and the public messaging about them. The underlying goals are not justice and equity, but protection of and advancement for the institution itself. Consider
universities, churches, and HR departments.
I think it's pretty clear that Title IX courts could do a much better job of protecting the due process rights of the accused. I think it's possible to take a nuanced position that advocates for better due process rights while still fundamentally respecting the advances we've made in protecting the interests of women and other underrepresented groups.
...but without that last part, the position I just outlined sounds very much like that of conservatives opposed to the whole program of social reform. The author of this article gives the game away in his concluding paragraphs where he throws the term "social justice" into scare quotes. He has a bigger agenda than just protecting the due process rights of college students. And (even assuming the facts are exactly as he portrays them) I'm not surprised that the professors described in the article got such a frosty reception to their position - it's a difficult one to describe without coming off as another stealth reactionary.
In your comment you seem to value who someone “is” (i.e. what their label is) more than you value what they have to say.
Your reasoning for why the non-italicized portion is not good enough is “conservatives say that”. The reason you offer for why the professors get a frosty reaction is “they could be mistaken for stealth reactionaries”. Perhaps it’s less important to consider what label you can assign to someone and more important to just consider what they’re saying.
Three generations ago, we had a framework in place which minimized these gray areas where, while a reasonable person would infer there was consent to have sex, the partner actually was not consenting to sex.
The framework was this: If the relationship was not a lifetime monogamous commitment, then the sex was not OK.
I have observed, in the majority of these cases (Caleb Warner, etc.), the issue was that two people had sex with each other without first having an established relationship with each other. It’s a simple observation that one can generally avoid a false rape accusation by making sure to only have sex in a monogamous committed relationship.
You do realize that sexual assault and rape can occur even within the framework of marriage, right?
This framework only "minimizes grey areas" in the sense that a patriarchal society assumes sex to be the the duty of the wife to the husband, and that, therefore a womans' right to deny consent is nullified under the contract of marriage. But this isn't actually the case. A relationship is not a guarantee of perpetual sexual consent.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
This is one of the big ways in which sexism is a much more tractable problem than racism and less potentially explosive. Women and men both have members of the opposite sex that they genuinely love. I have heard that fathers with daughters make for a very tough jury in rape cases. A lot of the opposition to these title ix courts has come from mothers worried about their sons being falsely accused.
With racism, there is a pretty good chance that in some areas, a person of one race has virtually no one of another race that they genuinely love. This allows racial discrimination to last longer, and has the danger that when base emotions get appealed to by demagogues, there is less resistance.
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
There was a recent episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR that talked about this [1].
This part is particularly interesting:
> In a thought experiment, Mahzarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated. To be clear, this isn't a prediction about what is going to happen. It just shows you the speed at which different biases are changing.
What they found is that this would have anti-gay bias all but eliminated in 9 more years. By contrast, it's about 60 more years for anti-black biases to be eliminated, 140 years for skin tone biases against darker skin to go away. Biases against the elderly and the disabled and the overweight do not go away within the next 150 years.
Most families include the elderly and the overweight, so the idea that familiarity breeds acceptance would predict that those biases should be going away quicker than biases against gays.
(To reiterate, the timeframes aren't predictions of what will happen. They are just comparisons of the rates that those biases are changing right now).
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709567750/radically-normal-ho...
[+] [-] notfashion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wutbrodo|6 years ago|reply
By contrast, there's nothing stopping racial groups from tending towards being fully segregated from one another, to the point that people stop thinking of the other race as full humans instead of fuzzy stereotypes.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
Generally speaking, if you want to nail a rapist to the wall, you should fill it with middle aged men, whether they have children or not, and actively avoid women.
Middle aged men remember what Randy jerks they were capable of being. Even if they have no daughters, they have mothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends and they want their women protected.
Women will say to themselves "I wouldn't have worn that outfit/gone to that bar/been in that part of town after dark." Women will try to convince themselves it was somehow the victim's fault so they can feel safe and in control of their lives.
Or so I've read.
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
I see this in a lot of forums, such as r/twoxchromosomes on reddit
The outspoken members there are women who assume their negative life experience is all women's experience. That they are speaking for the injustice of all women. Disagreeing with that version of reality is the worst sin of all. Offering a different perspective is at best tacit consent for the status quo or at worst advocating for the victimhood of women, intentionally(?) ignoring any other possibility. Offering a different perspective if you do not have two X chromosomes is mansplaining, no matter what the content is.
This is called an echo chamber. People don't realize they don't have as much consensus on reality as they believe.
I think one way to short circuit this is to reveal that the lack of consensus perpetuates the oppression of women. There are men willing to be allies and help create a gradient of collaboration, but given the censorship it is equally as entertaining watching a fragmented cause get nowhere due to its own balkanization that the echo chambers doesn’t even even seem to notice.
And this is all exacerbated because people aren't treating each other as individuals, and instead trying to speak for entire groups. The irony is that you can't even address this conundrum without grouping the people who do this together.
[+] [-] bhk|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, an increasing number of the laws we are subjected to in the United States are bureaucratic edicts removed several levels from democratic checks and balances. It appears to me that these are more readily steered by lobbying groups -- which by their nature agglomerate polarized supporters.
How else can you explain this Title IX perversity?
[+] [-] jeffdavis|6 years ago|reply
Consider how women couldn't vote in the US until 1919 -- a half century after blacks.
And a more modern example that was on display for all to see: the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. There were not a lot of facts available -- no date, no place, no witness that could remember. Yet millions were ready to brand him a rapist to the whole nation and pressure him out of political office.
[+] [-] harimau777|6 years ago|reply
I'm not saying its right to draw the conclusion "black people are overrepresented in crime therefore black people/culture must be bad", but I think it is human nature to do so. Going further, if an individual has had a negative experience with a person of another race (e.g. being mugged, living next to an addict, etc.) then there is also likely to be an emotional component that is difficult to overcome.
Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that this is right, just that it's human nature.
[+] [-] avar|6 years ago|reply
You can think that women aren't responsible enough to vote, or to hold certain jobs while still loving your daughter. You can kick it back with your black friend on the weekend while still not wanting black people in your neighborhood, your friends is just "one of the good ones".
Most of human society throughout history has been profoundly sexist by modern standards, and we still have entire countries that are structurally sexist by the standards of the west. None of that was destabilized because everyone had a mother, and most fathers had daughters.
[+] [-] epx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mieseratte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|6 years ago|reply
Hello, I spent a decade of my life learning just how difficult it is to become an expert in my very narrow field. In fact I spend most of my time helping undergrads refine their rank speculation into tractable problems to potentially guide them to a deeper understanding of even a tiny slice of my narrow specialty.
What's that? You'd like me to serve on a jury for the school? No not on a jury, but instead to serve as a kind of combination panel judge and amateur lawyer? For what may be criminal allegations against a student? And you say there's no actual trained judicial expert to lead and constrain the process, but instead a handbook that will teach me in about an hour how to question a witness?
Sorry, it's my minimal sense of civic and academic integrity calling. I really have to take this...
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
I have to wonder how much life experience someone has who thinks that...
At a large public institution near me they had some lawyers review their processes.
The resulting suggestions were pretty shocking. Things like, educating the accused as to what the process even was. Notifying the accused that there was an appeal (they apparently didn't do that all the time). Allowing all parties legal representation. And more detailed recording of testimony, mostly due to cases that involved concerns from accused students that their testimony that was recorded was inaccurate and had only been recorded by hand written notes taken by another student. In some cases their efforts to correct what they said seemed to be interpreted as lying... because it conflicted with the original notes (but not any factual conflict).
It is mind boggling that any of the suggestions were needed.
In the meantime the folks running the department investigating the reports are also tasked with writing the rules, investigating, judging....and on their own time advocating for various policies surrounding sexual assault.
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply
I was in a student court for something stupid and it was kafkaesque. I had to sit and hear a professor accuse me. I was not able to object or ask questions despite the professor making factually incorrect statements about how the phone company worked. However, when I spoke the professor was able to object, cross examine and refute me.
It was so weird and professors just sat there in the jury tolerating it.
There’s a lot of fake BS in college besides the knowledge. I just avoided all that stuff because how they would make these unjust systems and be totally cool with it.
I ended up talking with the Dean and he said he wasn’t interested in whether the process was fair he just wanted to find out if I “did it.”
If anyone I know gets into a similar situation I’ll advise getting a lawyer and not speaking at all.
[+] [-] Paperweight|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenkstom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oijqoiwejoiqwj|6 years ago|reply
Without distracting with any specific cases, it's very clear that the modern world is shifting away from the presumption of innocence. This, combined with an internet that remembers forever and a total disregard for free speech, will have predictably disastrous results. The set of punishable behavior is growing wider every day, whilst the standards of evidence are becoming shallower and shallower.
It's infuriating that every major US news site is being flooded with stories about increasing loneliness, plummetting sexual activity, increasing suicides, etc., but seem more than happy to contribute to the new character assassination of the day. Has it clicked for anyone yet that maybe today's youth are becoming shut-in's because they have a brain, and they know one mistake can ruin their entire life?
The commonly repeated reasons for this status-quo are pitiful.
Journalists aren't part of the judicial system, so it's alright if they pick a side without physical evidence --- as if that somehow makes their claims more likely to be true. Does not caring about science make a person's scientific claims more valid? Why even care about the news if the news doesn't care about the facts?
The 1st amendment applies only to the government, not private institutions --- so what? Is having a closed mind now a desirable personality trait? I'd hope that private individuals are working to preserve free speech as well, even if they aren't forced to do so. Besides that, many of the private institutions that this argument is applied to are in fact receiving special government funding / support (universities are a prime example, large payment processors are another). Can the government freely disregard your constitutional rights as long as it uses a private-sector middle-man?
/rant
[+] [-] logicprog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedilger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AzuraJergen|6 years ago|reply
Folks like the current Vice-President of the US, saying that he will only meet with a woman in the presence of others may become more prevalent and "correct" to limit the risk of liability. In the long run, this may lead us to fall back into segregation of sex similar to Islamic doctrine, where segregation is needed to ensure the protection of families and society.
Most may not be thinking about it, but change can happen slowly, but sometimes it happens abruptly like the changes we have been seen lately. I encourage everyone to use their minds to help build an environment that better suits the current times, before we go back in time and all we have to blame is ourselves.
[+] [-] DisruptiveDave|6 years ago|reply
Turns out the girl was ashamed she voluntarily slept with him. She admitted it to friends a couple months later. That was too late, of course. She received zero punishment. He was "lucky" that the police weren't notified on Day 1.
[+] [-] drewrv|6 years ago|reply
Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have been telling some alarming truths about the tribunals that have been adjudicating collegiate sex for the past five years.
No tribunals "adjudicate collegiate sex". They adjudicate sexual assault.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
But after a lifetime of sorting my baggage in the aftermath of sexual abuse and rape, I'm clear that one thing that must happen is women need public lives on par with what men have and women need career options and earned income on par with men.
A whole lot of this BS is rooted in the idea that a woman's sexuality is a prize to be won by an "eligible" male -- ie a man who earns enough to take care of her. There is a subtext of ownership there.
Which is part of what drives women to claim rape after a drunken hook up: It protects their perceived purity in a world where women are still not entitled to take ownership of their own sexuality and must hoard its use and preserve its value to merit future ownership by some worthy man.
Ie some man who makes enough money.
It's a terrible societal poison that seeps insidiously into far too many bedrooms.
[+] [-] jenkstom|6 years ago|reply
I'm happy that my daughter is doing so well in college and doesn't have to worry about date rape. But I'm terrified of my sons going to college because I know that consensual sex can destroy their lives. And honestly, they're much less likely to even get there or finish in the first place.
[+] [-] icu|6 years ago|reply
I've even heard of work situations where male managers refuse one-on-one meetings with female employees due to fear of being falsely accused of sexual impropriety. Again, in these work-related situations, recording the interaction may save your career.
I realise the questionable ethics of recording someone when they don't know they are being recorded. I also understand that there may be legal ramifications for doing this depending on where you live.
However, if you are falsely accused of sexual assault, with an audio recording proving consent, you can avoid the complete destruction of your life. You still may have to face the legal repercussions of recording the conversation, but this will be much smaller than the consequences of not being able to prove consent.
[+] [-] concordDance|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|6 years ago|reply
All of the elements of this story were in full flower during the Obama administration. Trump's role has been to politically capitalize on the resulting resentments. This is a "this is how you got Trump" story, if just another straw on the camel.
[+] [-] MFLoon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubbingalcohol|6 years ago|reply
But he just couldn't resist the urge to pepper a "Drumpf is a Nazi" in there. It's unnecessary to the thesis and undermines his point.
[+] [-] tomc1985|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mieseratte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lazare|6 years ago|reply
...I can fire him. I mean, obviously I need to go through the proper HR procedures, follow local employment law, respect the terms of his contract, etc., but I have no obligation to keep him employed if I think he's a net negative to my company. Arguably I have an obligation to not keep him employed. And I certainly have no requirement to wait until he has been convicted of a crime; it's not even clear any of the above is a crime.
Similarly, if I run a resort, and one of the guests is so unpleasant they're driving away other guests, or if I run a restaurant, and one of the guests is making other guests uncomfortable, or I run an apartment building, and one of the tenants is behaving poorly.
A university is a business. People come and pay money in exchange for a service, and if someone is interfering with the ability of other people to receive that service, or making people reluctant to come and pay money, it's perfectly fine for them to be asked to leave. If what they're doing happens to be a crime, then by all means, also report them to the police, but it's kind of odd to suggest that you shouldn't expel students except if they've been convicted of a crime.
That being said, I think universities are doing a terrible job here, and I think that given the extreme importance of a university education in modern life, the disruption that being expelled entails, and the stigma that will follow someone if they are expelled, we need to be very careful about the process here. My local dollar store will ban you from the store if they think you shoplifted, and I assume they get it wrong sometimes, but it's fine, because being unjustly banned from a dollar store does not ruin your life. Being unjustly expelled from university could! Things are broken and need fixing. But a world where you can only be expelled on conviction of a crime makes no sense either. The discussion need to be about the correct amount of protection needed.
[+] [-] scarmig|6 years ago|reply
That doesn't mean anything, one way or another, about how well these university tribunals work. It's just pointing out deficiencies in the existing court system.
Another way to think of it is balancing false negatives and false positives. The court system, ideally, errs on the side of minimizing false positives, because of how damaging they are for the accused. That inherently means more false negatives, and aspects of the process that are also much more burdensome for victims to navigate. Universities are trying to create an alternative system, where more false positives are accepted and consequences are less severe, and more focused on making sure the victim doesn't have to confront their rapist in day-to-day life than on life-altering consequences for the accused or protecting the public more generally from repeat offenses.
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
Now, you might disagree with this approach to any/all of the above, but this is the reason that answers your question.
Source: I work in higher ed technology, at times very closely with some of the disciplinary groups.
[+] [-] drewrv|6 years ago|reply
Student A and Student B have a class together. Their dorms are next door to each other. Student A rapes Student B. Is Student B expected to attend class every day with their rapist? To live next door to them? How could one expect Student B to maintain their academic performance in that sort of environment?
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
There absolutely should be a different standard for “can continue to be in this school” and “can continue to walk down the public sidewalk”, and also decided by different people.
[+] [-] hammock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmckeon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybersnowflake|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fromthestart|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lordlic|6 years ago|reply
...but without that last part, the position I just outlined sounds very much like that of conservatives opposed to the whole program of social reform. The author of this article gives the game away in his concluding paragraphs where he throws the term "social justice" into scare quotes. He has a bigger agenda than just protecting the due process rights of college students. And (even assuming the facts are exactly as he portrays them) I'm not surprised that the professors described in the article got such a frosty reception to their position - it's a difficult one to describe without coming off as another stealth reactionary.
[+] [-] _vertigo|6 years ago|reply
Your reasoning for why the non-italicized portion is not good enough is “conservatives say that”. The reason you offer for why the professors get a frosty reaction is “they could be mistaken for stealth reactionaries”. Perhaps it’s less important to consider what label you can assign to someone and more important to just consider what they’re saying.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strenholme|6 years ago|reply
The framework was this: If the relationship was not a lifetime monogamous commitment, then the sex was not OK.
I have observed, in the majority of these cases (Caleb Warner, etc.), the issue was that two people had sex with each other without first having an established relationship with each other. It’s a simple observation that one can generally avoid a false rape accusation by making sure to only have sex in a monogamous committed relationship.
[+] [-] krapp|6 years ago|reply
This framework only "minimizes grey areas" in the sense that a patriarchal society assumes sex to be the the duty of the wife to the husband, and that, therefore a womans' right to deny consent is nullified under the contract of marriage. But this isn't actually the case. A relationship is not a guarantee of perpetual sexual consent.