| Blog and Media Roundup - Tuesday, December 19, 2017; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 19 2017, 04:04 AM (68 Views) | |
| abb | Dec 19 2017, 04:04 AM Post #1 |
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Now we know what it takes for the NCAA to sanction a UNC By Abbie Bennett abennett@newsobserver.com December 18, 2017 02:58 PM The NCAA found a school called UNC guilty of academic fraud this week, but it may not be what you’re thinking. The college athletics governing body found the University of Northern Colorado’s men’s basketball staff members violated academic and recruiting rules and placed the program on three-year probation, imposed a single post-season ban, stripped the program of its 2011 conference title and revenue from that appearance, and added several scholarship and recruiting restrictions. Closer to home, the University of North Carolina, after a yearslong investigation, was not found guilty of academic fraud and faced no sanctions from the NCAA. National websites like Inside Higher Ed, 12 Up and others, however, played on the universities’ shared initials to comment on how big-name programs are treated versus other universities. While no national outlets so far have argued that Northern Colorado did not deserve its punishment, several have protested that it “seems harsh” considering that the NCAA “did nothing to the real UNC who committed academic fraud that benefited student athletes for nearly two decades.” The University of Northern Colorado was found guilty of several instances of academic fraud, including former head coach Ben Hill and other coaching staff completing assignments for student athletes and paying for classes to keep his athletes eligible, among others. Hill was fired in 2016 after allegations that he had helped athletes with class work. “The head coach took shortcuts to success, putting his own self-interest and ambitions ahead of student-athlete welfare,” according to the NCAA report. Nine members of the men’s basketball staff, including the former head coach, were directly involved in the violations, according to the NCAA’s findings. “We respect the NCAA’s decision and are disappointed that actions by members of a former coaching staff have led to consequences that have affected the entire program, past and present,” Darren Dunn, Northern Colorado athletics director said in a statement. “We remain committed to providing a great student-athlete experience while building champions for life. I’m excited about the future of our men’s basketball program.” The two schools may share initials, but the NCAA came to very different conclusions in each case. “When college basketball fans expected the NCAA to come down hard on UNC for academic fraud this year, it didn’t expect it to be the University of Northern Colorado,” Dan Lyons of The Spun wrote. “Earlier in the year, North Carolina essentially got off scot-free on years of widespread academic fraud, which involved numerous Tar Heel basketball players. “Well, today a UNC got handed down punishment from the NCAA. Unfortunately for those who wanted the Tar Heels to get hit hard, it is the Northern Colorado Bears that are getting hit.” The weight of an NCAA investigation was lifted from the shoulders of the University of North Carolina athletes, faculty, staff and fans on Oct. 13. The NCAA was considering questionable classes that enrolled many scholarship athletes at UNC and allegedly helped keep student athletes eligible. The NCAA ruled that “while student athletes likely benefited from the courses, so did the general student body. Additionally, the record did not establish that the university created and offered the courses as part of a systemic effort to benefit only student athletes.” Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/college/acc/unc/article190383659.html#storylink=cpy |
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| abb | Dec 19 2017, 04:11 AM Post #2 |
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http://www.dominionpost.com/WVU-Title-IX-case-set--tled Created on: Monday, December, 2017 18 8:59 PM Last modified: Monday, December, 2017 18 8:59 PM WVU Title IX case settled By Alex Lang The Dominion Post MORGANTOWN — A woman suing WVU over Title IX violations settled her case with the university. According to federal court documents, the woman and the university resolved the case and a federal judge dismissed the proceedings. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the court record. The woman—who The Dominion Post has not named as it typically does not identify victims of sexual assault – filed the suit in June 2016 in federal court. According to the suit: In April 2014, the victim reported she was raped in a bathroom at an off-campus residence. The victim told police and WVU Title IX investigators about the incident. Nathan Nkwaya was indicted on two counts of second-degree sexual assault and later pleaded to unlawful restraint and battery. The suit stated that there were Title IX violations and negligence as a result of WVU's actions and inactions during its investigation in the case. Title IX is a federal law that includes guidelines for sexual assault investigations. |
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| abb | Dec 19 2017, 04:13 AM Post #3 |
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https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/40125/ UC-San Francisco fires Title IX director who couldn’t keep up with repeated changes to harassment definitions Greg Piper - Associate Editor •December 18, 2017 ‘I would scream from the rooftops. There was no guidance in how to implement them’ If you read The Daily Californian‘s Thursday article about the firing of Cristina Pérez-Abelson, the Title IX director at the University of California-San Francisco, you’ll get the impression that she was slacking off on investigating allegations of sexual harassment and trying to cover her tracks. Read the previous day’s coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, however, and you get a picture of an official who couldn’t keep up with the university’s constantly shifting definitions of harassment, lack of coherent policies and refusal to staff up her office as complaints sextupled from her predecessor’s time. UC-San Francisco confirmed it dumped Pérez-Abelson this spring – after 10 months of paid leave – following an investigation that found she instructed staff to hide files from an auditor and “falsify dates on complaints to make it appear that they were handled more efficiently,” as the Chronicle said. Pérez-Abelson joined the university, which focuses on health sciences, as a lawyer in August 2013 and was soon tapped to lead the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination. Complaints were about to skyrocket: Nine UC Berkeley students and alumnae had just come forward, accusing campus officials of treating their sexual assault allegations too lightly, an action that precipitated an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints on university campuses across the country. Within months, dozens more students from UC alone had filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education accusing administrators of mishandling their investigations. Here’s her side of the story, which is completely left out of The Daily Californian report: Perez-Abelson said her predecessor at UCSF handled about 40 complaints a year. Her workload, she said, jumped to 250 a year. “I don’t think anybody expected that to happen,” she said. “And I had no investigators for a very long time.” Perez-Abelson investigated some of the cases. Others, she said, went to her associate director. Some went to outside investigators and some to human resources — which often bounced them right back because they were overworked, she said. Meanwhile, UC changed its sexual harassment policy three times from February 2014 to January 2016. “I would scream from the rooftops,” Perez-Abelson said, recalling her frustration. “There was no guidance in how to implement them.” While the investigator upheld employee claims that their boss told them to change the start date of investigations and hide files “under desks to prevent an auditor from seeing them,” Pérez-Abelson disputed this. The only files stashed away were “old and irrelevant,” and the university never stated when investigations should formally begin, she said. After the Chronicle started asking questions, and eight months after Pérez-Abelson was canned, the University of California System finally acknowledged she was correct. Two months before her dismissal and eight months after she was put on leave, the UC System “clarified that investigations must begin on the date a notice letter is sent to the complainant and the accused” – a line in the sand that had never been drawn when Pérez-Abelson was still directing the office: Perez-Abelson said that having the dates altered on reports “was really correcting, not changing” them. “The allegation that I did it to shorten the time frame was just crazy. It’s nuts.” She said she had nothing to gain by suggesting that her department was more efficient than it was. “I’m begging every week — I need additional staff! Look at my office! Stacks and stacks of cases!” she said. |
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| abb | Dec 19 2017, 04:15 AM Post #4 |
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https://thefederalist.com/2017/12/18/weve-learned-great-sexual-harassment-awakening-2017/ What To Learn From The Great Sexual Harassment Awakening Of 2017 Robert Tracinski 12/18/17 This is the time of the year I usually count down the top five stories of the year, looking back at the big events of 2017 and revisiting what I’ve written about them. At number five is a story that is not really about politics, since it spans party lines and ideology. It’s more a story about a moral reform movement: the sudden unwillingness to tolerate the 2017 version of the Hollywood “casting couch” and its many equivalents that were apparently common in politics and the media. Some are calling this the Great Sexual Harassment Panic of 2017, but I think that’s slightly premature. The term “panic” implies that it will go too far and be applied unjustly, and Claire Berlinski gives us good reason to believe that such a “warlock hunt”—the equivalent for men of a witch hunt—is likely. Read the short version at USA Today or a longer version, where she points out the dangerous arbitrariness of the #MeToo anti-harassment campaign. “The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.” Emily Yoffe expresses similar concerns, citing a cautionary tale she has already written extensively about: the hysteria over the alleged campus rape “epidemic.” Among the principles and policies that have become entrenched at schools—and are now spilling out into the wider world—are the beliefs that accusers are virtually always telling the truth; that the urgency to take action is more important than fair procedures; that we shouldn’t make distinctions between criminal acts and boorishness; and that predatory male behavior is ubiquitous. These beliefs have resulted in many campus cases in which the accused was treated with fundamental unfairness, spawning a legal subspecialty of suing schools on behalf of these young men. Examining what happened on campuses shows where the politics and social rules of interaction between the sexes might be headed—and how to avoid making the same mistakes on a larger scale. I have to admit that the case against Sen. Al Franken was rather thin, and he seemed to be sacrificed mostly to keep fellow Democrats from losing the moral high ground against Roy Moore. Or consider how Garrison Keillor has been totally expunged by Minnesota Public Radio, like a disgraced commissar airbrushed out of old Soviet photographs, without even any public explanation. The moment it became clear this is now a full-blown moral panic was when ABC summarily cancelled “The Great America Baking Show,” the American spin-off of a BBC baking competition, because of sexual misconduct allegations against one of the judges, pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. I could see wanting to put the skids under Iuzzini, and the show could easily continue next season without him. Yet rather than air any of the episodes already filmed for this season, ABC decided it would also punish all of the show’s competitors, not to mention its fans. This inevitable and predictable overkill puts me in the odd position of wanting to defend the original phenomenon. The original offenses that touched off this round of cultural self-examination were not ill-defined or ambiguous. Run down the list of accusations against Harvey Weinstein and you can’t escape the conclusion that he was a monster who used sexual harassment and assault as a way of asserting a sense of power and imposing humiliation on his victims. You’ll notice that many of the men who have been accused have basically owned up to it. Louis C.K. issued a groveling apology that begins, “These stories are true.” Celebrity chef Mario Batali confessed, “Although the identities of most of the individuals mentioned in these stories have not been revealed to me, much of the behavior described does, in fact, match up with ways I have acted.” Or consider the case of “Today Show” host Matt Lauer. When a network turns against its star talent for a major profit center so quickly, at the first whiff of an accusation, maybe they’re overreacting in a panic. Or maybe it’s because they already know what an investigation is going to turn up because they’ve been quietly tolerating his bad behavior for years. They know if they hang on, the story is only going to get worse. So they fire the big star because they’re trying to get out from under the wreckage as fast as possible. The real story here is that grotesque forms of sexual harassment have been known and tolerated in a lot of places. “Everybody knew” has been a running theme, prompting the question: if everybody knew, why didn’t they do anything before now? I can make a pretty good guess at the answer. They knew what was happening and deep down they knew it was wrong. But they were ambitious and liked to jump on a successful bandwagon, so nobody was going to fire the big famous guy just because he groped the interns. Then suddenly the culture changed, and they can’t move fast enough to dump these guys for what they knew or suspected was happening all along. This is really a kind of moral reform movement where there were moral compromises that were known and accepted, in which bad behavior was tolerated if the man involved was wealthy, powerful, or on the right side politically. Then suddenly there was a case that was bad enough, in which enough credible accusers stepped forward to reveal truly vile behavior that suddenly, almost overnight, those old moral compromises were no longer acceptable. That is why this feels like the throwing of a switch, like opening up the floodgates, and why famous and successful people are getting suddenly cast out onto the streets. Some of this will be a moral panic. But most of it, so far, has just been men suddenly being called to account for things that “everybody knew” they were doing. I also have to admit that there are aspects of this saga that are undeniably enjoyable, including the massive loss of moral credibility for the cultural heights controlled by the Left, particularly Hollywood and the elite political media. I compared this to the impact of the televangelist scandals of the late 1980s. What is happening right now has exactly the same combination of ingredients. First, it starts with an ideological and institutional establishment that promotes a puritanical creed according to which it judges everyone else from a presumed position of moral superiority—not religion, in this case, but feminism and the “War on Women.” Then there is the revelation that all along these same people were grotesquely violating that creed—in this case, by using their position of power and wealth to exploit vulnerable women. Finally, most damning of all, is the fact that the corruption was widely known and accept by people inside the institutions. As with Weinstein, “everybody knew” and nobody protested all that much until it all became public. They wanted to accuse everyone else of being misogynists and waging a “war on women.” For some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, they got the vapors over Mitt Romney using the phrase “binders full of women.” Yet during all that time they were treating actual, individual women like dirt—and now all of that is out in the open. If you’ve ever wondered where the left gets this idea that America is some kind of hellscape of misogyny and sexual predation on the part of wealthy and privileged men—well, now you know. They were describing the culture of some of their own institutions. No, such stories are not limited to any one ideology. But each ideology has certain institutional and ideological blinders that helps it happen. The last two examples are particularly instructive. Taibbi and Kriss got away with their behavior for as long as they did because they had a reputation of fighting viciously for the cause, particularly when it required someone who was willing to rejecting normal standards of respectability and civility. What made them so many fans was precisely their viciousness, their willingness to berate and insult. Because surely their political enemies are such horribly evil people that they don’t deserve the protection of civilized norms. Kriss was even part of a movement called the Dirtbag Left: “a term coined…to refer to a style of left-wing politics that eschews civility-for-its-own-sake in favor of subversive, populist vulgarity.” In other words, these writers were lionized and promoted precisely because of the characteristics that marked them out as predators. It’s hardly a new phenomenon and has even been immortalized on film. These guys are all the hippie boyfriend in Forrest Gump, who can’t help smacking around his girlfriend because “it’s just this war, and that lying SOB Johnson.” It has been particularly gratifying to see a scumbag like Matt Taibbi get what’s coming to him. The Left is now trying to cast this specifically as a problem with men and with masculinity. Partly, this is a frantic attempt to retain some of their lost moral high ground by claiming it on behalf of feminism. But as I observed, there’s something conspicuously off with that argument, particularly when you look at one favorite behavior among the men accused of harassment and assault. Sexual assault, the act of a man imposing himself on an unwilling woman, is always a confession of some kind of inadequacy. The attacker implicitly assumes that no woman would be sexually interested in him if she had any choice in the matter…. That’s true of all forms of sexual assault. But how much more so for these men who force unwilling women to watch them gratify themselves? It says: ‘I am so worthless I have to physically impose myself on a woman just to masturbate.’ Don’t just take my word on this. The Los Angeles Times interviewed a gaggle of psychiatrists about this compulsion, and the phrases they used to describe it include: ‘sexual inadequacy’ and ‘regret, shame, and self-disgust.’ Not exactly he-man stuff. To be sure, the perpetrator does the deed partly to make himself feel powerful through his ability to humiliate his victim. But this in itself is a confession. The compulsion to commit extreme, illegal, and potentially career-ending acts just to gain a fleeting sense of power is a confession of how worthless and powerless he normally feels. Heck, Louis C.K. has made a whole career out of joking about his neuroses and sense of inadequacy. Maybe we should have taken him more seriously about that. So is there a larger lesson to be learned? Perhaps, but it’s so broad and bipartisan that most people are missing it. The fundamental lesson is that our elites are always corrupt. If the elites are corrupt, and we should always assume that they are, then we should give them as little political power as possible, subject to as many limits and checks and balances as possible. Every time we contemplate giving some new power to politicians or government officials, we should assume that we might be giving that power to the moral equivalent of Harvey Weinstein—and then we should think twice about it. Beyond government, all of our cultural institutions should be designed to give as little power to unchecked personalities as possible. For those like Weinstein who are out in the private sector, we need to leave people as free as possible to speak and publish so they can criticize and expose the corrupt elites, which is the only thing that eventually stopped him. And we should leave the economy as free and vibrant as possible so that people have more ways to get around the creeps who like to set themselves up as gatekeepers whose favor you have to curry if you want to get ahead. Our elites our corrupt, and we shouldn’t be surprised. It is an old problem: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All of this is to say that the only man whose reputation is notably enhanced by the Great Sexual Harassment Awakening of 2017 is Lord Acton. Follow Robert on Twitter. |
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