Don’t think for a minute that the gender apartheid we’ve seen in British universities isn’t an ongoing issue in the United States. Don’t think that our homegrown equivalents to the segregationists over there aren’t always trying – trying to segregate buses, trying to segregate parks.
A pharm-loving doctor named Stossel
Is a fervent free market apostle.
But Glaxo’s stopped bribing
For over-prescribing,
And Stossel’s upset is colossal.
… Christmas in Washington.
(She’s the blonde.)
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Oh, plus: Turns out she’s
shorter than Charles Barkley.
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Backstreet Boys.
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Click on photos
for better view.
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UD thanks her sister.
“The glass broke and I picked up the pieces, almost weeping with rage. Such white liberals from left to right need to grow up. By Friday UUK had shed its overconfidence and seemed to be wavering. I predict the guidance will be binned.”
And so it will be, though the glowing self-righteousness with which men and women will lecture people like Yasmin Alibhai Brown (2002 winner of the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism) about how unenlightened she is to defend equality will persist, glowing ever brighter as one venue for discrimination after another shutters.
Eventually the lecturers will constitute a tight morally superior flame of burqa boosters and women to the back of the room and shut up enthusiasts. How appalling, they will say… How appalling that Europe is voting down burqas and bitching about backbenches…
In Britain, segregation of the sexes is viewed as a tool of the patriarchy. It traditionally reinforced a system in which women were deemed to be second best. For women to “voluntarily” opt to sit apart may be their religious right in a place of worship but in a public institution it undermines the hard-fought civic rights of women who, for generations, have battled for equality – and are still battling.
… [W]hat the controversy has again revealed is a profound concern about interpretations of Islam that conflict with a modern civil liberties agenda. Further, political correctness, sensitivity to charges of Islamophobia and commercial considerations (it has been suggested that segregated meetings appeal to overseas Muslim students vital for university finances) block discussions about what should and shouldn’t be inviolate in British society.
Well, thanks to the Orwellian language of separate but equal in the (now-withdrawn) Universities UK document, discussion is entirely unblocked. For years now, in a semi-underground way, women at some British universities have been treated like dogs. UUK, in seeking to normalize this treatment, instead made it very, very public. And when a practice as ugly as this one becomes public, that’s all it takes. Decent people will put a stop to it.
… adds another distinction: It has America’s first publicly-financed sex segregated park.
Oh, and even though your tax dollars built it, you can’t go there.
… and you’ll find our old friend, Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman. Go here for prior posts about this man.
… issue. UD has read pretty much everything, and continues to read pretty much everything, that’s being published. So far, the best bit of writing about it is by Matthew d’Ancona in the Telegraph.
d’Ancona rightly begins and ends his piece by recalling Christopher Hitchens, because if Hitchens were alive he’d be writing the best bit. In this enlightenment-warrior’s absence, it’s right to recall him and imagine what he would say.
d’Ancona writes:
[T]his is a test case about much more than fringe events on provincial campuses. It is about the very basis of a pluralist society and what philosophers call “value incommensurability” – the clash between principles, and the dilemmas that such conflicts pose. As a ferocious opponent of theocratic creep, Hitchens argued that secular society was becoming far too emollient and unwilling to defend Enlightenment values against attack. Diplomatic immunity, equality before the law, the right of the novelist to free expression: all are now weighed against the risk of upsetting the theological apple cart.
The segregation row has forced us to confront the friction between religious sensitivities and core aspects of our common citizenship. The heart of the matter is the word “freedom” and its abuse. The original [UUK] guidance claimed that forbidding segregation by gender on campus might infringe “the freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker”. This is babble, but it is dangerous babble. It implies that upsetting the religious sensibilities of an individual or congregation – and it is possible to take offence at anything – is a form of censorship.
… Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of UUK, has said that “where the gender segregation is voluntary, the law is unclear”. Voluntary segregation? Pull the other one. Hobbes teaches us that fear and liberty are consistent – but only in the sense that “as when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for Feare the ship should sink, he doth it neverthelesse very willingly, and may refuse to doe it if he will.”
I do not believe that the gender segregation under discussion is freely practised in any meaningful sense. It is an expression of theocratic patriarchy that a free society leaves alone in the home and the place of worship – as long as the law is observed – but cannot possibly countenance in the public square.
The crucial thing here is d’Ancona’s disbelief that “the gender segregation under discussion is freely practised in any meaningful sense.”
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When you see an eight-year-old girl in full burqa, do you think her behavior is freely practised? I don’t. When you see an eighteen-year-old woman in full burqa – what about that? In what sense is this physically self-destructive behavior (studies show what is obvious: depriving your body of sunlight does irreparable harm) which radically diminishes a person’s capacity for speech, touch, unrestricted movement, and the fundamental human experience of being recognized as fully and equally human by other human beings, of being identified as an individual – in what sense is this freely practiced in any meaningful sense? I have no trouble understanding it in Hobbes’s terms – throwing your human goods into the sea because if you don’t your husband will drown you. I can also make it sort of meaningful in psychological terms, as a subset of masochism. But in social terms I can never make it anything other than a nihilistic challenge to “core aspects of our common citizenship.”
What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.
So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:
University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University
These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.
These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…
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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…
When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…
So – here’s an example of the problem.
Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?
LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.
An LSU student journalist writes:
I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.
Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…
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So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.
… the Labour Party’s spokesperson, Chuka Umunna, who was way out in front on the UUK gender segregation scandal. Before any other politician went on record, Umunna spoke very strongly on BBC Radio.
Go here and start listening at 2:45:17.
“I was horrified by what I heard in that report. Let me be absolutely clear. A future Labour government would not tolerate or allow … segregation in our universities. It offends basic norms in our society. Universities are public funded places of research and teaching… There is no place for state-sponsored segregation… We won’t have it.”
But the commentary is important. The heads of England’s universities just issued an apartheid document. That is stunning. It shocked and outraged the nation, and within hours of this document’s appearance the Prime Minister called it for what it was: A disgraceful expression of separate-but-equal coming from the very custodians of British culture.
When something this twisted happens, you don’t merely wipe out the document (this was done quickly and briskly); you settle in for a review of the circumstances that might have made possible, in the heart of one of the world’s great liberal democratic cultures, this grotesquerie.
And so, in the Telegraph, Graeme Archer begins.
… “Universities UK” … has given succour to injustice-merchants whose politics are just as wicked as those who devised race-based apartheid.
… [Gender apartheid] is alien to the British way of life, and intolerable. … “We’re just promoting tolerance of those who wish to be segregated.” My response to that is unprintable in The Daily Telegraph… [I] despair that creatures exist in British public life capable of writing such moronic “guidance” in the first place.
Barry Petschesky at Deadspin reminds us that you can identify everyone at your university who wears glasses and take them out to the public square and shoot them through the head, but that won’t necessarily help your football stats or put more butts in the seats on game day.
His caution is prompted by the panic and confusion at the University of Kentucky, a school that has sacrificed everything for football, but isn’t able to fill its stadium. Seeking a cause, one fan tells a local radio host that the problem is that the school’s too intellectual. There are professors and students there. Professors are hostile to football. A lot of the students are from foreign countries, and they don’t even understand football, much less watch it.
Cosmopolitans and intellectuals will have to go if UK wants to bring its football program back.
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UD says this guy is jumping the gun. The picture is not as urgent as he would have you believe. UK has succeeded in making its academic ranking plunge, and there’s every reason to assume this trend will continue.
And do you really have to purge the university of its students and professors? UK hasn’t even begun looking into, for instance, the system of threats, retaliations, and incentives many other university ticket offices have adopted in order to get people to attend their football games. Let’s exhaust moderate measures before we go nuclear.
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UD thanks Derek.
Programs that bleed money schools could use to educate their students; programs that feature games in huge expensive stadiums full of nobody in the stands; programs that have brought academic shame, ridicule, and corruption to their universities; programs that…
You know the drill.
Among several such freak shows in this country, some stand out as truly pathological in their drive to debase themselves. One of these is the University of Massachusetts, haunt of hopeless teams, gaping stadiums, and marauding students.
Now most professors, as I’ve noted before, cultivate a studied indifference toward the loud non-stop foulness big-time sports brings to their campus; but at places like U Mass things have a tendency to get so repulsive that eventually, for a few professors, repression fails. Like take for instance Max Page (here’s his cool website). Page is a real misfit at U Mass – a seriously educated, reflective, activist intellectual. He’ll surely leave the campus soon. But meanwhile he is making one hell of a fuss about the sports program there. He co-chaired a faculty committee on football, and made a little speech about the game to his colleagues.
Page … said “There are far, far better uses for these millions of dollars.”
He went on to describe the current state of UMass football as a “failure of epic proportions” …
“I want to have everyone be aware about promises about the future costs, given that none of the promises have been realized, in terms of the costs,” Page said. “Attendance is far below what was promised. The revenues are much lower than expected. The team has not performed well, and the coach, some have argued, has behaved even worse. And the move to Gillette (Stadium) – the ace in the hole of this effort – has been a resounding disappointment, to say the least.
“How much of our precious resources and our tax dollars and our student tuition dollars should we waste on the enterprise?” he continued. “Is it $10 million? Is it $20 million? It’s it $50 million? You should ask yourself ‘What is the point at which you say enough is enough?'”
Well, let’s see. What has, say, another big public university, Penn State, had to pay out lately because of its football program? There’s a running tally. UD has been following it. The latest reports have put it at $171 million.… But no, that’s not fair. That’s just the scandal. The scandal has cost that much so far. The football program’s a whole other thing.
I’m sure U Mass football will never generate any scandals. The only, uh, outside cost U Mass football consistently produces is post-riot clean-up bills.
His office has entered the fray because of the “massive public backlash” against the original segregationist document.
And how do the original segregationists dig themselves a deeper hole? They say things like this:
“It is very hard to see any university agreeing to a request for segregation that was not voluntary and did not have the broad support of those attending.”
Broad support, you see.
I mean, ol’ UD walks in and sees that friendly little SISTERS MAY ONLY ENTER BY THIS DOOR AND MAY ONLY SIT HERE sign, and let’s say she sees several burqas in her mandated section and you know she’s actually strongly opposed to full veiling; she actively supports the French law banning it…
So how awkward. Really, how awkward to find herself in a setting forcing her to identify, to sit only, with this particular group of people who turn out to be her sisters…! Most events of this sort just have people in them – fellow students, faculty, interested locals – but this event turns out to be a family event, and UD is enjoined to regard her fellow segregated women as her sisters.
Yet these women are not her sisters; she is in fact appalled at the way the organizers of the event have forced her into a profound lie about her deepest familial as well as social identity.
Finding it totally unthinkable that she would ever sit in a room and accede to these constraints and manipulations, UD flees.
Still, there’s broad support for the segregation, you see…