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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Poisoned Ivy League gets disinfectant spray.

Great celebrations in the Tavern this night with news from the western colonies which have been beset by the Princess of Lies for so long, particularly in their 'top' Universities. The Poisoned Ivy League.

The draconian and unwarranted laws and procedures introduced to counter the so called 'war on women' and the so called 'rape culture', and which have so destroyed mens' and boys' opportunities and reputation in University education has at last - AT LAST - been condemned by an influential group at Harvard.

Harvard is (in)famous for the driving out of the Vice Chancellor who dared to suggest in a speech that men and women just might choose different courses and therefore might not have 'gender balance' on those courses. One female professor said she nearly vomited at the suggestion and had to leave the room lest she fainted.  Professor Nancy 'Vomit' Hopkins.


Feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
Summers's suggestion—now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies—was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only possible explanations for gender imbalances in the math-science area. He noted that high school boys have many more of the highest math scores than girls, and suggested that this might reflect genetic differences. He also stressed the need for further research into all three possible explanations.
The foul brute may as well have rapped that women are "hos," or declared that they should be kept barefoot and pregnant. 
The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she "felt I was going to be sick," that "my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," that "I just couldn't breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," and that she had to flee the room because otherwise "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."
Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day "Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines," in the words of George Will.

Any young man takes his reputation and future in his hands entering such feminist-dominated institutions. A simple accusation of a hinted sexual nature could see him not just rusticated but  masticated and spat out.

Even President O'Blasphemy got in on the act approving and sending out a guideline letter to education institutions (The 'Dear Colleague' letter) setting the dogs of whore on boys and men. Fortunately he stopped short of making Islam a compulsory subject.

Perhaps now we are seeing a fight-back. The decline in male attendance at University is at an all-time low and the educational standards have been poisoned by feminist make-believe agitprop courses that have rendered even girls as uneducated thickos. 

A 'Womyn's Studies' Degree does not even cut it in MacDonalds.





Harvard Law Professors Condemn University's War On Young Men

In age when ideology increasingly trumps the impartial quest for truth on our college campuses, 28 Harvard University law professors are to be commended, for—to borrow William F. Buckley, Jr.’s famous phrase—“stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Harvard’s motto is Veritas, Latin for “Truth.” 

Given its high visibility, Harvard habitually takes a good deal of flak from higher-education reformers—for valuing faculty publications more highly than teaching, for political correctness, and for rampant grade inflation, among other practices. Such critiques are demanded by a true survey of the detrimental example Harvard sets for all the little would-be-Harvard institutions who look up to it for guidance. 

But the same insistence on the truth should compel us to praise those Law School faculty members who are demonstrating that they possess the intellects to understand and the moral courage to “stand athwart” the totalitarian-tending project of radical feminism, as embodied in the university’s new “Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Policy” announced in July.
Last week, these 28 law professors—among them, Alan Dershowitz and Charles Ogletree—penned an open letter to the Harvard administration castigating it for imposing a sexual harassment policy that “will do more harm than good.” The letter could not be more pointed. 

It blames the new policy for violating “many of the most basic principles we teach,” among which are “due process of law, the substantive law governing discrimination and violence, appropriate decision-making, and the rule of law generally.”
Harvard’s administration, these law professors charge, has adopted “procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” 

Among the violations they find in the new policy are an inadequate “opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses”; the “lodging of the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office,” which is “itself a Title IX compliance office rather than an entity” that might be “considered structurally impartial”; and the “failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused.”
Moreover, Harvard, they charge, has wrongly “expanded the scope of forbidden conduct” in a manner that “goes significantly beyond Title IX and Title VII law,” setting in place “starkly one-sided” rules that fail to address “unfortunate situations involving extreme use and abuse of alcohol and drugs by our students.” 

The War on Young Men that the new policy embodies is one of the more curious results of the Sexual Liberation movement launched on campuses in the ‘60s. Until that time, universities took seriously their role of in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of a parent”). This meant curfews, single-sex dorms, prohibitions on alcohol consumption, and the like. All that fell by the cultural wayside in the ‘60s with the rise of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, which have come to be viewed almost as inalienable rights.
But when you put young men and women together, and add alcohol and drugs, sex is going to happen, and—surprise—it is not always going to proceed according to Marquess of Queensberry rules. In response to this dilemma, in loco parentis on campuses has now given way to in loco tyrannicus—to vague dictates regarding sexual conduct that are enforced in an oppressive manner on those already presumed guilty. If the ideologues of the ‘60s “liberated” the sexual passions, today’s feminist ideologues on campus have forged new fetters from principles antithetical to individual liberty and due process of law.
As a parting shot—and a stinging one, at that—the law professors appear to unload on Harvard president Drew Faust, who boasts that the new sexual harassment policies “will significantly enhance Harvard’s ability to address these incidents when they occur.” The law professors see through this façade, raising the age-old legal question of cui bono—“Who benefits?” “We recognize,” they conclude, “that large amounts of federal funding may ultimately be at stake.” 

That is, Harvard and other universities may be rushing to institute these illiberal policies in order to satisfy—and thus continue to receive federal funding from—the Obama administration, with its equally illiberal sexual-harassment agenda, as announced in the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” memo. The law professors find themselves forced to remind their university’s president of the ultimate price of her Faustian bargain: “Harvard University is positioned as well as any academic institution in the country to stand up for principle in the face of funding threats. The issues at stake are vitally important to our students, faculties, and entire community.”
In all, the letter provides a model defense of the rule of law, on which individual liberty relies. The letter also provides a model of academic dialogue. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sets the tone for what academic discourse should look like at the very moment that he disagreed fundamentally with Plato: “Dear is Plato,” writes Aristotle of his teacher, “but dearer still is the truth.” In an age when postmodern critiques of the very possibility of objective truth abound in academia, it is more than encouraging to see these members of Harvard’s law faculty take what some suspect is the minority position at too many elite colleges—namely, that freedom under law is what distinguishes civilization from barbarism, even and especially when the barbarians are convinced of their high-mindedness.
 http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomlindsay/2014/10/23/shocker-harvard-law-professors-condemn-universitys-war-on-young-men/

Here is the Letter itself. 

Rethink Harvard’s sexual harassment policy


In July, Harvard University announced a new university-wide policy aimed at preventing sexual harassment and sexual violence based on gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The new policy, which applies to all schools within the university and to all Harvard faculty, administrators, and students, sets up the Office for Sexual and Gender-Based Dispute Resolution to process complaints against students. Both the definition of sexual harassment and the procedures for disciplining students are new, with the policy taking effect this academic year. Like many universities across the nation, Harvard acted under pressure imposed by the federal government, which has threatened to withhold funds for universities not complying with its idea of appropriate sexual harassment policy. 
In response, 28 members of the Harvard Law School Faculty have issued the following statement:


AS MEMBERS of the faculty of Harvard Law School, we write to voice our strong objections to the Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures imposed by the central university administration and the Corporation on all parts of the university, including the law school.

We strongly endorse the importance of protecting our students from sexual misconduct and providing an educational environment free from the sexual and other harassment that can diminish educational opportunity. But we believe that this particular sexual harassment policy adopted by Harvard will do more harm than good.

As teachers responsible for educating our students about due process of law, the substantive law governing discrimination and violence, appropriate administrative decision-making, and the rule of law generally, we find the new sexual harassment policy inconsistent with many of the most basic principles we teach. We also find the process by which this policy was decided and imposed on all parts of the university inconsistent with the finest traditions of Harvard University, of faculty governance, and of academic freedom.
Among our many concerns are the following:
Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation. Here our concerns include but are not limited to the following:
¦ ** The absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing.
¦ ** The lodging of the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office, and the fact that that office is itself a Title IX compliance office rather than an entity that could be considered structurally impartial.
¦** The failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused, particularly for students unable to afford representation.
Harvard has inappropriately expanded the scope of forbidden conduct, including by:
¦ **Adopting a definition of sexual harassment that goes significantly beyond Title IX and Title VII law.
¦ **Adopting rules governing sexual conduct between students both of whom are impaired or incapacitated, rules which are starkly one-sided as between complainants and respondents, and entirely inadequate to address the complex issues in these unfortunate situations involving extreme use and abuse of alcohol and drugs by our students.
Harvard has pursued a process in arriving at its new sexual harassment policy which violates its own finest traditions of academic freedom and faculty governance, including by the following:
¦ **Harvard apparently decided simply to defer to the demands of certain federal administrative officials, rather than exercise independent judgment about the kind of sexual harassment policy that would be consistent with law and with the needs of our students and the larger university community.

¦ ** Harvard failed to engage a broad group of faculty from its different schools, including the law school, in the development of the new sexual harassment policy. And Harvard imposed its new sexual harassment policy on all the schools by fiat without any adequate opportunity for consultation by the relevant faculties.
¦ ** Harvard undermined and effectively destroyed the individual schools’ traditional authority to decide discipline for their own students. The sexual harassment policy’s provision purporting to leave the schools with decision-making authority over discipline is negated by the university’s insistence that its Title IX compliance office’s report be totally binding with respect to fact findings and violation decisions.
We call on the university to withdraw this sexual harassment policy and begin the challenging project of carefully thinking through what substantive and procedural rules would best balance the complex issues involved in addressing sexual conduct and misconduct in our community.
The goal must not be simply to go as far as possible in the direction of preventing anything that some might characterize as sexual harassment. The goal must instead be to fully address sexual harassment while at the same time protecting students against unfair and inappropriate discipline, honoring individual relationship autonomy, and maintaining the values of academic freedom. The law that the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have developed under Title IX and Title VII attempts to balance all these important interests. The university’s sexual harassment policy departs dramatically from these legal principles, jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.
We recognize that large amounts of federal funding may ultimately be at stake. But Harvard University is positioned as well as any academic institution in the country to stand up for principle in the face of funding threats. The issues at stake are vitally important to our students, faculties, and entire community.

Elizabeth Bartholet

Scott Brewer

Robert Clark

Alan Dershowitz, Emeritus

Christine Desan

Charles Donahue

Einer Elhauge

Allen Ferrell

Martha Field

Jesse Fried

Nancy Gertner

Janet Halley

Bruce Hay

Philip Heymann

David Kennedy

Duncan Kennedy

Robert Mnookin

Charles Nesson

Charles Ogletree

Richard Parker

Mark Ramseyer

David Rosenberg

Lewis Sargentich

David Shapiro, Emeritus

Henry Steiner, Emeritus

Jeannie Suk

Lucie White

David Wilkins
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/14/rethink-harvard-sexual-harassment-policy/HFDDiZN7nU2UwuUuWMnqbM/story.html


We raised a glass.


Pax. 


4 comments:

  1. Was this well-written commentary penned by the landlord himself? If so, have one yourself, mein host and put it on my slate.

    Vigilemus puerorum...... innit?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On your slate it is. Don't mind if I do. My comments are in 'ordinary' typeface and the customers' in italics. Links are provided.

      Delete
  2. Athwart? :)

    The thing is - why was it even necessary to come full circle? How did the circle get out of kilter in the first place?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is a matter of concern to us all that our colonial cousins have some difficulty both with English and with well known phrases or sayings. But it is a minor matter. Despite such small points we remain interested in what they do have to say on matters of greater importance. I think we are all aware of how the circle became a distorted lump.

      Have a drink on the house.

      Delete

Ne meias in stragulo aut pueros circummittam.

Our Bouncer is a gentleman of muscle and guile. His patience has limits. He will check you at the door.

The Tavern gets rowdy visitors from time to time. Some are brain dead and some soul dead. They attack customers and the bar staff and piss on the carpets. Those people will not be allowed in anymore. So... Be Nice..