Tag: university of virginia
Irked By Progressive Ideologues On Campus? Sorry, We Have Bigger Problems

Irked By Progressive Ideologues On Campus? Sorry, We Have Bigger Problems

Breaking News: college liberal arts departments infiltrated by liberals. Engineering schools, not so much. Profs pompous; college kids self-righteous. If these strike you as major revelations, you may have what it takes be an editor at the New York Times,brow perennially furrowed for signs of leftist groupthink in the academy.

Recently, the Times sounded the alarm yet again, publishing an op-ed column by University of Virginia senior Emma Camp, a columnist for the campus newspaper. Camp lamented that “my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity” to the point where “I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.” It’s a trendy complaint.

Camp provides one specific example. “During a feminist theory class…I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows.” For this implied offense against multi-culturalism—never mind that this custom has been practically unknown in India for many years—Camp felt the classroom grow tense.

“I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry.” After the professor tried to move the discussion along, "I still felt uneasy…I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself.”

And that’s it. From this, we are led to conclude that the University of Virginia has become a hotbed of “woke” political correctness where brave iconoclasm like Emma Camp’s is virtually unknown.

Never mind that the author herself had recently written a column urging classmates to confront their “racist” relatives over Thanksgiving dinner: “This holiday season,” she opined, “white progressives should not continue to favor their own comfort and familial peace over the tangible suffering of vulnerable people.”

Geez, I don’t know. Sounds a little woke to me. Your mileage may differ.

Look, she’s a college kid. Takes courses in “feminist theory” and expects… Well, what? Did her classmates defend ritual suicide? How? Camp doesn’t say. The professor? No clue. Where do they stand on eight-year-old brides? Female circumcision? Many remote practices are incomprehensible to contemporary minds.

If I’d been Camp’s editor, I’d have written “Be specific” in the margin and demanded particulars. Without them, her complaints ring hollow.

Nevertheless, a mighty hubbub arose in the Times comments section and elsewhere, quite as if Camp had described a real-world problem and proposed radical change. In my experience, anything touching upon the practices and prerogatives of college faculty—who have a lot of time on their hands—will draw an impassioned response.

Remember that Philip Roth wrote this novel a generation ago, titled The Human Stain. A New England professor uses the word “spooks” (as in “ghosts”) to describe two missing students he’s never seen. They turn out to be Black. Tragic folly ensues. The movie co-stars Nicole Kidman.

So it’s not exactly as if we’ve never heard of academic intolerance before. Indeed, I was present at the creation of political correctness. Back in the Seventies, I found myself the object of a departmental investigation at a New England university many years ago for failing a Black student who’d done badly on the mid-term, submitted no term paper, and failed to show for the final. Instead she dealt the race card.

Following my exoneration, a colleague commiserated that an “aristocratic Southerner” like me must find the school’s ethnic diversity challenging.

I am tall, not a big smiler, and may have appeared aloof. It’s been known to happen. Also I happen to be an Irish Catholic from Elizabeth, New Jersey who’d gone to grade school with classmates from families where foreign languages—Yiddish, Italian, Polish and Russian—were spoken in the home.

A diversity expert who couldn't spot an Irish guy in Massachusetts?

But I'd also attended the University of Virginia, on scholarship, which seemed to be what the investigation was all about. Seriously. At departmental gatherings, people patronized my “pretty little wife” to her face—accurate, but deliberately condescending. Academics only, I hasten to add. Ordinary New Englanders would ask Diane questions just to hear her Arkansas accent.

I decided to quit before they could fire me, and ended up teaching more Black kids every semester at a college in Arkansas than during three years in New England.

So my advice to contemporary students would be to avoid all courses in “theory” except in math or science. You’re just asking for politicized dogma of the kind that almost destroyed literary studies a generation ago. Look, academia attracts oddballs the way basketball courts draw tall people. There’s really not a lot to be done about it.

Except maybe to transfer to Virginia Tech or Texas A&M. It's a big country.

Meanwhile, author Camp resides in a state whose newly-elected governor has set up a telephone tip-line to report subversive school teachers. Churches in Texas are besieging librarians to banish books concerning race or sex. In Florida, armed truckers are blockading Disney World to protest its resistance to the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. School board members are getting death threats.

And we’re supposed to worry about UVA English Majors? I don’t think so.

‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues

‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues

Watching the Charlottesville spectacle from halfway across the country, I confess that my first instinct was to raillery. Vanilla ISIS, somebody called this mob of would-be Nazis. A parade of love-deprived nerds marching bravely out of their parents’ basements carrying TIKI torches from Home Depot.

The odor of citronella must have been overpowering. Was this an attack on the campus left or on mosquitoes?

“Blood and soil!” they chanted. “Jews will not replace us!”

Jews?

Had Jews somehow prevented these dorks from getting laid?

Deeply offensive, but also deeply ridiculous. The iconography of the torch-lit parade was straight out of Triumph of the Will, Leni Reifenstahl’s epic film glorifying Hitler. Deliberately so. These Stormfront geeks get off on trying to frighten normal people with Nazi imagery.

Hogan’s Heroes is more like it. I mean Confederate flags are one thing, but swastikas? Politically, nothing could be dumber. Why not just have “Besiegte” tattooed on your forehead? That’s German for “loser.”

Speaking for the overwhelming majority of Americans, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah tweeted: “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”

Then things went from laughable to tragic overnight.

The University of Virginia has always been hallowed ground to me. When I first arrived, the sheer, serene beauty of Thomas Jefferson’s architecture affected me almost viscerally. Was the orderly life it implied even possible in this world? Well, certainly not in Jefferson’s own life, but art is art.

I was first introduced to my wife in a serpentine-walled garden maybe 50 yards from where the would-be Nazis assembled around Jefferson’s statue. If I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there in her little shirtwaist dress—an Arkansas girl more exotic to me than anybody I’d known. A coach’s daughter, she’d applied to study history at UVa entirely unaware that there were no women undergraduates back then.

The dean asked if I’d ever heard of Hendrix College, her Arkansas alma mater—a potentially embarrassing question.

“No Sir,” I said. “They must not play football.”

She laughed because I was right; also because it was a cheeky way to talk to the graduate school dean. I’ve done my best to keep her laughing ever since.

For that matter, I played several seasons worth of rugby games on Nameless Field, where the would-be SS-men lit their little torches. We got married in Charlottesville two years later. Indeed, we’ve sometimes regretted ever leaving. So, yes, it’s doubly distressing to see the university and city turned into a stage set for fascist street theater.

“Charlottesville,” wrote UVa professor Siva Vaidhyanathan “is an ideal stage for them to perform acts of terrorism. This was the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who codified religious tolerance in colonial Virginia and who declared ‘all men are created equal.’ It’s also the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who owned, sold, raped and had whipped people he considered racially inferior to him. It’s the site of the University of Virginia, an institution steeped in conservative traditions that echo the Old South. And it’s the site of the University of Virginia, an elite, global research university with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.”

It’s definitely all that. Old South or not, Charlottesville is also a liberal college town that voted to remove an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from its courthouse square and relocate it to a park on its outskirts. Like many of the thousand or so Confederate monuments across the South, it was erected long after the Civil War, in 1924—hence more an expression of white supremacy than Virginian ancestor worship, precisely as Stormfront wants to use it today.

Lee himself steadfastly refused to be so memorialized in his lifetime. He would not contribute to the building of Confederate monuments and steadfastly advised white Southerners to leave it all behind. To an embittered Confederate widow, Lee once wrote “Madam, do not train up your children in hostility to the government of the United States. Remember, we are all one country now. … Bring them up to be Americans.”

Prof. Vaidhyanathan regrets that he and his wife stayed away on Saturday for fear of precisely what happened: a mad act of violence by a deranged young man. He vows to bear peaceful witness when the would-be Storm Troopers march again. Maybe he can help to calm campus hotheads as well. The last thing Americans need is anybody romanticizing violence.

Meanwhile, if Virginians need monuments, and they do, the state’s covered with Civil War battlefields. The Lawn at UVa remains; also Jefferson’s Monticello. For all the terrible ambiguity of his life, the man was the great genius of his age. The Washington and Lee campus in Lexington memorializes Robert E. Lee as he’d have preferred to be remembered.

For that matter, Appomattox Courthouse isn’t far away.

Header image: Wikimedia Commons.

Student At Center Of Rolling Stone Story Is Not To Blame, Investigation Authors Say

Student At Center Of Rolling Stone Story Is Not To Blame, Investigation Authors Say

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The University of Virginia student at the center of a discredited Rolling Stone rape story was not to blame when a “systemic” failure of journalism led the magazine to publish her unverified account of the alleged attack, the authors of an outside investigation into the story said Monday.

“This failure was not the subject or source’s fault as a matter of journalism,” Columbia University Journalism School dean Steve Coll, who co-authored the report, said at a news conference in New York. “It was a product of failed methodology. … We disagree with any suggestion that this was Jackie’s fault,” referring to the student, who was only identified by her first name.

The public dissection of the independent report came as criticism against Rolling Stone mounted, with the fraternity accused in the story announcing Monday it would pursue “all available legal action.”

Rolling Stone on Sunday night retracted and apologized for the November cover story as soon as the Columbia report was released. The Columbia team reiterated Monday that it found deep flaws in the reporting and editing of the woman’s narrative of her allegedly being gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity.

“The report by Columbia University’s School of Journalism demonstrates the reckless nature in which Rolling Stone researched and failed to verify facts in its article,” Stephen Scipione, president of the Virginia Alpha chapter of that fraternity, said in a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times. “This type of reporting serves as a sad example of a serious decline of journalistic standards.”

Questions about the authenticity of the rape story had emerged almost immediately after publication, although the school took the accusations seriously and brought in the police. In the end, neither police investigators nor the Columbia University report found evidence that such a rape happened at the fraternity.

“The abject failure of accountability in journalism that led to Rolling Stone‘s ‘A Rape on Campus’ article has done untold damage to the University of Virginia and our Commonwealth as a whole,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in a Monday statement. “This false account has been an unnecessary and dangerous distraction from real efforts to combat sexual violence on our college campuses.”

After retracting the rape story, the magazine removed it from its website and replaced it with the 12,644-word independent review by Columbia.

The review, which also found serious lapses in basic journalistic procedure, had been requested by Rolling Stone in December as doubts grew.

Coll said the report’s authors hoped to construct a “case study” that would be useful for journalists, journalism students, and the public “to see exactly how the editorial process broke down.”

He said that breakdown was not the result of the account Jackie gave, but of the magazine’s “failed methodology” in not confirming its basic accuracy.

Sheila Coronel, a dean of academic affairs at Columbia University and a co-author of the report, said the Columbia team decided not to fully identify the student known as Jackie even though her allegations of a gang rape could not be proved.

An attorney for Jackie declined to comment Monday. Jackie did not cooperate with either the police investigation or the Columbia review into the Rolling Stone story.

Although Rolling Stone‘s systemic breakdowns in verification and attribution marked one of the ugliest blemishes in the magazine’s sometimes storied history, Rolling Stone‘s publisher had no plans to fire any of the editors or the writer involved with the story, a spokeswoman said.

Through that spokeswoman, Rolling Stone‘s publisher, Jann S. Wenner, and its managing editor, Will Dana, declined requests for interviews with the Los Angeles Times on Monday.

In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Wenner had called Jackie “a really expert fabulist storyteller,” adding that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

The Columbia report’s authors found no instances of fabrication or lying on the part of Rolling Stone.

Rather than blame a single person for the story’s failure — such as the author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely — the Columbia authors instead detailed a systemic breakdown of journalism at Rolling Stone.

“The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision, and fact-checking,” wrote the Columbia authors — deans Coronel, Coll, and Derek Kravitz, a postgraduate research scholar at the journalism school.

“The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all.”

Through a spokeswoman, Erdely declined an interview request Sunday evening, but she apologized in a statement after the Columbia report was published, calling the last few months “among the most painful of my life.”

She apologized “to Rolling Stone‘s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the UVA community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Adam Fagen via Flickr

True Believers Make Lousy Reporters

True Believers Make Lousy Reporters

If the great Rolling Stone campus rape hoax proved nothing else, it’s that True Believers make lousy reporters. I’ve always found it useful to keep in mind what my brother and I call the state motto of our native New Jersey: “Oh yeah, who says?”

By now, it’s clear that none of the lurid allegations in author Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s account of a fraternity house assault on a histrionic University of Virginia freshman called “Jackie” stands up to skeptical analysis. Large parts of the narrative are demonstrably false.

Nothing the putative victim told her friends about the alleged encounter survives scrutiny. It’s not even clear that Jackie had a date with a handsome frat boy on that fateful night. Nor that the fellow actually exists. Photos she’d shared with Virginia students interviewed by the Washington Post turned out to be social media screen grabs of a near-stranger (and non-UVa student) with an ironclad alibi. Two other young men Jackie named as her betrayer have categorically denied ever dating her.

If they turned out to be lying, those boys would be in deep trouble.

Then there are Jackie’s callous friends — the ones who supposedly urged her not to report being gang raped by seven men because it might result in fewer party invitations.

“It’s important that people know that the way she portrayed us is not who we are,” Kathryn Hendley told the Post. Dubbed “Cindy” in Rolling Stone, Hendly was characterized as a “self-declared hookup queen” by a reporter who never met her. “Why didn’t you have fun with it?” the magazine quoted Cindy saying. “A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”

So tell me again how disbelieving Jackie’s melodramatic tale of woe means that I’m disrespecting women. (I’m embarrassed that the “hot Phi Psi guys” thing failed to start my personal BS detector blinking code-red immediately.)

Almost needless to say, skeptical responses to Rolling Stone’s debacle inspired the usual chorus of ideologues insisting that women never lie about rape and that only women-hating apologists for something called “rape culture” ever doubt them.

“The current frenzy to prove Jackie’s story false” wrote Jessica Valenti in The Guardian, “whether because the horror of a violent gang rape is too much to face or because disbelief is the misogynist status quo — will do incredible damage to all rape victims, but it is this one young woman who will suffer most.”

Oh yeah? Well it says here that all human beings lie, and that sex is one of the commonest topics they lie about. No conversation that doesn’t acknowledge that is worth having.

The good news is that grown-up feminists increasingly resist this kind of Dick and Jane thinking. “The idea that fully investigating or truthfully reporting on rape claims boils down to a simple ‘belief’ in a victim’s account,” writes Amanda Hess in Slate,“is simplistic and offensive.”

Indeed, several of Slate’s DoubleX writers have been instrumental in debunking the Rolling Stone hoax.

Possibly the sanest reaction comes from that magazine’s Emily Yoffe. In an astringent analysis entitled “The Campus Rape Overcorrection,” she disputes the idea that there’s anything resembling a rape “epidemic” on American college campuses.

Instead, there’s a kind of moral panic: a witch hunt.

At a recent White House conference, President Obama announced that “an estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years — one in five.”

Can anybody seriously believe it? After all, if one in five Starbucks customers got molested, the chain would go out of business.

Furthermore, with violent crime rates in the United States dropping steadily — FBI statistics show sexual assault down 60 percent nationwide since 1995 — why would campus sex offenses be rising sharply?

The answer, Yoffe shows, is that they aren’t. Not really. The study used to justify the one-in-five claim employs statistical legerdemain that would put you in a federal penitentiary if did your taxes that way.

Compare the National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that “an estimated 0.8 percent of noncollege females age 18-24…were victims of threatened, attempted, or completed rape/sexual assault. Of the college females…approximately 0.6 percent reported they experienced such attempted or completed crime.”

Not one in five; fewer than one in one hundred.

Forcible rape of the kind Rolling Stone described is a serious felony deserving of substantial time in the penitentiary. It needs to be probed by real investigators, not professorial committees or gender-sensitive administrators.

Let’s quit playing make-believe. If Jackie’s friends had walked her a few blocks from fraternity row to the University Hospital, anybody who treated her would be obliged to report the alleged crime to police. College administrators should be mandatory reporters too.

Yoffe also documents collegiate “Soviet-style show trials” that almost invariably punish presumptively “entitled” men for what would elsewhere amount to lovers’ quarrels.

These outcomes aren’t merely unjust. The damage they do to “progressive” causes almost can’t be overstated.

Correction: This column originally misspelled the name of the Slate author Emily Yoffe.