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Political Correctness Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 04, 2014 20 Comments
As Americans become increasingly concerned about the spread of Ebola in the United States, there is a growing call to cut off flights to and from Liberia. Senator Ted Cruz has even contacted the FAA. Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call reported:
Ted Cruz Asks FAA About Ebola Flight Ban Sen. Ted Cruz is asking the Federal Aviation Administration what it’s doing to prevent the spread of Ebola after the first U.S. diagnosis, which came in his home state. “Given the severity of this virus and the fact that its spread to Texas has been associated with travel, it is imperative that the FAA take every available precaution in preventing additional cases from arriving in the United States. As you may be aware, several African nations have already restricted or banned air travel to countries with confirmed cases of the Ebola virus,” the Texas Republican wrote in a letter to FAA chief Michael P. Huerta. “British Airways, Emirates Airlines and Kenya Airways have also suspended flights due to the rising death toll and deteriorating public health situation in Ebola-stricken countries.”
One recent voice on CNN, an author named David Quammen believes doing such a thing would be wrong because of slavery. I kid you not. Brendan Bordelon of National Review has the story:
CNN Guest: ‘How Dare We’ Cut Off Liberia Flights When ‘American Slavery’ Created That Country An author on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program Thursday said the United States is uniquely obligated to maintain air links with the Ebola-ridden nation of Liberia, claiming it would be immoral to quarantine a nation created through “American slavery.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 02, 2014 23 Comments
Somehow, this seemed inevitable. Just-resigned Secret Service Director Julia Pierson allegedly is the victim of male privilege, and was treated differently than a man in a similar position would be treated. This video clip -- just before the resignation -- led to charges of sexism: Those charges increased after the resignation.
At The New Republic, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson Was a Victim of the "Glass Cliff": On Wednesday, Julia Pierson, the first woman to ever lead the Secret Service in its nearly 150-year history, resigned her post amid heavy criticism over an intruder who was able to get as far as the East Room of the White House. Reasonable people can disagree about whether, ultimately, she deserved to lose her job or whether anyone in charge during such an incident would have to resign. But it’s probably not pure chance that Pierson, who held that position for just a year-and-a-half, was a woman. Time and again, women are put in charge only when there’s a mess, and if they can’t engineer a quick cleanup, they’re shoved out the door. The academics Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam even coined a term for this phenomenon: They call it getting pushed over the glass cliff.
On Twitter, the claim was made that Pierson was just the fall gal for male failure reflecting male privilege:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 02, 2014 29 Comments
There are seemingly endless programs and advocates to increase the participation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as a means of addressing the gender imbalance, which is particularly dramatic at the graduate and doctoral levels. The National Science Foundation has special grant programs.  The White House emphasizes the issue.  Efforts are made at the elementary and secondary school levels to increase participation by girls. One of my daughters was a computer science major in college (the only female CS major that year), so I'm well aware of the extensive outreach to women. Despite years of concerted efforts, the STEM gender imbalance has barely moved. Men still dominate, by a lot. But the gender imbalance is equal or even more dramatic in fields dominated by women, as this chart shows (via AEI, h/t Ron Coleman): Total Graduate Enrollment by Gender 2013 AEI continues, Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2013 for 5th straight year, and outnumber men in grad school 137.5 to 100
The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) recently released its annual report recently on US graduate school enrollment and degrees for 2013, and here are some of the more interesting findings in this year’s report:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 01, 2014 5 Comments
A few weeks ago, we covered the story of Columbia student, Emma Sulkowicz, who alleged she was raped by another student. Rather than pursue the matter all the way through the legal system (she dropped her case), Sulkowicz took her case to the University tribunal. Her alleged rapist was not found guilty by the campus tribunal, so Sulkowicz decided to protest her trauma through performance art (and college credit) and carry a mattress around campus as long as her alleged rapist remained on campus.  Carrying the mantel of Sulkowicz's cause, what was supposed to be a national day of action and a million mattress march, was not widely protested.  The only two protests we could find are at Texas Tech and Cornell. At Texas Tech:

Some Texas Tech University students have demonstrated against what they say is a "rape culture" on campus by laying bed sheets spray-painted with "No means No" at three locations.

The women's actions Wednesday came a day after university officials sent an email to students and faculty that called activities at a recent off-campus fraternity party "reprehensible."

A picture of a banner at the Sept. 20 Phi Delta Theta fraternity gathering, briefly posted online, read, "No means yes," followed by a graphic sexual remark.

University spokesman Chris Cook said the school learned of the banner the day after the party and began investigating immediately. Last week the university established a task force to review Greek organizations.

The bed sheets displayed Wednesday were removed by police after about 30 minutes.

Cornell took the call to action more seriously and approximately one hundred students showed up to protest. According to Casey Breznick at The Cornell Review (he also writes for Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection), a National Day of Protest Against Rape Culture took an odd turn yesterday. The protest was co-sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine, Black Students United, Crunch: The Kinky Club at Cornell, Cornell Organization for Labor Action, the Cornell Progressive, DASH: Direction Action to Stop Heterosexism,Women of Color Coalition, and Grrls Fight Back. The protest was meant to be the decisive blow to "rape culture" on Cornell's campus. To that end, students read poems aloud. Breznick reports:

Posted by Amy Miller on September 29, 2014 38 Comments
We've written previously about California's proposed "affirmative consent" bill, which codifies -- for lack of a more delicate terminology -- what constitutes acceptable foreplay between consenting adults on college campuses. On Sunday, that bill became law. Via Fox News:
[Bill author Sen. Kevin] De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain "no means no," the definition of consent under the bill requires "an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity." "With one in five women on college campuses experiencing sexual assault, it is high time the conversation regarding sexual assault be shifted to one of prevention, justice, and healing," de Leon said in lobbying Brown for his signature. The legislation says silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. Under the bill, someone who is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep cannot grant consent.
The bill holds hostage funding for colleges and universities unless "the governing board of each community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the governing boards of independent postsecondary institutions shall adopt a policy concerning sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking..." That policy is strictly defined within the bill, and mandates new, uniform procedures for the reporting, counseling, and investigation of alleged sexual misconduct on campus.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 08, 2014 4 Comments
S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, died today at the age of 93. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Mr. Cathy, an entrepreneur from an early age, built Chick-fil-A from a small diner founded in an Atlanta suburb 68 years ago into the top fast-food chicken chain in the U.S. Known for its grounding in the tenets of the founder's religious devotion as well as for its fried-chicken sandwiches, the closely held company has expanded to more than 1,800 stores in 40 states. Its sales have grown for 47 straight years, to $5 billion last year, Chick-fil-A says.... After some early setbacks, Mr. Cathy invented the original Chick-fil-A sandwich in 1964, considered to be the first fast-food chicken sandwich, and opened the company's first restaurant in Atlanta in 1967, according to a timeline on the company's website. He expanded the company in part by setting his restaurants in suburban shopping malls. Throughout, Mr. Cathy emphasized Christian values. The chain's locations are closed on Sundays and play religious-themed music. Mr. Cathy founded a youth-ministry organization, WinShape Foundation, in 1984, which provides leadership training and college scholarships to young people. Through the foundation, 13 foster homes have been created to provide long-term care for foster children in a family setting.
Chick-fil-A drew attention when activist groups and local politicians tried to force Chick-fil-A out of some cities because of its founding family's views on marriage and charitable donations. There never was an allegation of discrimination in the workplace -- this was pure political retribution, a precursor to purges such as that against Brendan Eich. We had extensive coverage of the anti-Chick-fil-A movement, including these posts: The anti-Chick-fil-A protests turned ugly at times, as Anne's video showed when this street preacher wa "chaulked": We covered Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day with many reader pictures, such as these:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on September 06, 2014 71 Comments
This is a thing that's actually happening at Columbia University in New York City. Rather than taking her allegations of rape to local law enforcement, Emma Sulkowicz has decided to carry around her mattress as long as her alleged rapist remains on campus. Sulkowicz didn't report the rape immediately after it happened, but was convinced to report the alleged incident months later. The case was ultimately dismissed by university authorities. According to the Columbia Spectator:

As long as her alleged rapist goes to Columbia, Emma Sulkowicz, CC ’15, plans on carrying a navy blue, extra-long twin-sized mattress wherever she goes.

Entitled “Carry That Weight,” the mattress is both the visual art major’s senior thesis and a step in her journey to come to terms with her experience. Over the past year, Sulkowicz has become a prominent critic of the University’s sexual assault adjudication policies, retelling her story to various administrators and media organizations to raise awareness.

“The past year of my life has been really marked by telling people what happened in that most intimate and private space,” Sulkowicz said, referring to the dorm bed where she was allegedly raped on the second night of her sophomore year.

“I was raped in my own dorm bed and since then, that space has become fraught for me. I feel like I’ve carried the weight of what happened there since then,” she added.

Months after her alleged rape, Emma reported the incident to the school. Her case, one of three individual complaints filed against the same student, was closed, and her rapist found “not responsible.” She appealed, but it was denied and the decision was upheld.

Sulkowicz has turned what she says was a horrible tragedy into performance art.

Performance art that will suffice as her senior thesis. A fact I'll just leave there without commenting on further:

Sulkowicz plead her case to the university. But why didn't she go to the police?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 29, 2014 42 Comments
Last March we covered how California Seeks to Redefine Consensual Campus Sex as Rape, and we asked the question: "How does classifying most consensual sex as rape help rape victims?" It doesn't, of course. The California affirmative consent legislation was not about preventing rapes or other sexual assaults, which already are crimes, but about redefining inter-personal relationships in accordance with radical feminist demands which always view the female as victim of the male patriarchy. The affirmative consent obligation now is on the verge of becoming law (emphasis added):
To address the problem of rape on campuses, California colleges and universities would have to adopt a standard of unambiguous consent among students engaging in sexual activity under a proposal passed by state lawmakers Thursday. If signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, such policies would be required at all public colleges and other institutions that receive state funds for student aid. They would have to include a detailed protocol for assisting victims of sexual assault, stalking, domestic violence and date violence.... Students engaging in sexual activity would first need "affirmative consent" from both parties — a clear threshold that specifically could not include a person's silence, a lack of resistance or consent given while intoxicated.
Campus relationship regulation now is about the predominance of "rape culture" theory which ensnares men into kangaroo campus courts, and even opposes objective preventative measures, like "Undercover Colors" nail polish that reacts to date-rape drugs. The normal sequence of romantic interaction now is a violation of law unless there is something more than objectively willing conduct. It's no longer "against our will," but rather, a matter of procedural steps imposed on willing, consensual participants in order to avoid creating a crime where none exists:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 27, 2014 29 Comments
In Rotherham, England, a group of Pakistani immigrants and others of Pakistani descent deliberately targeted white teenage girls for sexual exploitation, with a religious angle to the targeting. The authorities knew of the exploitation, but were fearful of talking about it or going public with it for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic. So the abuse continued for over a decade, with approximately 1400 girls gang raped and otherwise sexually abused. It's all detailed in The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, 1997 - 2013 (embedded at bottom of this post) released on August 21.  From the report: Rotherham Child Exploitation Cover
No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.... It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.... By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.....
This has been in the British papers for days, with The Daily Mail leading the way:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 07, 2014 9 Comments
We've previously reported on the uneven playing field upon which campus sexual assault cases are tried. In the world of faux-egalitarian bureaucracy that is the university system, there seems to be little concern for the due process rights of the accused; but one new group is aiming to change that. Families Advocating for Campus Equality, or "FACE," is spearheaded by the mothers of several male students who were falsely accused of sexual assault while at their universities. They're working to change the standards by which students accused of sexual assault are "tried" by universities, and for good reason:
On the basis of a mere accusation, students have been suspended or expelled from school, have been denied their right to attorney representation and have been prohibited from confronting or questioning their accusers. Investigations conducted by college administrators are often faulty, relying on hear-say, rumor, and teenage gossip, while the “burden of proof” -- the amount of evidence necessary to render a finding of guilt -- has been expressly reduced from the more exacting “clear and convincing” to a mere “preponderance” of the evidence. In practice, what this all means is that a student, accused of, say, pilfering another student’s computer in a dormitory, would be entitled to a full and fair hearing with legal representation, a right to confront his accuser, and would be judged by the more exacting “clear and convincing” standard. So, too, for that matter, would someone standing accused of murder in a court of law, where the standard of proof would be “beyond a reasonable doubt.”. But when the accusation is of some variation of sexual misconduct on a college campus -- a charge that itself carries enormous life-altering consequences for the accused -- no such safeguards are afforded.
FACE has, of course, been accused of being "anti-woman" for having the audacity to demand equal justice, but the founders of the group vehemently deny this accusation:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 01, 2014 30 Comments
On July 30, 2014, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) helped introduce the "Campus Accountability and Safety Act," a bipartisan initiative aimed at forcing universities to address and curb the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. During a press conference Wednesday, the coalition pushing the Act emphasized problems with existing policies, saying that current federal law actually encourages universities to under report sexual assaults that occur on campus. In a summary distributed to the press and public, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said that "[t]he bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act will create incentives for schools to take proactive steps to protect their students and rid their campuses of sexual predators." The full breakdown of the Act states several key goals:
  1. Establish new campus resources and support services for student survivors
  2. Ensure minimum training standards for on-campus personnel
  3. Create new historic transparency requirements
  4. Increase campus accountability and coordination with law enforcement
  5. Establish enforceable Title IX penalties and stiffer penalties for Clery Act violations

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 04, 2014 4 Comments
There is excellent article at See Thru Education by Robert Paquette, Hamilton College Professor of History, who also is a co-founder of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Previously, we have featured Prof. Paquette's battles with multicultural dogma on campus, Western Civilization driven off campus at Hamilton College. Prof. Paquette's post is How American Universities Assassinated the Fourth of July:
“American exceptionalism” would not become the whipping-bench of the professoriate until the last decades of the twentieth century, yet Americans from the first Independence Day onward, without the term in their lexicon, had a sense, somewhat mystical, but nonetheless deeply ingrained, of what might be called an orthodoxy, that their system of government exemplified by design a standard of moral rectitude that would not only bring peace and prosperity to themselves but serve as a liberating beacon light for oppressed people around the world....

Posted by Prudence Paine on June 30, 2014 29 Comments
Many people hearing talk of America's campus “rape culture” might be tempted to dismiss the overheated rhetoric as harmless. Despite little evidence "rape culture" exists, though, three recent roundtable discussions on campus sexual assault hosted by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) showed that not only do some people absolutely believe a rape culture exists on college campuses, but the federal government is involved in policing the issue on campuses. The Department of Education mandates colleges to handle every single student sexual assault through internal quasi-legal proceedings, in which the school performs all the roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge, executioner and statistics compiler. From the perspective of accusers in campus sexual assault cases, they may very well prefer a quasi-legal adjudication of their complaints because it provides a much broader definition of sexual assault, a much lower burden of proof and an environment in which “student's rights” tend to be accuser's rights, with little emphasis on rights for the accused. For the accuser, it makes the alleged post-assault experience that much less stressful. From the accused's perspective, though, he's not gonna know what hit him.

Schools Play Law and Order: SVU

MSUMikeJunger-CSPAN-SexAssault Speaking amongst friendly colleagues last Monday at the third roundtable, Mike Jungers, the dean of students at Missouri State University, made the surprising statement that new investigation procedures of campus sexual assault were resulting in the alleged perpetrators agreeing to be interrogated without obtaining an attorney. He considered this to be a good thing.
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