71–80 of 387 posts
Flagged as irrelevant to Hacker News' core purpose, and somewhat inflammatory to boot for those not marinating in campus culture wars all the time.
Also it's written in the least inflammatory manner I could imagine an article on the subject could be. Like, come on, be a bit more charitable.
I think it's pretty clear that Title IX courts could do a much better job of protecting the due process rights of the accused. I think it's possible to take a nuanced position that advocates for better due process rights while still fundamentally respecting the advances we've made in protecting the interests of women and other underrepresented groups . ...but without that last part, the position I just outlined sound…
Your reasoning for why the non-italicized portion is not good enough is “conservatives say that”. The reason you offer for why the professors get a frosty reaction is “they could be mistaken for stealth reactionaries”. Perhaps it’s less important to consider what label you can assign to someone and more important to just consider what they’re saying.
>But after a lifetime in service of the feminist cause, she took on the case of a friend whose son she came to believe had been wrongly convicted of rape and won his acquittal on appeal. This is one of the big ways in which sexism is a much more tractable problem than racism and less potentially explosive. Women and men both have members of the opposite sex that they genuinely love. I have heard that fathers with dau…
How would bias toward gay people fit in with that? A lot of people don't know (or at least aren't aware that they know) anyone gay, but bias toward gay people has dramatically fallen over the last couple of decades. There was a recent episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR that talked about this [1]. This part is particularly interesting: > In a thought experiment, Mahzarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines…
This is becoming increasingly less true because it is becoming safer and more respectable to be out. This creates a tight feedback loop of acceptance which makes people feel safer coming out.
> It is a story with which the rise of Donald Trump is fatally intertwined, but it is in fact a story that takes precedence—both temporal and logical—over the anarchic and pathological rise of the demagogue occupying the White House. All of the elements of this story were in full flower during the Obama administration. Trump's role has been to politically capitalize on the resulting resentments. This is a "this is ho…
For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
If I run a startup, and one of my employees is making other employees uncomfortable, and he keeps getting accused of harassing other employees, and is generally just making some of my best engineers unhappy, hurting productivity, and ruining our carefully constructed culture... ...I can fire him. I mean, obviously I need to go through the proper HR procedures, follow local employment law, respect the terms of his con…
At a university, dating other students is so commonplace that a large portion of people meet their spouses that way.
Title IX may want to treat dating at universities with the same disdain as in the workplace, but it's not going to be an easy cultural shift.
This is a symptom of a greater degeneracy in academia, driven primarily by progressive activism, wherin objectivity of argument evaluation is presumed to be impossible, and superseded by value judgements based on feelings induced by said arguments and the socioeconomic nature of the arguers. This not so Critical Theory and the movement it spawned is dragging the country down a path of ruin as our once great intellectual institutions are pillaged of their prestige by people who have been convinced that they are owed respect and power simply for being disadvantaged. In reality they only continue to cheapen the value of the college degree and sap resources from useful pursuits.
The deleterious effects may not be so obvious in academia, but if we do not curtail the movement's gradual march into the corporate world, we will be rewarded with an increasingly disfunctional society - poorer healthcare, inferior infrastructure, confused social policy - as we increasingly award power based on perceived marginalization rather than potential or some measure of merit. Welcome to the post meritocracy "egalitarian" Utopia.
For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
Ideally that makes sense to me, but unfortunately courts take a long of time and don't always pursue cases thoroughly. Given that reality, I don't know how an institution is supposed to handle the following scenario without their own tribunal system: Student A and Student B have a class together. Their dorms are next door to each other. Student A rapes Student B. Is Student B expected to attend class every day with t…
Currently the de facto assumption is whoever files a Title IX report first is the victim and whoever files second is the rapist. I'm sure you can see how this system can be abused: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/title-ix-i...
For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
The answer is in the article: Title IX requires them to. Specifically, the new federal guidance that was issued during the Obama administration.
See footnotes 10 and 12, which lay out the precedent that sexual assault alone could create a hostile environment.
What apparently did change was that prior to the letter some schools applied a "clear & convincing" standard to adjudicating harassment complaints, while the letter demands (citing some precedent) that the proper standard is "preponderance of the evidence". See pp 10-11.
But I don't think that's the critical change. From what I can piece together, the Obama letter was basically a notice that regulators were going to put more effort into enforcing the existing law. This type of shift of emphasis is common. When that notice went out, colleges did as all large organizations do to show obeyance--they made a show of reviewing their procedures and requiring completion of more sexual harassment training by their personnel.
Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally) there was some new "science" about the psychology of sexual assault that had begun to dominate the discourse. And one researcher in particular, Dr. Rebecca Campbell, gained widespread recognition and invitations to "educate" college administrators on matters of sexual assault. Dr. Campbell's ideas have since been roundly rebuked (if not completely rejected), but for a few years they figured heavily into how some colleges designed and applied their adjudication procedures. See https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-ba... for the long story.
But for this bad "science" making the rounds, I think the Obama-era increased enforcement would have mostly gone unnoticed, save for marginal changes in the speed and resolution of sexual assault complaints.
EDIT: And there it is in this article: "But she also described with astonishment a training session she had attended in which the concept of 'trauma-informed investigation' was taught." That's the Dr. Campbell research, likely presented by Dr. Campbell herself.
For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
I don't want to wade into the specifics of campus tribunals, but the broad mechanism here is very commonplace and uncontroversial, no? Eg if I work for an NSF grant recipient and I spit on my boss, and I get fired with no court ruling, would you find it confusing/objectionable?