According to [Congressional Black Caucus] members, [President Obama recently told them] that struggling HBCUs with low graduation rates are failing black students, and he reportedly said that the lowest-performing institutions “should fall by the wayside.”
The turnout strengthens the arguments of those in the legislature who point out that there’s no there there.
UD recommends that SCSU stop holding rallies.
You can follow her many posts about this staggeringly pointless institution by typing South Carolina State University in her search engine. She has often wondered aloud, on this blog, why the chump taxpayers of that state don’t en masse refuse to pay up until SCSU, with its virtually non-existent student body and its corrupt leadership, is shut down.
Now a state subcommittee has indeed voted to close the money pit, though higher level votes are needed to really make this happen. As proposed, the closure would be temporary; but the measure would almost certainly hasten the natural evolution of the campus toward extinction. You cannot function without students and without money. Taxing citizens year after year in order to transfer revenue to an empty outstretched hand is insane.
And speaking of transfer: Under the plan, SCSU students with respectable GPAs would be free to transfer to other state campuses. They may thus have an actual shot at an education.
Or he will be soon. UD has been waiting with bated breath for Arthur Porter – former head of the McGill University hospitals – to be extradited back to Canada (he’s been in a Panamanian prison for a year or so) to face corruption charges. His wife has already pled guilty to money laundering; he faces charges of having drummed up the money (22.5 million!!) via bribes from the company he chose to build a new hospital for the university.
Porter’s a real character; he has much to teach us about the varieties of responses available to people accused of massive corruption.
He has, for instance, claimed to be on the very brink of death from cancer for about three years. And he’s a doctor! He should know!
UD knows there’s more where that came from.
Background on Porter? Type arthur porter in my search engine.
The Washington Post’s interviews with the three friends of “Jackie” who rallied around her in the immediate aftermath of events make clear that all three are skeptical of her claims.
Even more ominously:
[P]hotographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night were actually pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs were of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.
Says here that Rolling Stone will entirely re-report the now-notorious “Jackie” piece (UD assumes this means a group of RS editors will re-report the piece?), a project that will involve “head[ing] to UVa both to sort through the errors of the story and to tell readers what actually happened.”
Indeed, as Joseph Heller put it, Something Happened. It’s even possible that we’ll find out much more precisely what.
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Some people believe “Rolling Stone was credulous about such an intense story because from factcheckers to editors to writers they are predisposed to believe the worst about fraternity brothers at an elite university.”
I suppose this goes to a culture clash idea: The argument would be that you’ve got brainy lefty hipsters who write stuff like this about Goldman Sachs, versus a fratful of future Mr Goldman Sachs… Sachses…
Maybe. UD thinks it may have more to do with the Huguely factor — UVa was attractive and … plausible… to the writer of the piece and to the factcheckers and editors and writers because as recently as last March Huguely’s murder of his girlfriend was still in the news.
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And why, UD has been asking herself, was she so “credulous about such an intense story”?
First of all, as I said above, something traumatically assaultive did happen. At this point, this seems to me beyond doubt, though of course we could turn out to be living in the sort of Kafkan world in which the whole damn thing is a lie… I’ll just say again that this seems to me wildly unlikely. So I was credulous because there was credible material in the story.
Second, though, and pertinent only to me: I was perhaps borne along by the prose. It didn’t occur to me, as I praised the article’s writing, that the writing was maybe too good, too perfectly lurid. I was captured, as they say, by the style, and as a result I take on the coloration of Gwendolyn: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
Apparently the woman at the center of the case has told conflicting versions of the story.
The fraternity, too, will soon begin defending itself against her claims.
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A note from Rolling Stone. UD thanks Chris, a reader, for the link.
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I should have been more skeptical.
The overwhelming majority of fraternity men are not rapists nor would they ever consider committing or condoning sexual violence, but as President Sullivan said on Monday, “There is great concern that a sexual predator can hide out in a fraternity, and therefore that fraternal social activities pose literal dangers to their guests.” This has nothing to do with whether fraternities contain a vast majority of good people (I have no doubt they do). It has everything to do with the fact that fraternities have houses with unwatched upstairs and padlocked doors, the ability to widely distribute unidentifiable mixed drinks to unknowing first-year girls and national organizations with comprehensive systems for deflecting liability. A rapist on a college campus is three times more likely to participate in a fraternity than not and sorority women are 74 percent more likely to be sexually assaulted than nonaffiliated women. Again, whether most people in fraternities are well-meaning individuals is beside the point; the faceless institutions in which these good people exist are flawed.
… It’s drinking-up time at the American university, and although we know all conditioned things are impermanent, a lot of people seem really, really pissed about it.
Yes, yes, only one football program has actually shut down.
As for fraternities [aka eat or be eaten clubs, dahling]: Like vampires, they cannot truly be killed. Fraternities can be suspended while crews hose down the vomit, but they almost always come back to haze again, until once again they are suspended, etc.
Even when a school or a national organization officially shutters them, fraternities live on as rogue operations just off campus.
Fraternities will never authentically be threatened with extinction. They are too important to the nation. The behaviors and attitudes you learn at a fraternity are structural to the leadership of America’s elite financial organizations. Fraternities are not about college; they are about Goldman Sachs.
And on law schools… How has it come to this? Can we actually be about to witness the shuttering of some of them?
Probably.
It’s all about the tragic confluence of the we’ll accredit your Aunt Tillie’s ass ABA, the ne touche pas my salary and course load law professioriate, and a collapsed job market.
In response to the collapsed job market, the ABA continues to accredit new schools.
I know you think that this cannot possibly be true, but it is. Every ten seconds the ABA accredits a new American law school.
Well, not every ten seconds. But frequently.
What is this former member of a sorority at San Dildo State University trying to tell us?
… case.
For reflections on whether this will mean downward pressure on law faculty salaries (UD can’t see how it could be otherwise), go here and read all of the posts on the page.
Universities don’t get much worse than San Diego State, an epicenter of the drug trade, a money-hemorraghing sports joke, and a school run (though considering what goes down there, is anyone actually running it?) by a president whose greed so outraged the local community that legislators moved toward imposing mandatory salary caps on executive pay there.
And now, with the eyes of America on the issue of rape on campus, SDSU’s fraternities, apparently looking for something to do since an unusually big drug raid two years ago shut down their main activity, have decided that their contribution to the crisis will be assaulting women and pitching dildos.
Where are you, President Hirshman? The local suckers pay you almost half a million dollars to do something. But what is that thing?
Drugs and violence. Violence and drugs. If you take away your students’ drugs, they turn to violence. (“[S]even students have reported being raped at SDSU this year, one about 24 hours after a protest last Friday night against sexism and sexual violence.”) For some of your students, those are apparently the only two behavioral options.
UD says, Maybe it would be safer to give them back the drugs.
The past few years have witnessed a steady stream of alleged rapes at schools with big revenue-generating sports cultures and Greek systems. Part of the supposed shock of the [Rolling Stone] article involves a sense that [UVa] as an institution is committed to high-minded ideas and taking care of our students, and that we ought to be better than this, even better than the rest of the society. If only that were true…
From the mouths of babes. She’s quite right. As I said in an earlier post, about places like Penn State and Florida State, when sports and fraternities and drinking rule and have long ruled, it’s hard to know how any of that would change.
Fraternities in places like these tend to be the quintessence, the culmination, of all the alcohol and athletics in the larger campus culture. At UVa, “the fraternity system is king and heavy drinking is part of the culture.”
More frighteningly, fraternities are young, tightly-knit, all-male subcultures. In many settings, young, tightly-knit, and all-male is bad news. Young, tightly-knit, and all-male adds group aggression – extreme hazing, fighting, assaulting – to the mix. “Fraternities have become more like lab experiments for the distillation of male sexual aggression” than anything else.
Some have called for UVa to close its frats permanently.
Phi Kappa Psi, like all fraternities, exists to teach bad values to developing young men. Sent off to campus to educate themselves as individuals, fraternity members instead learn to subordinate their values and plans to a collective. After a torturous and dehumanizing selection process, fraternity members are able to write a check and purchase 30 new friends; it’s not surprising that they would see sex — pour a drink, girl is yours — as similarly transactional.
… By deciding to suspend its fraternities temporarily, the University of Virginia has acknowledged that those frats cannot be implicated in any new offenses while the eyes of America are watching. It is a tacit admission that the school cannot risk, not now, another sexual assault being committed. It has decided that the easiest and most palatable way for this to happen — for UVA’s fraternity brothers not to rape — is for its fraternities to cease to exist.
So why bring them back? Shut them down and move on.
Dahlia Lithwick doesn’t weigh in on shutting or maintaining them, but she does get to the nub of things:
Fraternities are nuts.
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UD doubts closing them down is really a solution. Sick and sometimes criminal initiation rituals will persist somewhere on campus at any booze and sports soaked university that ignores them. The Florida A&M marching band didn’t need a fraternity to beat a fellow student to death in a long-tolerated form of hazing.
Perhaps what makes more sense is really serious policing and surveillance of fraternities – policing and surveillance for which the fraternities would pay.
Just as many schools spend a fortune on squads of extra police for their football and basketball games (students are prone to mischief and violence both in and outside sports arenas), so fraternities should be willing to bill their current and past members for the heightened security procedures they need. Hugely wealthy Michael Bloomberg happens to be a proud and loyal member of Phi Kappa Psi; with his passionate involvement in violence reduction, he should be willing to subsidize the hiring of guards and cameras for his brothers. A million dollars a year, say, would set Bloomberg back not at all.
Would university campuses begin to look like armed camps? Yes, but university football and basketball games (plus tailgates and party/riots) already tend to look like that. And as to cameras everywhere – well, most universities already have cameras everywhere.
In the longer term, UD proposes that frat-run universities like UVa choose as their yearly campus-wide book (UD is talking about the popular One Campus One Book, or Common Read, program) Lynn Chancer’s Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, so that fraternity members can begin to think seriously about their problem, and other members of the campus community can learn enough to at least see the brothers coming.