“Kavanaugh says he was a virgin in high school, and I’m sure, in his mind, this is saying he was naive or that he wasn’t sexual in nature, but subconsciously, this is the toxic masculinity at play. He’s saying, back then, he couldn’t have assaulted her. He wasn’t man enough,” Georgia Southern University professor Jared Yates Sexton said, according to Campus Reform.
But Jared wasn’t the only professor tweeting words of wisdom. Georgetown professor Christine Fair slammed the male pro-Kavanaugh senators or maybe male commenters supporting the nominee, saying “look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
Then there was Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, who said Kavanaugh was “being a total jerk,” characterized his very passionate testimony Thursday as a “whole meltdown,” and, yes, accused him of that dreaded “mansplaining.” Because the expression “just to let ya know” isn’t a colloquialism or anything, but actually a swipe at Feinstein for not having XY chromosomes. And oh Canada, don’t think I’m leaving you out of this.
University of New Brunswick professor Matthew Sears said “For those who argue that the Kavanaughs of the world deserve “due process,” consider that the *whole point* is that they have *always* benefitted from the “due process” that they themselves create and perpetuate for their own benefit, while excluding others from that process.” It’ll come as no surprise that Sears doesn’t seem to have elaborated on when exactly Kavanaugh has denied others due process.
Sears finished with this gem: “In the US, believing women and caring whether or not one of the most powerful people in the country might be a sexual predator *is* a partisan issue. Which tells you a whole hell of a lot.”
Finally, Matthew gets something right. Yes, uncritically listening and believing has become a partisan issue.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently put out long-awaited and much-dreaded — if you’re a leftist — proposed changes to Title IX. She said “every survivor of sexual violence must be taken seriously, and every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined,” reported Campus Reform.
That last part is crucial. It took me only around a few hours last fall to write a piece outlining several cases in which accused students have not received due process for sexual assault charges. A UC San Diego student accused of sexual assault claimed his school wouldn’t let him show text message evidence, cross-examine his accuser, or challenge the investigator. He took the school to court and won. A U.S. District Court judge ruled against James Madison University a couple years ago in a similar case. And a father is suing the University of Texas at Arlington for mishandling a Title IX case after which his son committed suicide.
Yeah, um, I’m not so sure how familiar the ACLU’s Emma Roth and Shayna Medley, the two young ladies who authored the nonprofit’s response to the Title IX proposal, are with those cases.
Emma and Shayna said “previous Department of Education guidance adopted that standard of proof.” They mean preponderance of evidence, or over 50 percent. “But the new regulation would allow schools to use a ‘clear and convincing evidence’ standard” — in other words, more than just a simple majority — “which favors the respondent by finding against complainants even where it is more likely than not that their account is accurate.”
But here’s the thing: in what other scenario does a judge or jury look at a case and say, “well, 51% of the evidence supports the accuser, so I guess that’s enough to send someone to prison for a decade”? It just doesn’t happen and shouldn’t happen unless we want to change “innocent until proven guilty” to “innocent until there’s a 51 out of a hundred chance he’s guilty.”
Four-year-old Julia Hartwell attended Pentucket Workshop Preschool in Massachusetts, up until the school told her she couldn’t use “best friend,” reported CBS News.
That’s right, Julia can’t say the term “best friend.” But why best friend? Schools don’t like four-letter words and probably that five-letter word, Trump. But what could the benevolent, completely unbiased educators we let have unfiltered access to our children’s minds for half of the waking day possibly find problematic about best friends?
The alternative is, hey, let’s erase all distinctions that could give kids’ bad feelings like grades, teach them shouting and punching each other is just dandy and have them completely unprepared for the next grade, unless we erase that grade’s standards as well, and on and on until these numerical adults but mental and emotional infants get choke-slammed by this thing called REAL LIFE.
“Even now she goes to say it in a loving way; ‘I’m going to go see my best friend Charlie,’” the mother said. “And she looks at me sideways as she’s saying it and she’s checking in with me to see if that language is okay.”
Not even a few hours after Barbara Bush passed away on Tuesday, Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar called her an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal” and then said “PSA: either you are against these pieces of shit and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem. That’s actually how simple this is.”
“I’m happy the witch is dead,” she said. “Can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have. Byyyeeeeeeeee.” Now, professors have free speech, sure, but what about the freedom of students? The problem with comments like these is that you can bet Jarrar would punish or has punished students who say anything pro-Bush and if that’s a microaggression, praising Trump would probably be — what, a macroaggression?
The professor bragged “I work as a tenured professor. I make 100k a year doing that. I will never be fired. I will always have people wanting to hear what I have to say.” I think she means she’ll always have people who are forced to hear what she has to say because of a policy that prohibits Fresno State from firing her no matter how popular she is. Though not necessarily…a Fresno State admin clarified that tenured professors still could be fired. Anyway, after getting some feedback on her scholarly critique, the professor tweeted out what she claimed was her phone number but was actually the number for a crisis hotline at another university. Because the compassionate left really cares about people who are suicidal and actually need help.
