NAS Blog

If you’re feeling confused about the boundaries of sexual conduct on campus these days, that’s more than understandable. In February, you’ll recall, we noted here the observance of Yale’s freewheeling, everything goes Sex Week festival. Let it all out, the message seemed to be, no holds barred. You’d better be careful about that and a lot less if you happen to attend Duke, however. Now, from the same folks who gave us the lacrosse team fiasco four years ago, predicated on false allegations of rape, we have a new sexual misconduct policy which seems intended to convert that entire farce into a comprehensive and repressive new regime which aims at enforcing some bewilderingly vague notions of what exactly constitutes rape. No one has to convince me that rape is a horrific crime which merits severe punishment; I wonder, though, what it takes to convince some other people that false allegaions of rape also occur, carrying lasting consequences of their own. Two long-time friends of NAS, journalists Cathy Young and John Leo, provide some helpful perspective.

Duke University, according to FIRE, has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy that can find a student guilty of non-consensual sex merely because he or she is considered “powerful” on campus.

The policy — which FIRE describes as “vastly overbroad, illogical, impractical, but also insane” –

• claims that “perceived power differentials may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion”
• transforms students of both sexes into unwitting rapists simply because of the “atmosphere” or because one or more students are “intoxicated,” no matter the degree, and
• establishes unfair rules for judging sexual misconduct accusations.

Rape and sexual misconduct are grave offenses. But what’s wrong with Duke that it can’t rationally address them? As FIRE’s Robert Shibley sensibly concludes, “students deserve a policy under which true offenders will be punished but the innocent have nothing to fear.”

The title may be a bit misleading, since we’ve never suggested that genuine harrassment isn’t something that needs to be dealt with swiftly and forcefully. But we’ve also had major problems with the kind of sexual harrassment codes which treat simple accusation as an indication of guilt and invite malicious, vindictive or frivolous charges of harassment from disgruntled students, antagonistic colleagues or cynical, calculating administrators. Today’ s Inside Higher Education issue carries a lengthy story indicating that the more troublesome type of harassment code may be an issue at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, which has certainly had its share of controversy regarding free speech, academic due process and related issues over the last decade. We’ll be watching, since we certainly don’t want a reprise of the harassment hysteria which dogged many campuses during the 1990s. Our Illinois affiliate head Jon Bean, who was quoted in the IHE article, is a professor at SIU and will be able to provide first-hand information.

Foolish mandates, says David Little at ChicoER.

See also the memo notifying employees that they must document all mileage traveled for university business, in order to “help the campus to achieve its goal of being a national leader in sustainability.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has published a guide to help administrators craft school policies in such a way as to protect First Amendment rights on campus. “Correcting Common Mistakes in Campus Speech Policies” (download PDF) details the problems – bias reporting sites, free speech zones, undefined terminology in harassment policies, mandatory university values – that FIRE frequently encounters among institutional policies.

NAS of course has also dealt with these problems. Our statement Sexual Harassment and Academic Freedom showed how the rights of individuals can be violated by misguided efforts to combat sexual harassment. In Tolerance, Diversity, Respect, OR ELSE, Williams Chokes Up, and Snitch Studies at Cal Poly, we highlighted freedom-threatening bias reporting systems at William & Mary, Williams College, and Cal Poly, respectively. And this spring, in a series of articles (beginning with Free to Agree), NAS exposed Virginia Tech’s faculty promotion and tenure policy that included a commitment-to-diversity litmus test.

We are welcome FIRE’s new guide for protecting individual rights on campus, and we hope to see more and more college administrators heeding the counsel therein.

Thomas Thibeault, a professor of English at East Georgia College, was escorted from campus by police and suspended from teaching two days after he criticized the school’s sexual harassment policy for lack of protection for the falsely accused. It appears that after voicing his concerns about the policy, he himself was falsely accused of sexual harassment. FIRE took on the case and now reports that East Georgia College has reinstated Thibeault after finding no evidence of sexual harassment.

FIRE says that the case is “far from over,” as EGC president John B. Black has engaged in new abuses of freedom. Greg Lukianoff said in a press release:

President Black has added to his blatant abuses of power by reprimanding Professor Thibeault for his speech, but never bothering to mention precisely what his offense was. Black has already retaliated against Thibeault by informing him that his contract would not be renewed after the spring semester. The bullying tactics at this college are breathtaking.

FIRE has enabled readers to take action and write to President Black and the Board of Regents by completing this form. NAS will be watching this case.

SEE ALSO: NAS’s statement on Sexual Harassment and Academic Freedom

Greetings! This is the first entry of the National Association of Scholars blog. We’re glad you found us. We created this blog in order to keep our readers attuned to higher education news and up-to-date on articles posted at the NAS website.

We are continuing to publish new articles every day, but we realize that sometimes a one or two thousand-word essay is a lot to swallow in the midst of a busy schedule. So we present this blog as a place you can check for quick updates with sound-byte versions of the originals.  Stay tuned for entries here contributed by our members and friends.

In the meantime, check out our three most recent articles. In “What’s Cooking,” NAS president Peter Wood rounds up some of the latest issues in higher education:

• The Virginia Tech “diversity” tenure and promotion requirement;
• The professor who seems to have been fired for criticizing his college’s sexual harassment policy;
• EMU’s eagerness to accomodate gays and lesbians;
• A scholarly association’s quandary when it schedules a conference at a hotel owned by a Prop. 8 supporter;
• A new organization’s stand against “21st-century skills”; and
• Campus Reform, a new web-based effort to repair American higher education.

“Spring and Summer Highlights” presents our top 5-8 articles from each month since April. If  you’ve been on vacation and missed some of these, or if you want to revisit one of your favorites, this posting is a great place to catch up.

Finally, in “What Good are People?” I wrote about the MAHB (Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior) and a new UK-based Handbook of Sustainability Literacy. The MAHB is a group led by Paul Ehrlich that wants to control population growth and figure out “what  people are for.” And the handbook contains the skills and dispositions needed to be sustainably literate. These include “Gaia Awarenss,” “Effortless Action,” and “Social Concience.”