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'A former high-level administrator at Chicago State University alleged in a statement filed yesterday in federal court that Chicago State President Wayne Watson pressured her to file a false sexual harassment complaint against Professor Philip Beverly, an outspoken faculty critic of Watson’s administration.
According to the declaration of former Chicago State Vice President for Enrollment Management LaShondra Peebles, Watson was determined to silence Beverly by shutting down the blog, CSU Faculty Voice, which Beverly had founded. Contributors routinely posted documents that supported their allegations of mismanagement by the administration.
'Straining under a record number of civil rights complaints, the U.S. Department of Education wants to hire 200 more investigators to expand its civil rights division by 30 percent.
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“Some of this is about the community believing that we’re here and we’re in business and we’re prepared to do the work,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s secretary for civil rights. Some of the increase, she said, was due to guidance her agency has issued, reminding the public as well as schools and universities of various protections under federal law and how to report illegalities.
Complaints of discrimination to the department have soared from 6,364 in fiscal 2009 to a record of 9,989 in the most recent fiscal year. Lhamon expects another record to be set when the current fiscal year ends in September. It is a sign that “we have the trust of the national community bringing to us their deepest hurts and asking for resolution,” she said.
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Sex discrimination comprised 24 percent of total complaints. Lhamon said two individuals were responsible for filing more than 1,700 of those allegations of sex discrimination. She declined to identify them, citing confidentiality requirements.[Bold added; also see article here]
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'I applaud Gov. Andrew Cuomo for seeking to change the culture surrounding sexual assault on New York's college campuses. His "Enough is Enough" campaign is raising much-needed awareness about the dangers of complacency with regard to campus sexual assault and rightly highlights the shameful way many sexual assault survivors have been treated by the institutions of higher education that they — and their parents — trusted to keep them safe.
But as much as there is to celebrate in Cuomo's plan, his proposal to change New York law so that college students must proactively say "yes" to every step of a romantic encounter, every single time, goes too far.
'“White men should never hold elected positions in British universities again,” proclaims a bold headline in yesterday’s edition of Britain’s the Independent.
The article, so substandard, boorish, and offensive it was scrubbed from the website within 24 hours, asserts that student gripes such as government, fees, and lack of activism are the result of white men being elected to positions of authority within student unions.
The solution, states the author, is:
“...to ban white men and their activism dilettantism from student unions. We need powerful women and minority ethnic people to bring their passion back to the heart of student politics. Being a student union president should no longer be a place for privileged whiteboys to swing their dicks around before graduating into a world that is in no way affected by what they claim to fight for.”"
'MSNBC host Toure argued that there is “sexist, coded language” sometimes used to describe Hillary Clinton on Saturday’s “Up with Steve Kornacki.”
Toure, in a discussion about a list of sexist code words put out by a pro-Hillary Clinton group said that “there is this sort of sexist, coded language that we’ve talked about. We had somebody on ‘the Cycle,’ I think when you were on, where somebody referred to Hillary as ‘shrill,’ right? And we all understood that as one of these code words that people use against women that they’d never use against men…we do have to be careful about the way we talk about female politicians and not sort [use] those code words to say ‘hey, remember she’s a woman,'” although he did argue that the words on the list in question weren’t sexist code words.'
'The campus rape panic that dominated western media for well over two years suffered a severe blow in late 2014 thanks to the credulous reporting of hoax allegations in Rolling Stone. Those who had long harboured doubts about the panic, such as Glenn Reynolds and Emily Yoffe began to lend aid to long-time sceptics like Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young. Today, Bloomberg columnists casually refer to this chapter of history as a moral panic. Meanwhile, colleges that embraced the panic by abandoning due process are facing a wave of lawsuits from aggrieved students.
This is all good news. But the focus on college campuses is limiting. It blinds us to the bigger picture. In truth, the “rape culture” panic spread far beyond the walls of universities, injecting an atmosphere of vigilantism into almost every community where both genders happened to mix. In all of these arenas, opportunists seized on the opportunity to ruin the reputation of innocent people on little more than hearsay. One of the most egregious examples, in fact, did not occur on a college campus but in the community of professional librarians.
The librarian, Joe Murphy, was publicly accused of being a ‘sexual predator’ by two colleagues on social media. This was followed up by blog posts urging his professional community to ban him from conferences, despite the fact that none of the allegations had been proven true.
It was excellent advice — but it’s not just women who have to be careful at college.
As the mother of a young son, I, too, am starting to plan some advice — about the dangers to guys of false accusations of sexual abuse. It’s a real issue, and a scary one.
My message to my future college-bound son would be: Don’t expect anyone to give you the benefit of the doubt. The tale of the Rolling Stone piece about a gang-rape-that-wasn’t at a University of Virginia Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party is a case in point.
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As in the case of the Duke lacrosse team years ago, everyone simply accepted — with zero evidence — that the brothers of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity were rapists. They were guilty merely because of the accuser’s word. Never mind the boys’ claims of innocence.
My son will spend his life hearing from me that women are — or should be — equal to men, that “she can do anything you can do.” But when he gets to college, he’ll find out that’s not always the case.
In fact, men are held to higher standards than women — most notably, by the very women and “feminists” who demand equal treatment between the sexes.
Consider: If a man and woman are both drunk at college, the onus is almost certainly on him to head off any possible sexual interaction between them.
'State Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, said there is bipartisan confusion within the Higher Education and Employment Committee about a bill she introduced to help shift the way society thinks about sexual assault.
While state Rep. Mike Bocchino, R-Greenwich, was openly criticized by the Connecticut Democratic Party for comments he made during discussion of the bill at a recent meeting, Flexer said he was just one of several people from both parties to make “unfortunate comments.”
The proposed legislation, which was forwarded to the Senate by a 14-3 vote, would move the burden of proof in sexual assault cases on college campuses from the victim to the alleged perpetrator, Flexer said. Currently, the victim must convince investigators that she said “no,” while this bill would put the onus on the accused to prove she said “yes.”
Bocchino’s remark was made in the context of his concerns about ambiguity in the bill’s definition of “affirmative consent.”
'In case you missed it, there is a documentary film that purports to expose the “campus rape culture.” Premiering at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, “The Hunting Ground” takes full advantage of the belief that college campuses are extraordinarily dangerous places for women because sexual assault is so common and tolerated. Canadian writer Wendy McElroy’s Daily Bell piece about this film is excellent.
“The film is best understood as a volley in the campus consent wars now raging across North America,” she writes. “It is part of a manufactured and coordinated hysteria about campus rape that imposes a politically-correct agenda and strips accused male students of due process rights.”
Exactly. This is another of those hobgoblins H.L Mencken observed were so vital to crusaders, who constantly need “issues” that keep people looking to them for salvation.
Bill status page here. Bill as referred here. Excerpt:
'Section 1. Section 10a-55m of the general statutes is repealed and the following is substituted in lieu thereof (Effective July 1, 2015):
(a) For purposes of this section and sections 10a-55n to 10a-55q, inclusive:
(1) "Affirmative consent" means an active, informed, unambiguous and voluntary agreement by a person to engage in sexual activity with another person that is sustained throughout the sexual activity and may be revoked at any time by any person;
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(b) Each institution of higher education shall adopt and disclose in such institution's annual uniform campus crime report one or more policies regarding sexual assault, stalking and intimate partner violence. Such policy or policies shall include provisions for: [(1) detailing]
This article was great to read, for once. Heather Gray writes in News.com.au with a heap of good sense. Excerpt:
'YOU know the moment. You’re at a backyard barbecue when one of the wives starts telling silly tales of her husband’s misdeeds. She tells them with a smile and may even be hugging her husband when she does it. Still, though, there’s this cord of tension that you can just feel. She’s mocking him in front of his friends and is doing it in such a way that he will seem “sensitive” if he gets upset about it.
It might be called “passive-aggressive”.
Instead of saying what’s really bothering her, she lets him know through “a joke.”
Others may call it “emotional manipulation.”
She’s being mean and then making him feel like he’s overreacting if he brings it up or gets offended because she was “just joking.”
Maybe as an isolated incident, we can look at this as simple, emotional manipulation. However, this isn’t just one incident.
'Despite the steady wave of scandals that have begun to erode even the New York Times’ portrayal of Hillary Clinton, her image remains unblemished on Wikipedia. Since he first started editing her page in June 2005, Hillary’s “Wikipedia watchdog" has been guarding against slanders, accusations, unfair assumptions, and distortions on the high-traffic, heavily footnoted, highly policed Hillary Rodham Clinton Wikipedia page.
Unlike most Wikipedia editors, who prefer to remain anonymous, "Wasted Time R" has no problem giving his real name: Jonathan Schilling. Leading up to Hillary’s failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Schilling’s significant role in the shaping of the image of the former first lady was the subject of several interviews and articles, including pieces by NPR, BBC, Canadian Radio, and New Republic.
'There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig — daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense — and the literary critic Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find).
The latest challenge invited you to climb aboard the bandwagon and compose an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author. In a small but accomplished entry, Sergio Michael Petro, Frank Upton and Sandra McGregor deserve an honourable mention, the winners take £30 each and Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver.
'But in the need to ensure there are safe places for women to be educated – which is crucial – isn’t it worth asking if there can be safe places for men to gather without suspicion of being a cabal of misogynist terrorism? In the heated discussion about rape culture, the feminist voice is loudest at the moment, which makes many young men feel that their every move, every thought, is policed. Some might even suggest they’re victims of misandry, if they weren’t sure their complaints would fall on deaf ears.
A witch hunt, you say? Well, I won’t use that loaded term, because it only serves to ratchet-up the gender wars when what we need is a little calm.
That said, some of the research about fraternity culture is not kind. A 2007 study by professors at the College of William and Mary – the place, ironically, where the first Greek-letter fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded in 1776 with the motto “Philosophy is the guide to life” – found that men in fraternities were three times more likely to rape than those who weren’t.
A culture of male peer support for violence against women coupled with excessive drinking practices contribute to a higher risk for sexual assault, the study found, leading some scholars to suggest fraternities should be banned. Other research has added to the alarm. Elizabeth Armstrong and other professors at Indiana University studied the social life at a large Midwestern university for five years, producing a book in 2013, Paying for the Party, How College Maintains Inequality, and a paper on sexual assault that described how fraternities contribute to the reproduction of gender inequality.
'Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday that he and other elected officials can’t fight domestic violence alone — ordinary residents must join the battle, too.
Abbott stopped here Thursday morning for the grand opening of The Gatehouse, a 96-unit apartment community for abused women and children.
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“No woman should be trapped in an abusive relationship,” he said. “No woman should feel unsafe in her own home. No woman should feel helpless with no place and no one to turn to.”
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“This is not a women’s issue,” he said. “This is a man’s issue … and we need to draw a line in the sand and say you never, ever, ever hit a woman.”
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