UVA Joins Colleges Agreeing to Disregard Suspensions for Participating in Anti-Gun Protests

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting on February 14, 2018, many high school students are planning to participate in anti-gun protests, especially on March 24, 2018 when nationwide protests are scheduled.  A number of school superintendents - typically in backward, GOP dominated/knuckle dragging areas of of America (the two generally go together) - have threatened to suspend students who miss school in order to participate in such protests.  In an effort to counter such efforts to stifle free speech and freedom of assembly, a number of prominent colleges and universities have announced that suspension arising from participation in anti-gun protests will not be counted against student applicants.  Among such universities I am proud to say is my alma mater, the University of Virginia which found itself invaded by non-Virginian Neo-Nazis last August.  Here are highlights from BuzzFeed:

In the Needville Independent School District just outside Houston, Texas, the superintendent reportedly sent out letters threatening three-day suspensions for any student who joins in on walkouts.

"Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative," Superintendent Curtis Rhodes said. "We will discipline no matter if it is 1, 50, or 500 students involved. All will be suspended for three days and parent notes will not alleviate the discipline."

The Spring Independent School District, also in the Houston area, and the Waukesha County School District in Wisconsin issued similar warnings. (The Waukesha superintendent later made another statement saying students could participate if they were excused from class by their parents.)

Now colleges are standing up for the teenage activists, saying it won't affect their admissions decisions if they get suspended for protesting. 

Here are just a few of the schools that have vowed not to penalize student protesters:

Yale UniversityMIT
Boston University
University of Virginia
Tulane University
Dartmouth College
George Washington University
UMass Amherst
Brown University
Northeastern University
University of Connecticut
Clark University
Smith College
UCLA
Brandeis University

For more schools that have made this pledge, growing lists are available here and here.

Noticeably missing from the lists of such universities are Christofascist institutions such as Regent University and the even more insane Liberty University whose degrees and graduates are frequently viewed with suspicion by those who graduated from legitimate colleges and universities. 

The University of Virginia Statement reads as follows:

Kudos to my alma mater!

GOP Education Bill Would License Virtually Any Form of Discrimination

A common theme on this blog is the quest by Christofascists to make themselves above the non-discrimination laws that govern the rest of us.  The smoke screen they disingenuously use is that of "religious freedom" that utterly perverts the concept of religious freedom contemplated by the Founding Fathers who viewed religion with suspicion and wanted it completely separate from civil government.  Aiding in the Christofascist's quest are Republican elected officials at both the state and federal level who seem to have no limit on the extent they will prostitute themselves to Christofascist while throwing the majority of citizens under the bus. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at a frightening Republican bill pending in Congress which would allow Christofascists to engage in unlimited discrimination against other taxpaying citizens.  Call your members of Congress and demand that they vote against this bill.  Here are highlights that look at this sinister effort:

Consider for a moment this chilling hypothetical. Imagine that the day after last summer’s white nationalist rally at the University of Virginia, the leaders of the group that marched through the Charlottesville campus shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans take themselves instead to the university’s student activities office. There, they seek to register themselves as a recognized student club, the White Christian Alliance.

If this happened today, university authorities would undoubtedly respond by citing Virginia’s “Contracted Independent Organizations” policy, which makes ineligible for official recognition any student group that “restricts its membership, programs, or activities” on the basis of any of a wide range of protected identities, including race and religion.

But now imagine that a bill that Congress is currently considering to reauthorize the Higher Education Act has become law. Under the terms of the bill, Virginia would no longer be able to bar the White Christian Alliance from campus. That’s because the bill prohibits public institutions of higher education that receive federal funding—which is to say, all (or nearly all) public two- and four-year colleges and universities—from denying “to a religious student organization any right, benefit, or privilege… because of the religious beliefs, practices, speech, membership standards, or standards of conduct of the religious student organization.”

[T]he bill, which goes under the name of the “Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform Act,” or “PROSPER Act,” seeks to enact a particular, and historically peculiar, conception of religious freedom that has in recent decades become a staple of conservative Christian political activism.

[B]uried deep within the bill’s more than five hundred pages are provisions that carve out broad exceptions for religious actors within the higher education landscape. Beyond the requirement that public institutions recognize religious student organizations notwithstanding the content of their beliefs or practices, the bill grants exceptionally wide latitude to religious colleges and universities as well. The bill prohibits any “government entity,” whether the Department of Education or an accrediting body that receives federal funds, from taking action against a religious institution of higher education if that action “has the effect of prohibiting or penalizing the institution for acts or omissions by the institution that are in furtherance of its religious mission or are related to the religious affiliation of the institution.”

What sorts of “acts or omissions” might the bill’s drafters have in mind? To take one of history’s more extreme examples, in 1970 the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of South Carolina’s Bob Jones University because it had barred from admission first black applicants and, later, anyone who supported interracial marriage. . . . . But under the PROSPER Act, so long as Bob Jones could explain how its admissions policies reflect its Christian identity, the IRS could not have penalized it in the first place.

[T]he PROSPER Act would likewise shield a religious institution from federal penalties if, in the face of some statutory requirement, it barred students from engaging in same-sex relationships, or if it violated Department of Education regulations about the handling of sexual assault allegations, so long as the institution could justify its actions in terms of its religious mission. The bill defines “religious mission” very broadly . . .

The drafters of the PROSPER Act appear to be embracing a theory of religious freedom that seeks to exempt religious individuals and institutions from generally applicable laws and regulations.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has tended to hold that religious convictions, however sincere, cannot be used as a shield against reasonable actions by government that are not specifically targeted at believers. 

In 2010, the Court upheld a policy at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that barred from official recognition a religious student group, the Christian Legal Society, because the society excluded from membership anyone who would not sign a statement of faith and live in accordance with moral guidelines that included a prohibition on “unrepentant homosexual conduct.” Under the proposed PROSPER Act, of course, Hastings could not require a religious student organization like the Christian Legal Society to meet its “all comers” standard for achieving official recognition, even though it could continue to enforce that standard with regard to non-religious groups.

[S]uch sweeping religious exemptions are reckless. They disregard the potentially disastrous consequences of forcing public institutions to accept all religious organizations and of permitting religious institutions to avoid government scrutiny merely by invoking their mission. And by casting such a wide net, the bill forecloses in a thoughtless way one of the most important debates that a religiously pluralistic society can have.

If the PROSPER Act were to become law and the University of Virginia forced to recognized the White Christian Alliance as a student group, how could there still be room for legitimate and nuanced disagreement about the rights of religious believers and their institutions when they come into conflict with our constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under law?

The Christofascists are a clear and present danger to the rights of all Americans and seek to subvert the freedom of religion of all other citizens. They must be stopped.

A Bunch of Law Schools Are About to Close

There is a huge over supply of attorneys and with the huge down turn in the legal industry during the Great Recession, it's getting harder and harder for newly minted attorneys to find jobs to repay the massive debt they have incurred, often going to bottom tier law schools - why does Liberty University's law school immediately spring to mind? - and leaving them in severe financial straits.  Fortunately, younger folks seem to be waking up to the reality that law is perhaps not the best occupation.  The downside (depending on one's view) is that a number of law schools are facing closure.  A piece in Slate looks at the situation.  Here are some highlights:

In the world of law schools, every day is sort of like Black Friday.  OK, slight exaggeration. But with applications in free fall, schools are locked in a brutal competition to attract students who might theoretically one day be qualified to sit for a bar exam. And that, the New York Times reports today, has meant slashing tuition and dolling out discounts. At Northwestern University School of Law, one of the top ranked institutions in the country, “74 percent of first-year students this academic year received financial aid, compared with only 30 percent in 2009,” the paper notes. The University of Iowa, University of Arizona, and Penn State University have cut their prices. J.D.s are on sale!

It seems fairly obvious that some law schools are going to have to close in the not too distant future. Between the fall of 2010 and fall of 2013, enrollments dropped 24 percent. This year’s crop of new students should be even smaller. And while schools are doing everything in their power to pare back expenses and prop up their head counts, it seems like someone is going to fall victim to a collapsing demand. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” Northwestern Dean Daniel Rodriguez, told the Times. That’s because it probably won’t.

This has been a subject of fearful discussion in the legal academy for a while. Already, Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley School of Law, a notorious diploma mill, has been forced to close its Ann Arbor campus due to sagging enrollment. But, as University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Jerry Organ writes, the history of another graduate school bust suggests bottom-tier schools might not be the only ones affected.

Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. Meanwhile, qualified applicants are now harder to find for schools with some semblance of standards, because the biggest application declines have occurred among students who scored in the middle-to-high range on the LSAT.

There are plenty of lousy lawyers out there and many of the younger ones - perhaps out of financial necessity - seem inclined to engage in less than ethical conduct.

The University of Virginia - Searing Allegations of Campus Rape

It has been decades since I graduated the University of Virginia, first with a history major and then with a law degree.  During my days at "UVA," I attended many a fraternity party and it is not without reason that the school is known as a party school despite the rigorous academics that are the norm.  This week, Rolling Stone published a story that has sent the University administration reeling and let to the unusual move of the suspension of all fraternity and sorority activities until January 9, 2015.  The story alleges a gang rape in 2012 at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house (pictured above).  I did not belong to Phi Kappa Psi but did attend some parties there from time to time (I initially belonged to Zeta Psi and shifted my allegiance to Kappa Sigma later).  Back then, let's just say the Phi Kappa Psi parties were wild even by UVA standards.   

I don't know if the allegations of the rape are true or not, but I do know two things: (i) like most institutions, UVA tends to place maintaining its reputation above all else and (ii) here in Virginia, too often the authorities, including the police, tend to put too little effort into protecting the rights of minorities, gays, and yes women.  In the latter regard, we have a bunch of aging white male Republicans in the General Assembly striving to maintain control of women's uterus yet paying little attention to the other needs of women.  The male chauvinism can be intense, especially when Republicans hold power.  The problem is part of the overall problem of needing to drag Virginia fully into the 21st century and insuring that ALL Virginians are protected be they male or female, gay or straight, white or belonging to to a racial minority.  

The Rolling Stone articles is in many ways not accurate - e.g., most students are from average family backgrounds and while there are still self-imagined "Southern aristocrats," things today are far more egalitarian than 40 years ago - and doesn't paint an unbiased picture of the university.   Here are some article highlights that seem off the mark:

But the dearth of attention isn't because rape doesn't happen in Charlottesville. It's because at UVA, rapes are kept quiet, both by students – who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture – and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal. Some UVA women, so sickened by the university's culture of hidden sexual violence, have taken to calling it "UVrApe."

"University of Virginia thinks they're above the law," says UVA grad and victims-rights advocate Liz Seccuro. "They go to such lengths to protect themselves. There's a national conversation about sexual assault, but nothing at UVA is changing."

Prestige is at the core of UVA's identity. Although a public school, its grounds of red-brick, white-columned buildings designed by founder Thomas Jefferson radiate old-money privilege, footnoted by the graffiti of UVA's many secret societies, whose insignias are neatly painted everywhere. At $10,000 a year, in-state tuition is a quarter the cost of the Ivies, but UVA tends to attract affluent students, and through aggressive fundraising boasts an endowment of $5 billion, on par with Cornell. "Wealthy parents are the norm," says former UVA dean John Foubert.

Attorney Wendy Murphy, who has filed Title IX complaints and lawsuits against schools including UVA, argues that in matters of sexual violence, Ivy League and Division I schools' fixation with prestige is their downfall. "These schools love to pretend they protect the children as if they were their own, but that's not true: They're interested in money," Murphy says. "In these situations, the one who gets the most protection is either a wealthy kid, a legacy kid or an athlete. The more privileged he is, the more likely the woman has to die before he's held accountable."

Thankfully, the story does contain a small amount of somewhat balanced language:

S. Daniel Carter, who as former director of public policy for the advocacy group Clery Center for Security on Campus is a national expert on college safety, points out that UVA's sexual assault problems are not much worse than other schools; if anything, he says, the depressing reality is that UVA's situation is likely the norm. Decades of awareness programming haven't budged the prevalence of campus rape: One in five women is sexually assaulted in college, though only about 12 percent report it to police.

UVA president Teresa Sullivan denies the administration sweeps sexual assault under the rug. "If we're trying to hide the issue, we're not doing a very good job of it," she says, noting that this past February UVA hosted the first-ever sexual-assault summit for college administrators. It's true that recently, while under close government scrutiny, the school has made some encouraging changes, including designating most UVA authority figures as mandatory reporters of sexual assault and teaming up with student activists to create a bystander-intervention campaign. Students praise UVA's deans as caring folks who answer late-night calls from victims and even make emergency-room visits.

Am I saying that things cannot be improved at UVA?  Certainly not.  But,  I cannot help but suspect that if UVA were a lesser tier school, this story would never have been written.  Especially, if the S. Daniel Carter is correct that its problems are not out of the norm.  I further know that of my family members who attended the University, none to my knowledge ever encountered anything like what this article would have readers believe is a rampant problem (my oldest daughter graduated from UVA with an undergraduate degree and I have 6 other relatives - not counting my former wife and her family members - who have attended UVA).  Were we all living in a vacuum?