Volokh Conspiracy Just yesterday I was pointing out that many people were misled about the content of George Will’s column on sexual assault by left-wing sites that manufactured outrage by putting a wholly inaccurate headline on a blog piece that proceeded to misrepresent what Will wrote. Now it’s my turn. Here’s the Gawker headline: Law Professor: […]
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It’s not just the Obama administration VAWA Office that thinks all sexual contact or behavior without “explicit consent” is sexual assault. So does Senator McCaskill (D-MO). Later this summer, McCaskill is going to propose legislation that would further undermine due process on campus. According to Senator McCaskill’s spokeswoman, she thinks that people (including, presumably, her […]
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In a recent article in the New York Times (6/17/14), economic columnist David Leonhardt says that “affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed”. I wish I could be so confident. Premature obituaries for affirmative action have been a periodic feature of commentators and op-ed writers for three decades now (I foolishly engaged in […]
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I recently looked at the inconsistent and in some cases outright arbitrary ways the nation’s leading universities are defining one form of campus sexual assault—rape that occurs because the accuser cannot consent. The piece made three points: (1) a substantial minority of schools have a definition of sexual assault that technically applies to many instances […]
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AEI’s Cristina Hoff Sommers is now hosting “The Factual Feminist,” an excellent YouTube series which punctures the conventional wisdom on “feminist philosophies and practices.” Today’s episode explores the damage Title IX has done to college sports:
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It’s important to remember that though college makes good financial sense, not all college degrees are created equal. A new paper by Temple economics professor Douglas Webber makes this point by highlighting a few factors which determine whether college is worth it. The first, major choice, surprised him. As he told the Chronicle of Higher […]
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When student activists tried to block some commencement speakers this year, conservatives generally denounced these efforts as censorship. Sure, these protesters were mostly aligned with the campus left, a group that has historically attempted to stifle free speech. These efforts were consistent with the decades of illiberality on our college campuses, a subject we and […]
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The politically correct speech enforcers at the Patent and Trademark office have just voted, for the second time, to cancel several Washington Redskins trademarks that contain the term “Redskins” because Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act “prohibits registration of marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute.” (The first such decision, […]
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The Volokh Conspiracy Columnist George Will wrote a column recently that has attracted a tremendous amount of ire, including calls that the Washington Post fire him. The St. Louis Dispatch has now announced that it’s replacing Will with Michael Gerson. The announcement reads in part: “The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which […]
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National Association of Scholars How frequent are sexual assaults on campus? President Obama recently cited the estimate that one in five women enrolled in college suffer sexual assault by the time they graduate. The Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, based on reported crimes, put the rate at 1 in 40. Reported crimes inevitably fall short […]
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The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has been waging a war on campus due process, ordering colleges to change their disciplinary processes to make it more likely that students accused of sexual assault will be found culpable. Many schools, however, have gone beyond the OCR’s demands in various ways, both in terms of due […]
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As revisionist histories go, The Forgotten Man went—straight to the NY Times bestsellers list in 2009. The book stayed there for months, even though it differed from the received wisdom of academia, and the lockstep opinion of the mainstream media. Indeed, Amity Shlaes’s pellucid chronicle of the Great Depression became successful because it rejected the […]
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Last Monday, Bowdoin College made page one of the New York Times with its decision to de-recognize an evangelical student group for refusing to sign an anti-discrimination pledge. This meant the group could not use the chapel, the multicultural center, any room at Bowdoin, or even campus bulletin boards. The pledge said all campus groups […]
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There he goes again, bypassing the Constitution’s pesky requirement that laws must be passed by Congress, not promulgated by executive decree. The Washington Post has just reported that President Obama will soon sign an executive order implementing all or most (the text is not yet available) of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors based on […]
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Will working as a barista reduce your college tuition? Starbucks thinks it should. Yesterday, Starbucks CEO and chairman Howard Schultz announced that his company will pay for a portion of its employees’ college educations at the online arm of Arizona State University, provided they work up to 20 hours a week for the company. It […]
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Our friends at FIRE has just released a video explaining why the 2006 Duke lacrosse case is still relevant. It features frequent Minding the Campus contributor KC Johnson, who wrote the definitive history of the case. Check it out here:
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Last month, the Vassar chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a Nazi propaganda poster on its Tumblr site. The poster depicted, among other things, a big nosed man carrying a moneybag. The SJP had previously posted material from an anti-Semitic magazine, using the classic “fifth columnist” trope to describe Israel’s American defenders. At that time, […]
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One striking element of the debate over sexual assault on campus is the almost complete lack of credibility for those whose predictions or observations have failed to stand the test of time. Two examples: The first came in a piece from anthropologist Barbara King, a blogger for NPR. King delivered a pretty standard “rape culture” posting, […]
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Posted by A Voice For Male Students 1. John Doe at Occidental College 2. Andre L. Henry at Delaware State University 3. Benjamin King at Depauw University 4. Edwin Bleiler at College of the Holy Cross 5. John Doe at Williams College 6. Drew Sterrett at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 7. Kevin Parisi at Drew University […]
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In late April, the media were abuzz with the tale of yet another horrific injustice inflicted by a university on a female student who had been a victim of sexual assault on campus. “Brown University lets rapist who choked his victim reenroll after a semester-long suspension,” thunderedthe headline on Salon.com. The reports were based on the account of Brown […]
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The Center for Individual Rights has filed a lawsuit in Connecticut on behalf of Pamela Swanigan, a graduate student in English at the University of Connecticut. The suit alleges that Ms. Swanigan was not allowed to compete for a highly prestigious, merit-based scholarship despite being the top applicant the year she applied to UConn. Instead she was […]
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Liberalism and the left have become virtually indistinguishable (as Fred Siegel’s impressive Revolt Against The Masses persuasively documents), becoming more intolerant and hence more intolerable. An exemplary recent example is the recent attack orchestrated by GetEqual, a Berkeley-based militant gay rights group, against University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock. Laycock, ubiquitously described, as here, as “husband of UVA President Teresa Sullivan [and] […]
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Last month, the Modern Language Association (MLA) issued the report of its Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. The crucial word in the report is “unsustainable.” The authors recognize that the old model of luring students into doctoral programs, keeping them at work on degrees for up to a decade, and then […]
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In the Brown University rape-charge scandal, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has declared that the complaining student was “nearly choked to death.” The male involved says the “choking” was minor and meant to be affectionate: “Both (the female and male students, Lena Sclove and Daniel Kopin) acknowledge that Sclove had an intensely negative reaction when Kopin put his hand on her […]
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English departments have pretty much given up on their mission of preserving a literary canon or teaching poetic form and rhetorical strategies. Decades ago, politics of race, class, and gender overtook any concern for preserving and perpetuating poetic art. In fact, to claim that there is such a thing as Literature was to align oneself […]
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Columnist Mike Adams reports that at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he is an embattled conservative professor, graduating students can get commencement cords in three colors: gold for good grades, purple for being a homosexual and lavender for being supportive of homosexuals. We had no idea that they gave out tassels for orientation and orientational support, […]
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Is it reasonable for a university to insist that campus Christian groups accept non-Christian or anti-Christian students as group leaders? Ask a hundred ordinary Americans and you would very likely get 99 or 100 noes. Ask the same question at our most politically correct colleges and universities, though, and you’d get a different answer. Because of campus anti-discrimination codes, all […]
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Suppose you’re a wealthy investor, and an enterprising businessman comes to you requesting a billion dollar investment in his company. He promises an incredible ROI. Your interest is piqued, so you ask him for some data to justify such a large investment. “No can do,” he says. “That information is private.” Of course, you’d laugh […]
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Slate‘s Emily Bazelon recently took a look at the tensions in campus sexual assault matters by looking into a the case of Leah Francis, a Stanford student who said that she was brutally raped on campus. Though Bazelon conceded due process problems, her column suggested that issues regarding campus due process are likely to get worse before […]
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President Obama announced today an executive order that will make the student loan program a worse deal for taxpayers. Though the federal government already allows some students to cap their loan repayments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes, the President hopes to expand the program. Students who borrowed before October 2007 or who haven’t borrowed since […]
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