Tag: harvard
Rape Is A Vile Crime, But The ‘Epidemic’ Of Campus Sexual Violence Is Exaggerated

Rape Is A Vile Crime, But The ‘Epidemic’ Of Campus Sexual Violence Is Exaggerated

Look, the Great Campus Rape Crisis was mainly hype all along. What Vice President Joe Biden described as an epidemic of sexual violence sweeping American college campuses in 2011 was vastly overstated. If people actually believed that 20 percent of college girls ended up being raped or sexually assaulted—as activists claimed—then they’d quit sending their daughters.

Instead, what’s happened on too many campuses has been a kind of psychosexual panic akin to the “recovered memory” episodes of the 1980s—such as the infamous McMartin preschool trial in Los Angeles, and the fantastic allegations of orgiastic rape and murder in Olympia, Washington described in Lawrence Wright’s terrific book Remembering Satan.

This is in no way to minimize rape, a vile crime deserving heavy prison time. Nor even boorish drunken carousing often winked at by college authorities even as Title IX administrators on the same campuses conduct Star Chamber sex investigations against students accorded none of the due process rights guaranteed in the US Constitution.

It’s not a criminal matter, you see. Merely one’s educational and professional future that can be at stake.

Somebody changes her mind after a one-night-stand and a young man may as well pack up and go home. That, or prepare himself for months in virtual exile, banned from anywhere on campus frequented by the “survivor” of this misbegotten tryst, while being interrogated by an administrator serving as one-size-fits-all investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury.

There is no right to remain silent. Refusal to testify against oneself can result in expulsion. No cross-examining one’s accuser, either. It’s thought too traumatic. Anything an accused student does say can be used against him at a criminal trial.

The standard of guilt is the “preponderance of evidence,” i.e. 51 percent. Were they alone together in his dorm room? OK, then he raped her.

I’m sorry, that does not sound like America.

If you think that’s too strong, check out the excellent series of investigative articles by The Atlantic’s Emily Yoffe. A careful, even scholarly reporter, Yoffe describes an upside-down world where the weaker the evidence of sexual transgression in too many instances, the stronger the finding of guilt.

Indeed, things on campus had gotten so out of hand that Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy De Vos has even taken time out from her busy schedule of attacking public schools to promise badly needed reforms to the Obama-mandated Title IX system.  Groups of law professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the American Association of Trial Lawyers and the American Association of University Professors broadly support her.

Campus activists are certain to put up a fight. If nothing else, quite a few jobs could be at stake. Harvard University, for example, now has 55 Title IX investigators—full time sex sleuths, most of them.

“Who Gets to Define Campus Rape?” ask Miriam Gleckman-Krut and Nicole Bedera, University of Michigan “campus sexual violence researchers” in a recent New York Times op ed.  Definitely not judges and juries. “College tribunals,” we’re reminded “are not criminal courts.” Also, false rape accusations are perishingly rare—a truism among academic feminists that Yoffe shows to be based upon fallacious evidence.

In real life, of course, both men and women lie all the time, and sex is one of the topics they lie about most often. Ask any divorce lawyer.

But the real heart of the matter comes when Gleckman-Krut and Bedera insist that bad witnesses are the best witnesses: “[T]rauma can make survivors seem disorganized to campus administrators who are untrained.”

To Emily Yoffe, this is the intellectual heart of the matter. Based upon a highly influential, but highly unscientific paper called “The Neurobiology of Sexual Assault,” Title IX investigators have been taught that trauma wrecks memory, so that the more confused a victim’s story, the truer it’s apt to be.

Brain scientists Yoffe interviewed say otherwise, as does common experience. Terrible events too often can’t be forgotten. Intoxication, however, definitely makes for shaky recall. Meanwhile, as in “recovered memory” episodes of yore, overzealous inquisitors can persuade people of damn near anything.

Yoffe writes that her own reporting doesn’t “typically describe campuses filled with sociopathic predators. They mostly paint a picture of students, many of them freshmen, who begin a late-night consensual sexual encounter, well lubricated by alcohol, and end up with divergent views of what happened.”

 In short, basic Animal House stuff—more John Belushi than, well, Donald Trump. The Michigan team does patronizingly concede “that being accused of sexual assault hurts. And there are things that we can and should do to help accused students — namely, providing them with psychological counsel. But accused men’s pain does not excuse rape, and men shouldn’t be the ones defining it.”

Look, nothing excuses rape. Nowhere, never. But they can keep their psychological counseling. It’s legal counsel accused students need.

Let judges and juries do the defining.  

The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard

The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica. This story was co-published with The Guardian.

I would like to express my gratitude to Jared Kushner for reviving interest in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” I have never met or spoken with him, and it’s rare in this life to find such a selfless benefactor. Of course, I doubt he became Donald Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere merely to boost my lagging sales, but still, I’m thankful.

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said in an email Thursday that “the allegation” that Charles Kushner’s gift to Harvard was related to Jared’s admission “is and always has been false.” His parents, Charles and Seryl Kushner, “are enormously generous and have donated over 100 million dollars to universities, hospitals and other charitable causes. Jared Kushner was an excellent student in high school and graduated from Harvard with honors.” (About 90 percent of Jared’s 2003 class at Harvard also graduated with honors.)

My Kushner discoveries were an offshoot of my research for a chapter on Harvard donors. Somebody had slipped me a document I had long coveted: the membership list of Harvard’s Committee on University Resources. The university wooed more than 400 of its biggest givers and most promising prospects by putting them on this committee and inviting them to campus periodically to be wined, dined, and subjected to lectures by eminent professors.

My idea was to figure out how many children of these corporate titans, oil barons, money managers, lawyers, high-tech consultants and old-money heirs had gone to Harvard. A disproportionate tally might suggest that the university eased its standards for the offspring of wealthy backers.

I began working through the list, poring over “Who’s Who in America” and Harvard class reunion reports for family information. Charles and Seryl Kushner were both on the committee. I had never heard of them, but their joint presence struck me as a sign that Harvard’s fundraising machine held the couple in especially fond regard.

The clips showed that Charles Kushner’s empire encompassed 25,000 New Jersey apartments, along with extensive office, industrial and retail space and undeveloped land. Unlike most of his fellow committee members, though, Kushner was not a Harvard man. He had graduated from New York University. This eliminated the sentimental tug of the alma mater as a reason for him to give to Harvard, leaving another likely explanation: his children.

Sure enough, his sons Jared and Joshua had both enrolled there.

Charles Kushner differed from his peers on the committee in another way; he had a criminal record. Five years after Jared entered Harvard, the elder Kushner pleaded guilty in 2004 to tax violations, illegal campaign donations, and retaliating against a witness. (As it happens, the prosecutor in the case was Chris Christie, recently ousted as the head of Trump’s transition team.) Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities. Kushner then had a videotape of the tryst sent to his sister. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

I completed my analysis, which justified my hunch. Of the 400-plus tycoons on Harvard’s list — which included people who were childless or too young to have college-age offspring — more than half had sent at least one child to the university.

I also decided that the Kushner-Harvard relationship deserved special attention. Although the university often heralded big gifts in press releases or a bulletin called — in a classic example of fundraising wit, “Re:sources” — a search of these outlets came up empty. Harvard didn’t seem eager to be publicly associated with Charles Kushner.

While looking into Kushner’s taxes, though, federal authorities had subpoenaed records of his charitable giving. I learned that in 1998, when Jared was attending The Frisch School and starting to look at colleges, his father had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in annual installments of $250,000. Charles Kushner also visited Neil Rudenstine, then Harvard president, and discussed funding a scholarship program for low- and middle-income students.

I phoned a Harvard official, with whom I was on friendly terms. First I asked whether the gift played any role in Jared’s admission. “You know we don’t comment on individual applicants,” he said. When I pressed further, he hung up. We haven’t spoken since.

At Harvard, Jared Kushner majored in government. Now the 35-year-old is poised to become the power behind the presidency. What he plans to do, and in what direction he and his father-in-law will lead the country, are far more important than his high school grades.

IMAGE: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump greets supporters along with his wife Melania and family during his election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar