Long article, but gets to the heart of why the far left will likely continue to double down on identity politics. Really relevant to this thread since it’s largely coming from the far left intellectual elite who are shaping progressive politics, the political class and the academics.
@countingbeans, you might like it.
About the author - Joshua Mitchell is a professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown.
Keep them coming. You’re a very refreshing voice on these pages.
BTW, it is unfair to blame the current state of universities solely on the left and identity politics. The right also shares some blame. Education is not valued in this country by people on both sides. The right hates experts and people with too much “book learning” and the religious influence on the right’s decision making has them more concerned about school prayer and creationism than actually getting a good education. It is their own version of identity politics. So many alt-right types champion western culture and civilization yet how many of them fight for the arts and humanities instead of attacking them? This in spite of the fact that arts and the humanities are not only part of western culture but the reason for it even existing. You have schools getting curriculum advice from CEOs who base their reasoning on what they want from employees. Really? School now is about creating worker bees for corporations? Obama jokes about the usefulness (or uselessness) of an art history degree which says something about our culture as it is vs our idea of what our culture is. Yes, Pres. Trump “we” write symphonies yet how many schools don’t have music programs? Our universities have problems because the kids entering them don’t really care about being educated. It is a reflection of our society’s view of education. If you measure the availability and access to education that we now have and have had, the accessibility of knowledge via public libraries and the internet, the number of people who are literate, etc, against what we actually know and our ability to reason logically, I think we must be the stupidest people who ever lived.
Excellent post, zecarlo…!
I should also add that we are now a culture of “is this going to be on the test?,” and “do I need to know this?” I was told education is its own reward but that is no longer the case. All of this standardized testing, thanks to the stupidity of No Child Left Behind, has turned our kids into good test takers who can’t think for themselves. Ask people who teach and some will tell you how they take time away from educating to teach kids how to take tests. I remember tutoring college students in Spanish and Italian and they would ask if there were any shortcuts or strategies to help them do better. They were always upset when everything I advised them to do involved studying and actually learning the language. Which brings up how much Americans hate learning a language other than English, and their difficulty in learning is related to their weakness with English. Anytime I hear someone say how immigrants need to learn English I feel like asking him what a direct object is. Then you meet someone from a non-English speaking European country who speaks English better than an American as well as one or two additional languages other than his native one. It’s embarrassing.
This is really excellent, thanks for posting. And at the heart of the flaw of identity politics is the fuel that makes it persist - Boomer vanity. To which I say, quite seriously actually, when will the Boomer generation take a long look at their body of political and cultural work and say, maybe that’s enough?
Comparing historical figures of the Renaissance or Enlightenment periods of western civilization to your run of the mill college or university student isn’t really fair to anybody, yourself included.
Though I do agree to some extent that there is a lot missing from our society as a whole when it comes to the role and value of education as it is currently viewed and applied.
Once education became an industry instead of an undertaking the game was fucking O_V_E_R.
And now that it has become an emotional hot button there is no way that anybody can say “You know what? Billy is a fucking idiot, and there is no way we can spend the next 5 years and $160,000 hoping that he doesn’t drink himself to death or eat a god damned lightbulb or some shit” lest they be accused of being “Anti - Intellectual!” when really he should be a plumbers apprentice or a welders helper.
So yeah, dark days are upon us.
I’m not doing that. What I am doing is pointing out how we have more educated people today than in the past yet, we don’t really seem to be as smart as we should be relative to that education.
I hear you. I’ve beaten my head off of that wall plenty of times in my life.
It hasn’t moved.
@magick - I wanted to share this article with you. Pardon the long block of text. Paywall.
Really, this is very basic ACLU stuff. Let’s have respect for the civil liberties of someone accused of a serious offense. Bolded text in that regard is mine. Anyone who is liberal in the ACLU sense of the word should be happy with these changes. Notice all the Harvard professors who have expressed concern - more than TWO DOZEN have spoken out about the problems with it.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made clear her intention to correct one of the Obama administration’s worst excesses—its unjust rules governing sexual misconduct on college campuses. In a forceful speech Thursday at Virginia’s George Mason University, Mrs. DeVos said that “one rape is one too many”—but also that “one person denied due process is one too many.” Mrs. DeVos declared that “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.”
This might seem like an obvious affirmation of fundamental American principles. But such sentiments were almost wholly absent in discussions about campus sexual assault from the Obama White House and Education Department. Instead, as Mrs. DeVos noted, officials “weaponized” the department’s Office for Civil Rights, imposing policies that have “failed too many students.”
In 2011 and 2014, the OCR issued “guidance” letters radically reinterpreting Title IX, a statute prohibiting sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal money. The highest-profile of these directives required schools to adjudicate sexual-misconduct claims under the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof.
But as Boston College’s R. Shep Melnick has noted, that was “just a minor part of the OCR’s procedural requirements.” Worse were “the agency’s rules on cross-examination and appeals; its informal pressure on schools to institute a ‘single-investigator model’ that turns one person appointed by the school’s ‘Title IX Coordinator’ into a detective, judge, and jury; and the intense pressure for schools to show they are ‘getting tough’ on sexual assault.” As Mrs. DeVos observed: “It’s no wonder so many call these proceedings ‘kangaroo courts.’ ”
The OCR’s guidance letters were not even formal regulations, so that the department bypassed the public notice and comment rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. Mrs. DeVos promised that wouldn’t happen again: “The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over.”
To be sure, withdrawing the Title IX guidance, as the department is now expected to do, would not be enough to create a fairer system on campus. In a just-released study, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found only two of the nation’s 53 leading institutions (Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley) earned a score of greater than 60% for fair procedures in their Title IX tribunals.
Under Obama administration pressure, schools dramatically increased personnel in their Title IX offices, creating entrenched bureaucracies that will aggressively resist reform. And several states, including California and New York, have enacted laws designed to make it even more difficult for accused students to defend themselves. Thus the system will remain rigged against accused students until the Education Department issues specific, detailed rules to ensure fairness.
Still, discarding the Obama-era guidance would have two immediate salutary effects. First, it would eliminate one of universities’ standard defenses against lawsuits by accused students, which is to claim that they were merely doing Washington’s bidding.
Second, it would allow the department to implement Title IX policy through new, carefully considered regulations after a period of public notice and comment. The FIRE study identifies provisions that would be necessary to achieve a minimum of fairness in campus tribunals—the presumption of innocence, clear notice of alleged violations, sufficient time for the accused student to prepare his defense, impartial fact-finders, access to all relevant and exculpatory evidence, the right to cross-examine the accuser, a meaningful right to legal representation, and a meaningful right to appeal.
As four Harvard law professors— Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet and Nancy Gertner —argued in a recent article, a fair process requires “neutral decisionmakers who are independent of the school’s [federal regulatory] compliance interest, and independent decisionmakers providing a check on arbitrary and unlawful decisions.” The four had been among more than two dozen Harvard law professors to express concerns about the Obama administration’s—and Harvard’s—handling of Title IX. So too had 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors, as well as the American Council for Trial Lawyers.
Due process is, or should be, neither a liberal nor a conservative issue, and Mrs. DeVos is hardly alone in recognizing the shortcomings of the policy she inherited. But the accusers-rights organizations that dominated Title IX policy during the Obama administration have reacted with outrage. Laura Dunn, executive director and founder of SurvJustice, deemed the mere news of the speech a “winter” for Title IX. Another group, Know Your IX, demanded that Mrs. DeVos “enforce and support Title IX.”
In fact, on Thursday Mrs. DeVos made clear her determination to enforce Title IX fairly—to combat the new normal of discrimination against accused students as well as any residual discrimination against accusers.
For any of you who weren’t following the Lauer thread. These are The Atlantic articles, @magick put up. Well worth the read if you missed them. Talking about sexual assault on campus.
Also, if you’ve never seen it, there’s a link somewhere near the beginning of this thread about the Duke Lacrosse case. If you’ve never seen that video, it’s chilling.
Weird how the campus pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction to that of the non-academic zeitgeist.
Yeah, I think your comment in the Lauer thread about a needed correction, societal tipping point is right.
I think they’ll work out the due process issues. It’s taken a few years to see the fall out. At least at the university level, we’ve now also seen some victims that have been created with policies that tried to protect women, but didn’t do enough to make sure the accused had their civil liberties protected, too. A balance, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to care more about sexual assault in our society AND still preserve basic civil liberties for people who are accused.
I don’t think a couple of articles on sites like The Atlantic would be sufficient to suggest that people with power in college campuses are looking at the issue on a more even scale.
IIRC(I haven’t read them in a while) the articles show that it’s fairly evident that the Admin on many campuses themselves are firmly entrenched in thinking that the accused have no real right and that’s perfectly fine. Furthermore, CA and many other states are currently in the process of moving the Obama Admin Title IX guidelines into their state laws in some form or fashion.
As I wrote earlier- the Trump Admin striking down the guidelines leave no room for folks to actually build an informed opinion on it- If the Trump Admin and its cronies did something, then we as responsible individuals MUST oppose it, or some such.
The Democrats are basically starting to do what they castigated the Republicans for doing with Obama.
I think it would be fairer to say that the general populace is catching up to the way things are changing on college campuses.
Edit-
What really bothers me is the information conveyed in the second article- The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault
If the campus Admin doesn’t even trust the vicitm to have some valid input to give to the case because of trauma, then what exactly are they going on?
It basically means that the very accusation is the only thing that matters- how he/she recollects the incident as it happened may not matter at all, since he/she was too traumatized to remember anything at all.
That seems terrifying. The basic foundation of accusing someone of some misdeed is that there is some evidence or recollection of memory that substantiates the accusation. How the heck do you accuse someone of some misdeed if there is there’s nothing to substantiate the claim?
To me, this claim that the victim cannot be trusted to have any real memory of the assault means that the campus Admin is free to make up the story to fit what it feels is correct to the situation and roll with it. This makes the lack of rights the accused have in these cases worse and essentially makes it impossible for them to even mount a defense.
Heck, I think there was an instance in one of those articles where the victim eventually decided that nothing happened, and the Admin went along with charging the accused anyways.
I find this absurd, but if you agree to the idea that the traumatic event made the victim’s memory unreliable, then it makes sense to continue on with prosecuting the accused.
It’s always hard to detect with certainty, in real time, when the zeitgeist shifts.
I’m sure no liberals will read this with an objective view because-
1- Betty DeVos
2- WSJ
But when you have a bunch of Harvard Law Profs saying that things are a bit screwy right now, then I think you should at least listen to what they have to say.
=(
DeVos is objectively and woefully unqualified for her position. You may agree with her stance on this particular policy, but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone–liberal and conservative alike–should be deeply skeptical of everything she says in her professional capacity.
Ya, that’s exactly what I meant…
Since Betty DeVos is unqualified and was appointed through a great deal of criticism, no one is going to look at what she says or does in an objective manner.
Where does that lead us?
I don’t understand. Are suggesting people should overlook her professional inadequacies and give her opinions credence they don’t deserve?