Article here. Excerpt:

'President Obama's proposed budget includes a $30 million increase for the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights—the federal agency charged with investigating university's sexual assault and anti-harassment policies.

OCR had a budget of about $100 million last year and will get a 31 percent increase under the new budget, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The additional funding will allow the agency to hire 200 new employees.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Paul Nungesser, the Columbia University student whom classmate Emma Sulkowicz claims raped her, has come forward with a more factually detailed denial of the allegations against him. In addition to offering his version of events on the night of the alleged rape, he provided a reporter for the Daily Beast with Facebook message transcripts that show warm interactions with Sulkowicz in the weeks and months after the incident.
...
Nungesser says that on the night of the alleged assault, in August 2012, he was not drunk — just buzzed — and he and Sulkowicz engaged in consensual anal sex (among other acts). In a message sent two days after the incident, Sulkowicz accepts Nungesser's invitation to a party, adding: "Also I feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz" and "because we still haven’t really had a paul-emma chill sesh since summmmerrrr."

Story here. Excerpt:

'Signing a pledge is nothing new for college lacrosse teams. Teams often sign pledges in regards to abstaining from alcohol during the season, but the Brown University men's lacrosse team may have broken new ground by signing a pledge related to preventing sexual violence.

Brown's lacrosse team voluntarily held two programming events this fall with the university's men's health coordinator, Marc Peters, related to sexual assault prevention. Alum and former captain Alex Buckley was inspired and sent the team a sample pledge to sign prior to the season. The team worked with Peters to refine Buckley's pledge and all 39 players signed it in December.

The "Team Up" pledge reads:

I have been made aware of systemic problems of sexual violence on college campuses and elsewhere. These problems include behaviors that are unwanted, not mutually agreed to, lack conscious consent, involve coercion or manipulation by men against women. I realize that there are situations where I can assist those who are at a disadvantage against an aggressor.

Story here. Excerpt:

Story here. Excerpt:

'Advocates for military women are suing the Department of Defense for information about how the Naval Academy and the other military service academies recruit female students — part of a campaign, they say, to expose ongoing gender bias at the elite training grounds for the nation's officer corps.
...
A spokesman for the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs — where the superintendent is a woman — said cadets are selected without reference to gender, and they gain opportunities by earning them.

"In the military, we are rewarded for performance," Lt. Col. Brus Vidal said. "The airplane doesn't care if you're male or female."

Excerpt here. Excerpt:

'Ada Developers Academy today announced that it will spin out of the Technology Alliance and become its own non-profit organization.

The Seattle-based, tuition-free coding school for women, which we featured last week on GeekWire, will end its formal incubation period with the Tech Alliance and begin transitioning to a standalone non-profit.

“One of the Tech Alliance’s greatest strengths is identifying a need, developing a solution, and finding the right people to make it work,” Susannah Malarkey, Executive Director of the Tech Alliance and co-founder of Ada Developers Academy, said in a statement. “We’re proud that Ada has met with such success, and are looking forward to its next chapter.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the salient features of the Obama administration has been its willingness to toss aside the rule of law whenever getting a result that its zealous officials and supporting interest groups want collides with fundamental fairness. Over the last couple of years, that impulse has manifested itself in the brazen demands by the Department of Education that colleges and universities abide by its regulations concerning sexual harassment and assault.

The notion that America’s campuses are gripped by an epidemic of sexual assault and tolerate a “rape culture” has never had any basis in fact. It is, however, a meme popular with the feminist left – a hobgoblin they find useful. Efforts at boosting it, such as the infamous Rolling Stone article about an evidently fictitious rape at the University of Virginia have flopped disastrously.

Nevertheless, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been on a national blitzkrieg to compel colleges and universities to follow its blatantly one-sided rules for the adjudication of sexual harassment and assault complaints.
...
There is no constitutional authority for the federal government to give or lend money to students, but once it began doing so nobody stopped it. Now federal bureaucrats have the leverage to force schools to obey them. If they don’t, the flow of money will stop.

A very small number of institutions, wishing to keep their independence from federal bureaucrats, have done what they had to;they’ve rejected federal money completely.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A comedian who was due to perform at a London university and had offered free tickets to student feminists has had her gig pulled, because students feminists said they didn't like her feminism.

Kate Smurthwaite had been intending to talk to Goldsmith University's student comedy society about, ironically, free speech, and a Saudi prisoner of conscience who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In that spirit, I’m also taking every precaution to protect people I care about from the constant danger posed by Differently-Gendered Americans. So I’ve sent out to my young male friends a similar mandate: avoid progressive women for your own safety. Seriously. The risks are real.
...
The facts don’t seem to matter anymore. If anyone questions an accuser’s credibility, the media accuses them of “victim-blaming.” As said feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, “Rape is really, really common. I think understanding that is why I believe rape victims. They’re usually telling the truth.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Best:

10. T-Mobile

The commercial wasn't as funny as you'd expect from a spot that features both Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Handler, but Silverman handing a newborn baby to her mother and saying, "Sorry, it's a boy" was priceless.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'As a mother of a son, who is a 100% all-boy alpha male that I have been delighted to raise as such, I was appalled by the crass anti-maleness of the statement. Let’s play a game of substitution, shall we?

Pan right, and have Silverman’s character whisper, “I’m sorry, it’s a girl.”

The blow-back from NOW and all the other elite feminist groups would have been of Category 5 Hurricane proportions, with the T-Mobile executives dutifully making the rounds to all the talk shows on their apology tour. After a vitriolic social media campaign in which the participants would be likened to Boko Haram rapists, the company would have been compelled to donate millions to girls’ educational programs and the feminist organizations leading the charge. Finally, the feminist activists would not have been satisfied until all parties involved in that commercial were brought to tears, like Dr. Matt Taylor (the comet scientist in the iconic shirt).

Article here, by Johnathan Chait. For those of you who don't know, Chait is a veteran of classic liberal causes and circles. (By "classic", I don't mean "leftist"; he does a pretty good job of describing the difference in the article.) For him to come out so openly against the resurgence of P.C.-ness on today's campuses is a big deal. (David Frum reviews Chait's article here.) Excerpt:

'But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity. ...

Story here. Excerpt:

'National sorority leaders said Friday they have been very surprised by the reaction to a letter sent to University of Virginia chapters warning them to avoid fraternity parties on campus Saturday night.

The letter from 16 national sorority presidents — members of the National Panhellenic Conference — sparked an outcry on campus from students who said it was sexist and didactic to order women to stay home for their own safety.

“I believe people are missing the point here,” said Jean Mrasek, chairman of the NPC. The national leaders were merely enforcing an existing rule, she said. “We are upholding our policy and yet we’re being criticized for doing so. That’s the irony of this.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'The University of Virginia held a two-day conference last February on “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.” One of the speakers was the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, who touted her office’s efforts to compel colleges and universities, under pain of losing federal funds, to adopt draconian policies on sexual harassment and assault.

These policies have raised serious concerns about due process and basic fairness for the accused, and an audience member asked Ms. Lhamon how she planned to deal with such “push-back.” Her reply: “We’ve received a lot of push-back, and we need to push forward notwithstanding.” The recent experience of Harvard Law School demonstrates the value of pushing back.
...
Most institutions yield to OCR’s pressure without significant dissent. But at Harvard, 28 law professors—including liberal luminaries Elizabeth Bartholet, Alan Dershowitz, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley, Duncan Kennedy and Charles Ogletree —signed an open letter, published in the Boston Globe, in which they described the new policies and procedures as “inconsistent with many of the most basic principles we teach.”

Among their complaints: “the absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense”; the designation of a Title IX compliance officer, “rather than an entity that could be considered structurally impartial,” as investigator, prosecutor and judge; “the failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused,” especially for lower-income students.

Article here. Excerpt:

'We have been informed by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement that they have been inundated with far more comments on child support guidelines than they ever expected. This is evidence that as a movement, we are stepping up the pressure more than ever, making our voices heard more broadly and more effectively. Each of you who took the trouble to submit our child-support comments deserves a pat on the back. There is power in numbers, and when we pull together with unity, we can move mountains.

Remember that our latest push is to force the OCSE to hold public hearings on child support guidelines in each of the federal regions around the country. This will be your chance to tell them directly what you think of the guidelines.

If you have not already done so, please copy and paste the following brief message and send it to: barbara.addison@acf.hhs.gov

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Dear Ms. Addison: