So do you think that their objectives are not worthy? What do you think the DOE’s objectives are?
This conversation has become Kafkaesque. The earnest assumption that colleges should be policing every move in the bedroom and that students should be running to the administration to have each other prosecuted for drunk sex in which they willingly participated at the time, instead of taking responsibility for their own actions, the labelling of virtually EVERYTHING as assault…I just can’t take it. The case of the two lesbians puts the cap on it. I’m out.
The latest controversy out of Yale. No evidence one way or another has come out.
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/03/03/second-wave-of-posters-hits-campus/
Wow. What a cluster-you-know-what of a situation! It brings into play an aspect of this whole question that we have barely touched on in almost 900 posts: All of these university tribunals operate amid all sorts of privacy concerns. The result is that the decisions may not actually have any instructional or deterrent effect, because no one (possibly even including the accuser and the accused) knows what was actually determined. No one knows not to have sex with a drunk girl, because no one knows Joe College was expelled or suspended for having sex with a drunk girl.
Maybe Joe College will make it public, but chances are what he will make public is some alternative version of events. Maybe the accuser or her friends will make it public, but their story may not be credited, either. Months from now, some dry version, shorn of any detail, may show up in a semiannual Title IX report, but otherwise the university won’t be saying what it thinks happened and what punishment that merited.
Then you will get a situation like this, where the withdrawal or expulsion – it’s totally unclear which – is a matter of intense interest inside and outside the university, for the most part for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with sexual assault. So you have a battle of rumors, and no guidance from the university about what anything means. No matter where you stand on the question of using Title IX to battle sexual assault, and what actually constitutes sexual assault worth battling, this kind of outcome is completely counterproductive. Students don’t trust the process, and students don’t know what they are supporting or opposing.
I don’t have a solution for this. Making university disciplinary proceedings public would be a huge change in privacy policy. Using university disciplinary proceedings as a tool to change campus culture is next to useless if they are kept private. I have been critical of using university disciplinary proceedings as a tool to change campus culture in some respects here, but I believe in the need to change campus culture on this issue. What would work better? What do you do with this sort of case, assuming discipline is warranted given the actions of the individual, without regard to whether anyone else learns anything about it?
I was thinking that perhaps he withdrew from the university before any formal hearing took place. Or he and the complainant cut some kind of deal where she doesn’t file formal charges and he withdraws. That makes it much easier for him to enroll elsewhere.
Not clear from the article, but I did not think “withdrawal” was a possible option after a Title IX hearing.
I don’t think that anyone on this thread has brought up Joe Biden’s speech at the Academy Awards.
Here is the text:
“Good evening and thank you very much. Despite significant progress over the last few year, too many women and men, on and off college campuses, are still victims of sexual abuse and tonight I am asking you to join million of americans including me, President Obama, the thousands of students I’ve met on college campuses and the artists here tonight to take the pledge,” Biden said.
“A pledge that says – I will intervene in situations when consent has not or has not been given. Let’s change the culture. We must and we can change the culture. So that no abused woman or man, like the survivors you will see tonight, ever feel they ever have to ask themselves ‘what did i do?’ They did nothing wrong. I really mean this, take the pledge. Visit itsonus.org.”
I taught my son at an early age (& my daughter too) about protocol, meaning to ask first, “may I kiss you” “may I touch you here” etc. Wifey preferred not to talk to them at all about sex
Well, the Yale women clearly don’t believe in innocent until proven guilty and see nothing wrong with calling someone a rapist. I hope the college clamps down on that defaming and uncivil activity and I hope none of the women involved make it to the Supreme Court. It’s one thing to discuss what colleges should and shouldn’t do. It’s another thing when college students accusing someone of skirting the law, turnaround and do it themselves.
He may well have been proven guilty. It was announced that he had left the university for personal reasons, and at the time he said publicly that he hoped to return very soon. More than two weeks later, the university announced that he was no longer a student and would not be returning. It’s entirely possible that in fact he was determined to have committed a serious offense and expelled or suspended, perhaps after he attempted to withdraw voluntarily.
I sympathize with the frustration of the Women’s Center group. If the university expelled one of the biggest of BMOCs – a senior, captain and a key starter of Yale’s best basketball team in over 50 years, in all likelihood a member of a prestigious secret society – because he raped a woman, that’s a very powerful statement putting people on notice that no one can get away with rape, and that victims can get justice. Unless no one knows it, then it’s not a powerful statement at all. And it must be really galling to have the team publicly rally around their captain as if he were the victim, and he was treated unfairly. Of course, maybe he was treated unfairly; maybe he was a victim. No one knows.
The public postering by the women’s groups didn’t happen until after the team’s very public protest (even though team members denied it was a protest, something that utterly lacks credibility). That action by the team was a horrible lapse of judgment. Their coaches letting them do it was a horrible lapse of judgment. The women’s group calling the team out for it seems pretty fair to me. Expecting that anything about this would really remain private was completely unrealistic.
“All of these university tribunals operate amid all sorts of privacy concerns. The result is that the decisions may not actually have any instructional or deterrent effect, because no one (possibly even including the accuser and the accused) knows what was actually determined.”
Right. This Yale basketball case also illustrates that there can’t really be any protection for the accused if s/he is a leader like an athlete or SGA executive whose sudden absence will be noted. His teammates did not do him a favor with their high-profile show of solidarity; it will just exacerbate his Google problem if he is exonerated. You have a group of students calling a named, individual student a rapist in public, in classrooms, on posters, etc. when they do not know what happened. Maybe he’s guilty; chances are, we’ll never know.
Re: Biden’s statement at the Oscars, I was all for it. Well stated.
I was a little torn about the Lady Gaga performance. Giving voice to survivors is great. But I did have a moment of concern thinking about whether joining that club might appeal to some young people.
Project Consent released some semi-NSFW videos on consent. I’ll link them below:
Their platform is “If it’s not yes, it’s no.”
It’s a nuance that has already been completely lost here, but the women’s groups clearly took a fair amount of care not to call a named, individual student a rapist, at least not directly. It didn’t work, of course – it would have been clear to anyone on campus and anyone following Ivy League basketball that a premise of what they were saying was that X had raped someone. But they never said, “X is a rapist.” They said, “Yale Basketball Stop Supporting A Rapist,” after the team wore t-shirts honoring X and implicitly denigrating Yale at a televised game, and led the crowd in chanting the nickname of the withdrawn captain.
I understand and sympathize with the team’s desire to support their friend. But, honestly, if they had any clue what was going on – assuming that there is any truth to what the women said – they deserved public shaming for what they did. And if they didn’t have any clue what was going on, and didn’t know that by honoring their friend publicly they were effectively advocating for rape . . . then that shows the inherent limitations of private discipline, and the university effectively threw them under a bus.
Yale doesn’t always expel students found responsible for sexual intercourse without consent. Sometimes the student gets probation. Sometimes the student gets suspended. Sometimes the student is expelled. i’m just guessing here, but it seems likely that expelled Yale students are believed to be guilty of something worse than sex with a person who was very drunk but still conscious and actively cooperating. Probably quite a bit worse.
Hanna, do you have inside info about what gets a Yale student expelled and what doesn’t?
Re #890, interesting videos. However, the salient point is that one must ask for assent BEFORE touching, etc. In these videos, the “no” occurs AFTER the contact. All three then can be interpreted as sexual assault per campus policies.
@whatisyourquest I think these videos are good for those who think that once you show some interest, you can’t say “no” or the perpetrator is not obligated to listen to your “no” or your “I don’t think I want to.” From the videos, all parties seem to be mutually enjoying each other’s presence and yet once there is some sort of sexual contact, they stop when there is no clear and affirmative “yes.”
Nobody in the Yale administration is making any comment about the alleged infraction the basketball player committed, or the punishment. But it seems like both are widely known on campus.
That suggests to me that contrary to what was said up thread, the punishment is not a secret at all. It could therefore have a deterrent effect: if Yale is willing to throw out a BMOC, they’ll be willing to throw out other students as well.
Post on Yale Women’s Center Facebook page:
“Hanna, do you have inside info about what gets a Yale student expelled and what doesn’t?”
No. I personally do not know that he was expelled. Abrupt departure does not mean he was expelled. I hope that we find out what happened. But he’s clearly going to wear the “expelled rapist” shirt forever now. Maybe fairly, maybe not.
I spent the afternoon today on the phone with a kid who left school in the middle of the semester on the advice of his counsel because of a threat of a possible complaint of misconduct. It’s probably too risky to go back. No complaint has been filed, no investigation, no finding, but it’s a safe bet that he’s being called a rapist on that campus.
If that Yale kid left college because he was innocent but didn’t want a black mark on his record, his teammates did him no favor publicizing his name and their support for him.
I have no viewpoint on sexual encounters where both parties are drunk, and the woman is not incapacitated. For me, this is too hard a situation to decide. My view is quite different if the woman is drunk and the man is not drunk.
Among the women students who have told me that they were raped, relatively few were drunk. As it happens, I don’t have long-term follow up with those students, and I don’t know how difficult or easy it was for them to get over. One student was roofied, and it is clear that has had long term effects–more than 3 years. The women who were forcibly raped have experienced strong effects for at least two to three years, and sometimes longer. They have experienced weaker, continuing effects over a much longer period of time.
It is very surprising to me that anyone would view being tattooed as worse than being raped, in circumstances that were otherwise identical (drunk with apparent consent, drunk without consent, not drunk without consent). That is not my view. I understand that some of the concern about rape does originate from patriarchal views of women and women’s sexuality. However, it seems to me that when women have agency and choice, sexual encounters would be an extremely important area in which to exercise agency and choice.
I am concerned about giving sons the implicit message that women will get over rape, or drunken sex–no big deal, the woman will go on with her life just fine, and she bears the person who raped her no ill will. I doubt that happens very often.