DeVos–and Due Process–vs. the ACLU

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More. As Camille Paglia notes: “The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.”

Furthermore.

18 Comments for “DeVos–and Due Process–vs. the ACLU”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    The issues raised in the ACLU lawsuit, and others like that will be coming down the road quickly enough, will be settled in the courts.

    As a policy matter, the think that the era of in loco parentis (the idea that colleges and universities stand in the place of parents) has long since passed its expiration date, and that public colleges and universities should turn over investigation/enforcement to the police. It isn’t like “college kids” are kids any more — they are almost all adults. It is the rare student who is under the age of 18.

    I agree with the widespread criticism (from all directions) of the way in which colleges and universities handle allegations of criminal acts by students. Colleges and universities don’t have the knowledge, expertise or trained personnel to handle such allegations, and it shows.

    I would give private colleges and universities the power to enact rules and regulations governing student sexual conduct that exceed the standards of conduct prescribed by law.

    For example, many private colleges and universities have strict and detailed policies about sexual conduct, and I don’t think that we should be interfering with the ability of private colleges and universities to establish and enforce those standards.

    But when it comes to public universities, I look at extra-legal codes of sexual conduct with a decidedly jaundiced eye. I don’t think that public universities should be trying to manage the sexual conduct of students. We have laws for that purpose, and for the life of me, I don’t see why a college student should be treated any differently than someone the same age running a forklift.

    • posted by Matthew on

      K-12 government schools are idiot factories, and by the time they graduate thanks to grade inflation, they get dumped into some state college where they get indoctrinated with all sorts of pseudointellectual psychobabble that’s actually pretty bigoted underneath its fauxgressive façade and leaves them unprepared for life outside an educational bubble. The lucky ones go to private colleges, but both have the same problem of students being shovel-fed stealth homophobic, stealth antisemitic Marxist postmodernist BS. Home schooling should be mandatory. The US and the West cannot afford another generation of their bigoted lies going unchallenged.

    • posted by Matthew on

      Order now and you get a second disc of Uncle Tom Krautbach’s Greatest Shits:

      https://igfculturewatch.com/2012/02/02/two-bits/#comment-84113

      Actually, what Singer realizes, Tom Scharbach, is that Obama Party gays and lesbians like yourself have a remarkably flexible definition of what constitutes “anti-gay” — which, as you and your Obama Party staffer friends like Hilary Rosen, Andrew Tobias, Rick Rosendall, and others have made abundantly clear, is that it is determined solely by political affiliation.

      This is a fine example. Singer dares donate to someone you don’t like and immediately you start branding him an anti-gay hatemonger, insisting that he wants to slit gays’ throats.

      Granted, that attitude is understandable, Tom Scharbach. As long as the Obama Party succeeds, you succeed. Obama Party politicians in power mean you get paid, you get to avoid paying taxes, you get to vote as many times as you want, you get to force businesses and churches to do whatever you want, you get government “stimulus” funds without actually having to produce things, and you avoid at all costs being judged by such things as character or merit instead of sexual orientation.

      Hence your rhetoric about slitting throats. Indeed, a vote for Republicans slits YOUR throat; it removes your privileged position and requires you to start actually working, earning a living, paying taxes, and being judged by the content of your character rather than your minority status.

      But of course, if you were to acknowledge that it’s your own position you were protecting, that makes you incredibly selfish-looking. Hence you hide behind the rhetoric of “antigay” and “slitting throats”, even though by doing so you make yourself look like a bigot and gays and lesbians look like helpless fools incapable of thinking past which politician panders the most to sexual orientation.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      It is the rare student who is under the age of 18.

      /raise_hand

      Okay, it was only for a month and a half, but I was only 17 when I started my freshman year at college.

      That said, yeah, in loco parentis is a concept that can’t die soon enough. The only real hurdle I see to doing so in public schools is that housing (especially for freshman) is often under control of the school, which often puts it, like it or not, in the role of mediator and parent.

      That said, as online courses become more and more respectable this whole issue is going to become increasingly moot as the in-person students become a smaller and smaller share of the student body. So it’s possible that, outside of “prestigious” universities, this is an issue that’ll solve itself in a few decades.

      • posted by ME Bill on

        I began college in my senior year of high school, the couple of (mostly worthless) high school required courses, and college nearby in the afternoon, and stopped going to high school the last half of the year.

    • posted by Jorge on

      Title Blah-Blah-Blah, the story that keeps rising from the dead like a serial slasher horror from the ’80s. Who’s the deadliest, Betsy or Anthony?

      Since we’re talking about adults, then may I suggest that Title Blah: The College, has the same basic premise as Title Blah: The Workplace. So, when you’re in the workplace, public or private, and there’s an accusation of sexual harassment, whether a criminal behavior or something that is not criminal behavior, one cannot discriminate based on the sex of the accused OR the sex of the accuser.

      Once you realize that, it’s very hard to escape some sort of due process. Even At Will employment can flounder before anti-discrimination law. There has to be a disciplinary or termination proceeding, and that proceeding has to have some elements that are objective, some means of gathering the facts and deciding what they mean.

      So it does not bother me in the least that colleges that mostly service thousands of students should be directed or advised (I gloss over which) by the lawgiver to adopt rules that are followed by businesses that service thousands of employees.

  2. posted by Matthew on

    You greedy Kraut fascists have no shame:

    https://igfculturewatch.com/2012/02/02/two-bits/#comment-84128

    You either have an a hyperactive imagination or poor reading comprehension skills. Where do you come up with such nonsense?

    That’s easy.

    To me, funding Romney is like paying someone to slit your throat.

    You made it clear you think Romney wants to slit gays’ throats, and that by funding him, Singer shows that he wants to slit gays’ throats.

    Meanwhile, back to the point of which Singer is aware.

    Namely, that your statement here:

    I advocate withholding votes, money and volunteer time from politicians who oppose equal treatment under the law for gays and lesbians.

    is completely and demonstrably false.

    It’s amazing, Tom Scharbach. You claim independence of thought, you invoke all these lofty principles, yet you can’t do the simplest thing and denounce your Obama Party’s leadership and the leadership of the gay and lesbian community for voting for and giving money and volunteer time to politicians who, if they were Republicans, you would be screaming hate gays and want to put them in concentration camps.

    Don’t worry, I understand why; pissing off the DNC treasurer and several lobbyists by publicly denouncing them would likely get you called into Graeme’s office and fired. Party before principles, as you Obama sorts always say and do.

    And finally:

    The irony is that I am retired and living primarily off my investments, paying capital gains rates and enjoying life in the low-tax zone

    Which means, according to your party’s own OWS rhetoric, that you are a selfish person and a criminal who stole from others and should have his wealth forcibly taken from him.

    If you were honest, Tom Scharbach, according to your own party’s rhetoric, you wouldn’t hide your income like this and you would pay higher taxes, because, as you and your party always say, the government knows better than you do how to spend your money, and you aren’t entitled to any portion of it.

    So you’re a hypocrite.

  3. posted by Matthew on

    https://igfculturewatch.com/2012/02/02/two-bits/#comment-84129

    What is distasteful is that this donor will give to gay causes and to Republicans, but never demand from Republicans that they move towards equality or at least tone down the rhetoric.

    Singer knows that, as I’ve pointed out above, Houndentenor doesn’t have ANY problem with the FMA, gay marriage bans, or discrimination when people of the right political affiliation are doing them.

    As is obvious, “antigay” simply means “Republican” or “not Obama Party”. People have caught on to that fact, and have simply started to proceed through their lives knowing that people like Tom Scharbach and Houndentenor are really nothing more than mindless bigots who use “antigay” the same way their fellow Obama Party member Al Sharpton uses “racist”.

  4. posted by Matthew on

    And a gay Republican MAN you helped derail under Oscumba is now Trump’s ambassador to your beloved Deutschland, Krautboy.

    https://igfculturewatch.com/2012/05/01/grenell-derailed/

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    That said, yeah, in loco parentis is a concept that can’t die soon enough. The only real hurdle I see to doing so in public schools is that housing (especially for freshman) is often under control of the school, which often puts it, like it or not, in the role of mediator and parent.

    Maybe public schools ought to think of themselves as landlords, rather than parents, with respect to school-owned student housing. Most apartment complexes have staff whose job it is, in part, to mediate issues between tenants, keep the complex up to snuff, and enforce the rules of the lease.

    The concept of in loco parentis developed hundreds of years ago in the English universities, at a time when the age of majority was 21. But that changed in the early 1970’s, in the US and throughout Europe.

    In loco parentis is a two-headed coin. Colleges and universities assume the parental power to discipline outside the law, but the doctrine also shielded students from the law, creating, in effect, a “safe zone” within the colleges and universities into which law enforcement wasn’t invited.

    I don’t think that the doctrine makes any sense in a world where the age of majority is 18. Why should a college student’s conduct be treated by different rules than a forklift operator’s?

    Colleges and universities are odd places, culturally. Too many students, it seems to me, want colleges and universities to shield them the realities of life and/or from the consequences of their actions, to provide “safe spaces” like their parents used to do when they were kids.

    I don’t have any problem with colleges and universities insisting on classroom decorum, because classroom decorum is important to the mission, just as codes of conduct within the workplace are important to employers. But outside of that?

    I don’t think colleges and universities should undertake to protect students from the realities of life outside of the classroom, including, specifically, the reality that way too many people are ignorant, abusive, racist assholes prone to using words like “faggot”, “nigger”, “wetback” and the like. In the real world, we are all exposed to morons. Why should colleges and universities shelter students from that experience outside the classroom?

    And I don’t think that colleges and universities should undertake to protect the assholes from the consequences of their speech and action. Ignorant, abusive, racist assholes out in the real world face consequences, like a punch in the face. Why should ignorant, abusive, racist students be treated differently?

    Case in point, taking us to another perennial topic on IGF: Why should colleges and universities be expected to spend shitloads of money to provide security when student groups invite provocateurs like Milo and the ever-nasty Ann Coulter to rile things up?

    In the real world, a group hiring a hall to host a speaker requiring special security would be required to provide and pay for the security, and held liable for the consequences if they did not. Why should college and university students be coddled in that regard?

    I haven’t paid much attention to the nuances of the current flap, but it seems to me that a basic rule ought to be, “Report crimes to law enforcement and let them handle it. No exceptions.”

    • posted by Jorge on

      I don’t think colleges and universities should undertake to protect students from the realities of life outside of the classroom, including, specifically, the reality that way too many people are ignorant, abusive, racist assholes prone to using words like “faggot”, “nigger”, “wetback” and the like. In the real world, we are all exposed to morons. Why should colleges and universities shelter students from that experience outside the classroom?

      Well one I would suggest, as many commenters on this site have argued in such controversies as Kim Davis’s jailing and numerous other gay discrimination cases, because it’s the law.

      But to give a reason I actually have a record of supporting, because we’ve done things that way for some time.

      More specifically, in a country that has majority rule as a legal and social value, there is also recognition of the need to protect the individual from the excesses of the majority, or groups that coalesce in such a way to exert social power over others. Examples include numerous First Amendment cases such as teaching German in public schools and not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as the legacies of Jim Crow and beyond such as restrictions on voting and their enforcement by the Ku Klux Klan.

      You say that being an “asshole” should have consequences and that people should not be shielded from “assholes”, as if there is a black-and-white distinction as to who the good guys and bad guys are. That does not escape the original problem: someone has to make the decision as to who is good and bad. Removing the college’s authority delegates that decision to the very group dynamics that have historically violated individual rights and prevented access to educating, voting, and other rights we consider basic.

      That is far too high a price to pay.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        What you say makes a good deal of sense, Jorge, but (in my view, anyway) it is not the role of public colleges and universities to enforce civility and decency outside of the classroom or other arenas central to the college’s or university’s educational mission.

        And, with respect to sexual misconduct, the DeVos proposal limits the power of colleges and universities to conduct investigations under Title IX to “Unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity.”

        That describes conduct so severe that it almost certainly constitutes criminal conduct. It seems to me that colleges and universities should report criminal conduct to law enforcement authorities and let the authorities investigate/prosecute in normal course, treating both offender and victim on the same basis as anyone else.

        Colleges and universities don’t have the proper training or personnel to stand in the stead of law enforcement authorities. That’s why the record shows botch after botch, with little evidence of success.

        In fact, the record shows evidence that college and university attempts to “handle” the issue often results in protecting the offenders, not overprotecting the victims, typically because colleges and universities have a conflicted interest in protecting the reputation of the institution.

        To look at the issue from a slightly different perspective, the mess that the Catholic Church finds itself in these days results not so much from the misconduct of priests, but from the Church’s refusal to turn offender-priests over to law enforcement authorities in the interest of “avoiding scandal”.

    • posted by Matthew on

      “In the real world, we are all exposed to morons.”

      Then why aren’t you in jail for indecent exposure, you son of a Nazi?

  6. posted by Jorge on

    “The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote.”

    How quaint.

    (Reads the link.)

    Oh, dear. I really called it. This line’s probably my keeper:

    “But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start.”

    It is truly fascinating reading the thoughts of an atheist who is able to channel spiritual energy. Oh, since I just that said that, here comes Matthew to spew some self-triggered hate; someone throw him into a shower when he gets here.

    “Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood).”

    This reminds me of my favorite line from Romeo and Juliet. Anyway, I found this very helpful.

    • posted by MR Bill on

      A friend insisted I read “Sexual Personae”, and I found it sometimes interesting , often tendentious, and ultimately infuriating. It was full of assertions that mistake Paglia’s opinions for facts: her ideas on the formations of sex roles aren’t borne out by anthropology, or archeology. As an outdoor guy, her notion that culture is completely a reaction to the horror of nature is weird: and ultimately the view of a life long urban resident (who seems to have loathed a camping trip, the kind of view the late Issac Asimov or Fran Leibowitz held…Her view of human sexuality is dark..Paglia flirts with gender essentialism, and contrairist portions for the shock Value…I read mostly Bend Bow Break, and found it the sort of thing I had loathed in literary criticism: she was reaching for evidence of her views, and it was as bad and any postmodernist/structuralist lit crit..and sometimes howlingly wrong: the Jean Toomer poem she analyzed wasn’t about a cannibal cleats, but a pig barbecue…and casting Emily Dickinson as secretly into S&M is…hardly instructive.
      Here’s Mollie Ivins send up from Mother Jones, which I didn’t see until recently:” Never one to dodge a simple dichotomy when she can set one up, Ms.
      Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from
      denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and
      that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this. She pegs
      poor old Rousseau, that fathead, as the initiator of the silly notion that
      Nature is benign and glorious and that only civilization corrupts.

      Right away, I got a problem. Happens I have spent a lot of my life
      in the wilderness, and also a lot of my life in bars. When I want sex and
      violence, I go to a Texas honky-tonk. When I want peace and quiet, I
      head for the woods. Just as a minor historical correction to Ms. Paglia,
      Rousseau did not invent the concept of benign Nature. Among the first
      writers to hold that nature was a more salubrious environment for man
      than the corruptions of civilization were the Roman Stoics–a
      clear-eyed lot, I always thought.

      Now why, you naturally ask, would anyone care about whether a
      reviewer has ever done any serious camping? Ah, but you do not yet
      know the Camille Paglia school of I-am-the-cosmos argument. Ms.
      Paglia believes that all her personal experiences are Seminal. Indeed,
      Definitive. She credits a large part of her supposed wisdom to having
      been born post-World War II and thus having been raised on television.
      Damn me, so was I.
      …
      Paglia’s view of sex–that it is irrational, violent, immoral, and
      wounding– is so glum that one hesitates to suggest that it might be
      instead, well, a lot of fun, and maybe even affectionate and loving.

      Far less forgiveable is Paglia’s constant confusion of feminism with
      yuppies. What _does_ she think she’s doing? Paglia holds feminists
      responsible for the bizarre blight created by John T. Molloy, author of
      _Dress_for_Success_, which caused a blessedly brief crop of young
      women, all apparently aspiring to be executive vice presidents, to appear
      in the corporate halls wearing those awful sand-colored baggy suits
      with little floppy bow ties around their necks.

      Why Paglia lays the blame for this at the feet of feminism is beyond me.
      Whatever our other aims may have been, no one in the feminist
      movement ever thought you are what you wear….

      In an even more hilarious leap, Paglia contends that feminism is
      responsible for the aerobics craze and concern over thin thighs.
      Speaking as a beer-drinking feminist whose idea of watching her diet is
      to choose either the baked potato with sour cream or with butter, but not
      with both, I find this loony beyond all hope–and I am the cosmos, too.

      What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit.
      The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually
      taken seriously in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of
      decadence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s
      intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of
      categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is
      to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she
      has “flashes of brilliance”. If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill….

      One of her latest efforts at playing enfant terrible in intellectual
      circles was a peppy essay for _Newsday_, claiming that either there is no
      such thing as date rape, or, if there is, it’s women’s fault because we
      dress so provocatively. Thanks, Camille, I’ve got some Texas fraternity boys
      I want you to meet.
      There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that
      politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays,
      when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say,
      “Poor dear, it’s probably PMS.” Whereas, if a man behaves in a
      hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “What an asshole.” Let
      me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh,
      what an asshole.”http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/02/MJ_1991_Sept_Ivins.pdf
      My Paglia moment was during a CNN interview , and the interviewer had asked her about the way she had been cooped by the Right, particularly anti feminists and abusive Men’’s Rights activists.She was having none of it, yelling that feminists were the freak fascists,and that she was so radicalization she couldn’t be cooped “I am an argosy full of whores, I am more radical than they know..” I started laughing..I class her with Cornel West: someone who’s done some interesting if less than vital work, and fluttered the dovecotes of Academic writing, and then started clowning to stay in the media, pushing their own ideas as “sublime and funky..”

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Christ’s guts, I miss Mollie Ivins.

    • posted by Jorge on

      As an outdoor guy, her notion that culture is completely a reaction to the horror of nature is weird…
      …
      Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this.

      You know, she kinda has a point. Judeo-Christianity cares about… other things. But we have a name for that horror: Satan.

      It seems to me you’ve uncovered the flip side of Ms. Pagila’s theory of atheist spirituality, though she may not realize it: atheists need not only a substitute for the worship of the spiritual, but also one for the fear and loathing of the abomination. Since Ms. Pagila worships the spirit of culture, it is unsurprising that her opposition spirit is nature. It’s almost exactly the opposite of the way, at its most secular, the Boy Scouts of America aligns itself. (I am referring to its suggestion in the case about banning people who refuse to honor God that honoring God is non-denominational, and can include revering nature.)

      “She credits a large part of her supposed wisdom to having been born post-World War II and thus having been raised on television. Damn me, so was I.”

      The few times I’ve read her I’ve kinda enjoyed Miss Ivins’s sunnily puckish sense of humor.

      Nature is impressive. But now, Trump leads: Fox News for everyone!

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