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-Framework |
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-The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that presents the best policy option – key to out of round advocacy skills. |
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-Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing” Colorlines 3.2, 2000) //WW JA 1/15/16 |
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-“This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. |
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-The standard is combatting structural violence – epistemologically precedes normative ethics. |
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-Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. |
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-Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. |
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-Plan |
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-Plan Text: Public colleges and universities in the United States should derestrict constitutionally protected speech by amending Title IX policies to redefine sexual harassment. |
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-AAUP 16. (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 1/5/16 |
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-The 2014 AAUP report proposes a policy for colleges and universities desiring a separate statement of policy on sexual harassment. The proposal distinguishes conduct or speech defined as sexual harassment from protected speech: It is the policy of this institution that no member of the academic community may sexually harass another. Sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when: 1. such advances or requests are made under circumstances implying that one’s response might affect educational or personnel decisions that are subject to the influence of the person making the proposal; or 2. such speech or conduct is directed against another and is either abusive or severely humiliating, or persists despite the objection of the person targeted by the speech or conduct; or 3. such speech or conduct is reasonably regarded as offensive and substantially impairs the academic or work opportunity of students, colleagues, or co-workers. If it takes place in the teaching context, it must also be persistent, pervasive, and not germane to the subject matter. The academic setting is distinct from the workplace in that wide latitude is required for professional judgment in determining the appropriate content and presentation of academic material.91 |
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-They continue: |
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-AAUP statements and reports should be amended, as needed, to further clarify the distinctions between sexual assault and harassment and between speech and conduct, and to strengthen academic freedom protections. The 2012 statement on Campus Sexual Assault uses the term “sexual violence…as a blanket term for sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, stalking, domestic violence, and other forms of sexual misconduct.” Using the term “sexual violence” so broadly does not adequately distinguish sexual harassment – particularly where it involves only speech – from other types of sexual misconduct. The 2014 report on Sexual Harassment proposes a policy that distinguishes protected speech from conduct or speech constituting sexual harassment. Further, the policy includes protection of conduct in the teaching context. This could include expressive conduct such as gestures, dance, or other types of actions. To further clarify the protection of speech and expressive conduct, the AAUP proposed policy could be amended to include specific references to academic freedom. The proposed policy could also be amended to clarify that teaching, research, and extramural speech protected by academic freedom are excluded from definitions of sexual harassment. |
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-The Advantage is Sexual Assault |
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-Scenario 1 – Education Consumerism |
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-Status quo sexual harassment laws fail – they’re driven by education consumerism – Title IX prioritizes minimizing administrative liability rather than effectively challenging assault. |
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-deBoer 15 (Fredrik deBoer is an academic and writer. He has a Ph.D. in English and graduated from Purdue University. “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.” NY Times. September 9, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html?_r=0) //WW JA 2/17/17 |
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-The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless. And because the law compels the self-protective, legalistic wings of universities to grind into gear, for fear of liability and bad publicity, invocations of Title IX frequently wrest control of the process and the narrative from student activists themselves, handing it to bureaucrats, whether governmental or institutional. Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions. If students have adopted a litigious approach to regulating campus life, they are only working within the culture that colleges have built for them. When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company, it makes sense to take every complaint straight to H.R. I don’t excuse students who so zealously pursue their vision of campus life that they file Title IX complaints against people whose opinions they don’t like. But I recognize their behavior as a rational response within a bureaucracy. It’s hard to blame people within a system — particularly people so young — who take advantage of structures they’ve been told exist to help them. The problem is that these structures exist for the institutions themselves, and thus the erosion of political freedom is ultimately a consequence of the institutions. When we identify students as the real threat to intellectual freedom on campus, we’re almost always looking in the wrong place. Current conditions result in neither the muscular and effective student activism favored by the defenders of current campus politics nor the emboldened, challenging professors that critics prefer. Instead, both sides seem to be gradually marginalized in favor of the growing managerial class that dominates so many campuses. Yes, students get to dictate increasingly elaborate and punitive speech codes that some of them prefer. But what could be more corporate or bureaucratic than the increasingly tight control on language and culture in the workplace? Those efforts both divert attention from the material politics that the administration often strenuously opposes (like divestment campaigns) and contribute to a deepening cultural disrespect for student activism. Professors, meanwhile, cling for dear life, trying merely to preserve whatever tenure track they can, prevented by academic culture, a lack of coordination and interdepartmental resentments from rallying together as labor activists. That the contemporary campus quiets the voices of both students and teachers — the two indispensable actors in the educational exchange — speaks to the funhouse-mirror quality of today’s academy. I wish that committed student activists would recognize that the administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends. I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators. |
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-The corporate university stifles gender progress to limit liability and enables rich white males to buy out of rape accusations. |
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-AAUP 2 (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 2/16/17 |
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-While the original aims of Title IX and the legal meaning of “sex discrimination” encompass more than sexual violations, today the claims most readily associated with Title IX involve sexual violence or sexual harassment, whether actual conduct or speech. This is largely a result of the efforts of a national student movement against sexual violence on campus, often in the name of enforcing Title IX. While students’ wide-ranging commitment to combating sexual violence across a number of fronts is admirable and necessary, institutional engagement with such activism in the context of the corporate university can result in disturbing outcomes. First, administrative efforts to address sexual harassment and violence have adopted bureaucratic and legalistic methods that reward the narrowest forms of activism, student or otherwise, on campus. In this context, invocations of Title IX—and in particular calls by some activists to adhere to OCR and US Department of Justice criteria—have effectively narrowed the popular meaning of sex discrimination to sexual speech and sexual violence, often conflating the two. This singular focus on sexual harassment has overshadowed issues of unequal pay, access, and representation throughout the university system. Additionally, the treatment of students as “clients” in the corporate university has obscured the question of how to deal with prohibited behavior on campus. The client-service model allows administrations to try to have it both ways. For example, the University of Colorado at Boulder recently settled a lawsuit, for $15,000, from a former student who said the university violated Title IX when it suspended him for nonconsensual sexual intercourse. The university’s behavior in this case satisfied the law, and it satisfied the accuser by finding the accused responsible, but it mitigated any fallout by settling the accused individual’s resulting lawsuit.81 This bureaucratic and legal resolution does not address the question of whether sex-based inequality is being remedied. Finally, investigations of claims of sexual harassment and violence do not necessarily understand those claims as embedded within the broader social dynamics on and off campus. As Janet Halley points out, this segmented approach to sex discrimination promotes partial and legalistic analyses of the nature and scope of the problem, obscuring how biases or discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity may be ignored or even perpetuated by a narrow view of gender equality.82 This approach fails to respond to the overarching question: What vision of justice, educational access, and public accountability should the enforcement of Title IX seek to facilitate? The answer depends in part on what counts as sex discrimination—particularly what conduct or speech (and in what amounts) can support a charge of sexual harassment. While financial cuts and program eliminations have threatened entire disciplines and methods of producing knowledge, struggles over the importance and scope of academic freedom in the context of sex discrimination have also surged across campuses nationwide. From trigger warnings to tweets, the AAUP has documented an increase in potential threats to the academic freedom that protects teaching, research, and extramural speech and that fosters shared governance by administrations, students, and faculty members. When Title IX concerns play out as sexual-harassment panics within the corporate university, academic freedom is threatened across several fronts.83 Under such interpretations of Title IX, faculty members who teach, research, and otherwise study sexuality are left especially vulnerable to sexual-harassment charges. Further, those who seek to bring material related to sex or sexuality into courses not specifically devoted to those topics are also reluctant to do so for fear of being accused of violating Title IX. In responding to the OCR’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the AAUP warned of this danger, emphasizing that “any training for faculty, staff, and students” about how to identify and report sexual harassment “should explain the differences between educational content, harassment, and ‘hostile environments,’ and a faculty member’s professional judgment must be protected. Women’s studies and gender studies programs have long worked to improve campus culture by teaching about issues of systemic gender inequity, sex, and sexuality. The OCR should encourage discussion of topics like sexual harassment both in and outside of the curriculum, but acknowledge that what might be offensive or uncomfortable to some students may also be necessary for their education.” |
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-Scenario 2 – Rape Law |
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-Title IX results in silencing classes that discuss controversial subjects like rape law |
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-AAUP 3 (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 2/16/17 ***BRACKETS IN ORIGINAL*** |
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-At USC–Upstate, the controversy about Fun Home coincided with the closure of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. The transfer of funds underscores the fact that the serious study of sex and sexuality is becoming increasingly vulnerable, leading to selfcensorship by faculty members. This state of affairs extends to areas such as creative writing, where some instructors are wary of assignments that may raise the specter of sex, and criminal law, where some faculty members have chosen to omit from their courses units on rape and sexual-assault law out of fear that students may claim that the content is too emotionally distressing. Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk contends that, ironically, after long feminist campaigns to include rape law in the law school curriculum, the topic has once again become difficult to teach. Not only is discussion of rape sometimes thought to be “triggering,” but discussions of how consent or nonconsent may be communicated in a sexual encounter or how social inequalities (tied to class, race, or sexual preferences) might bias the assessment of whether an incident is labeled as a crime risk being perceived as disrespectful of victims. As a result, some students view such necessary debates about the law and sexual violence as fostering a hostile environment.49 |
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-The legal classroom should be the focal point of rape law discussions – the 1AC cultivates an open environment to challenge oppressive ideologies about rape, race and stereotypes. We change dominant perspectives by creating a counter-culture which addresses pedagogies of supremacy. |
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-Denbow 14 (Jennifer M. Denbow is Assistant Professor at University of New England. “The Pedagogy of Rape Law: Objectivity, Identity and Emotion,” Journal of Legal Education, Volume 64, Number 1. August 2014. http://www.swlaw.edu/pdfs/jle/jle641denbow.pdf) //WW JA 2/17/17 |
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-Since the law school classroom is one place where future legal professionals, many of whom will have substantial power, form their ideas about rape, discussion is crucial. Precisely because people have such different and charged views of rape, it is important that future lawyers at least have the opportunity to discuss it. Furthermore, the reluctance to teach rape law and the politics of the pedagogy of rape law cannot be divorced from the historic tendency of prosecutors and judges to presume that women are the sole victims survivors of sexual assault and in many instances trivialize rape accusations. Crenshaw argues, for example, that the reluctance of legal actors, including prosecutors, to address the rape of black women is rooted in stereotypes of black women’s licentiousness.43 The law school classroom could serve as a site where such stereotypes are confronted. A critical approach to the pedagogy of rape law would take the confrontation between different ways of understanding rape seriously and would be selfreflective about knowledge and its production. I would call not just for getting more instructors to teach rape law—and for a related push to reveal that the decision not to teach rape law is just as political as the decision to do so—but also for an effort to reveal the space of the classroom, as well as the claims to knowledge made therein, as political.44 The difficulty will be in developing a pedagogy that allows for exploration of one’s position and an inquiry into how that affects one’s understanding of the crime of rape. Rather than taking the objective as that which has no point of view, it must be acknowledged that there is no way not to have a point of view. As Crenshaw notes, not calling “into question the objectivity of the dominant perspective . . . fails to challenge majority students’ beliefs that the minority perspective is self-interested and biased, while the doctrinal framework and their own perspectives are not.”45 The exploration of experience and identity can thus destabilize the appearance of legal objectivity and requires those with the dominant view to account for their perspective. As hooks explains: . . . a critique of essentialism that challenges only marginalized groups to interrogate their use of identity politics or an essentialist standpoint as a means to exerting coercive power leaves unquestioned the critical practices of other groups who employ the same strategies in different ways and whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly buttressed by institutionalized structures of domination that do not critique or check it.46 |
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-Scenario 3 – Student Journalism |
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-Broad definitions of Title IX have a chilling effect on student journalists who release information regarding sexual assault because college administrators police free speech to avoid funding losses. |
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-Dewulf 10-7-16 (Kaitlin Dewulf, Dewulf is double-majoring in Political science and Journalism and Mass Communication on the pre-law track. "An unintended consequence of Title IX", Student Press Law Center, 10-7-2016, page numbers here, http://www.splc.org/article/2016/10/an-unintended-consequence-of-title-ix)//DM Accessed 1-16-2017 |
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-Passed more than 40 years ago, Title IX is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex — which can include sexual harassment or sexual violence, such as rape, sexual assault, battery and coercion — in education programs and activities. All public and private schools receiving any federal funding must comply with Title IX. Before Title IX, women faced discrimination in academics, admissions, athletics and hiring. Though the effects of Title IX have increased gender equality in higher education, an unforeseen consequence of the law, as it is currently being interpreted, may be the restriction of college media. In an effort to rid college campuses of sex discrimination in compliance with Title IX — and avoid the potential loss of funding that comes with noncompliance — some college administrators have panicked, and have taken the law too far, some First Amendment advocates say. Just last year, the Daily Bull, a student comedy publication at Michigan Technological University, was slapped with disciplinary measures after satirizing issues of sexual harassment and assault. The publication’s editor, Rico Bastian, wrote an article, “Sexually Harassed Man Pretty Okay with Situation,” that describes a male student receiving “unwelcomed sexual contact from members of the opposite sex, all of which he later looked back on with feelings of complacency.” The satirical article — published alongside a satirical list of “Signs that she wants the D,” including reasons like she “only screams a little” — was an attempt to comically address how many people don’t take male sexual assault seriously, managing editor Mike Jarasz told the Student Press Law Center. Jarasz also said it may be “considered more acceptable” for an attractive person to sexually harass someone, as the article ends with the male student saying he felt violated after receiving a sexual look from a “kinda ugly” woman. Still, MTU Vice President for Student Affairs Les Cook did not find the article humorous. Cook sent out a campus-wide email denouncing the article for “advocating criminal activity on campus.” The university’s office of academic and community conduct placed the Daily Bull on probation for two years — which meant if the publication put out another problematic article, it could be removed as a student publication altogether — and issued staffers to take a cultural sensitivity course. The Daily Bull’s adviser stepped down, and the publication issued a retraction and apology. And although student governments are legally not permitted to withdraw funding in retaliation for content, student legislators at MTU voted to freeze the Daily Bull’s funding until its staffers attended a Title IX training course. The staff underwent a three-hour training, covering both Title IX and cultural competency, but “didn’t really learn much,” Bastian said. Cook also told the Daily Mining Gazette that the university was legally required by Title IX statutes to act in cases of sexual discrimination or harassment. “(The Constitution) doesn’t supersede Title IX,” he said. “Title IX is a federal compliance policy. Those policies supersede anything else.” That interpretation of the Constitution, however, is inherently wrong, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “Let’s be clear about one thing: The Constitution of the United States, including the First Amendment, is ‘the supreme Law of the Land,’ and does in fact supersede any federal regulation that violates it,” FIRE said in a statement following the discipline. Mark Wilcox, a spokesman for MTU, said conflicting regulatory mandates regarding Title IX affect the university’s compliance efforts. FIRE President Greg Lukianoff has repeatedly blamed censor-happy administrators on the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights — the department that enforces federal civil rights laws — which he said has significantly confused administrators and students on Title IX compliance. “For the overwhelming majority of my career what I’ve been fighting is administration overreach,” Lukianoff said in an interview with Reason.com. ADMINISTRATIVE OVERREACH In April, several free speech, academic freedom and education groups argued that interpreting Title IX to include speech that some students find offensive could not only threaten students’ speech rights, but also undermine their education and efforts to promote equality on campus in a letter to OCR. The letter — authored by the SPLC, FIRE, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Association of University Professors — argues that the office’s definition of harassment, set forth in “Dear Colleague” guidance letters to universities, poses profound threats to free expression. While the letter was written in response to a situation at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, where members of a campus group called Feminists United filed several complaints alleging that online harassment of female students over social media violates Title IX, it urged the department to provide more guidance in general. “We take the allegations of discrimination at UMW very seriously, and we urge OCR to adopt an approach that will target unlawful conduct without casting a net so wide that it scoops up innocent students and constitutionally protected speech,” the letter read. NCAC Executive Director Joan Bertin said that since people who post on Yik Yak — the social-networking app targeted at Mary Washington — are spreading news and opinion, much like student journalists, any guidance related to online communication apps issued by OCR could ultimately affect student journalists. “Student speech and peer-to-peer activity is of much interest to OCR,” Bertin said. “They are plainly prepared to issue citations or to start investigations if they hear things that they don’t think universities are responding to appropriately.” She said if one student ”who is really pissed off about a gender-based article published in the student newspaper” files a complaint, the department could begin an investigation and “set the stage” against student journalists. It could only be a matter of time, Bertin said, before Title IX requires administrators to regulate college media, and some officials are already practicing this form of censorship. She said university administrators are highly risk-averse, so if the choice is between being the object of a Title IX investigation or disciplining a student newspaper, she doesn’t think there is any question of which option administrators will choose. “There is a very well-founded concern that college administrators are overreaching into student media,” Bertin said. “They are acting preemptively, and are very aggressively policing speech with sexual content to avoid being on OCR’s hit list.” The OCR maintains that its efforts to combat sexual harassment and discrimination in schools is met with equal respect for the First Amendment. “OCR has made it clear that the laws and regulations it enforces protect students from prohibited discrimination and are not intended to restrict the exercise of any expressive activities or speech protected under the U.S. Constitution,” an OCR spokesperson said in an email. “When schools work to prevent and redress discrimination, they must respect the free speech rights of students, faculty, and other speakers.” CONFLICTING GUIDANCE Under Title IX, no person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. While short, the statute has been given a broad scope through U.S. Supreme Court decisions and DOE guidance to cover sexual harassment and sexual violence. Though schools must respond to and remedy all sexual harassment, they can only impose discipline for harassment if it creates a “hostile environment” — when it is so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit” — and failure to do so puts schools at risk of losing federal funding. Since its implementation, vital definitions for compliance with Title IX have expanded drastically, despite rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court that have drawn distinctions between constitutionally protected offensive speech versus unlawful harassment. Though sexual harassment is not mentioned in the Title IX legislation itself, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1992 court case Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools that monetary damages could be awarded to individual victims of sexual harassment under Title IX. In separate cases in 1998 and 1999, the Supreme Court made clear that Title IX requires schools to take action to prevent and stop the harassment of students by faculty and staff, as well as other students. The decisions in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education and Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District established liability of the school, which occurs when the school knows about on- campus harassment that is creating a hostile environment and responds with “deliberate indifference.” But some First Amendment experts say this narrow definition has been absent from guidance given to college administrators through recent pronouncements by OCR. For example, a “Dear Colleague” letter by the department from 2010 defined “sexual harassment prohibited by Title IX” to extend to “making sexual comments, jokes or gestures; writing graffiti or displaying or distributing sexually explicit draws, pictures, or written materials; calling students sexually charged names; spreading sexual rumors; rating students on sexual activity or performance; or circulating, showing, or creating e-mails or Websites of a sexual nature.” Directed by this broad definition, rather than the one given in Davis, what is considered a Title IX violation can be unclear — which could lead college administrators to unnecessarily restrict what student journalists publish, experts said. AAUP recently published a report concluding that OCR’s broadened description of sexual harassment and heightened scrutiny of speech that includes sexual references of any kind has resulted in “a frenzy of cases in which administrators’ apparent fears of being targeted by OCR have overridden faculty academic freedom and student free speech rights.” In one recent episode, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks newspaper was the subject of a year-long university investigation — ultimately resulting in no punitive action — after a university employee filed a sexual harassment complaint after being offended by a joke about genitalia in an April Fool’s Day humor edition. College Media Association President Kelley Callaway said while Title IX once was used to ensure women had the same opportunities as men, she has seen its scope expand to include “almost anything that may offend someone.” “I think we’re living in a world where if anything could possibly offend, there is this idea to eliminate it,” Callaway said. “That is surely not the best environment for student journalists.” She said the vagueness of harassment definitions in “Dear Colleague” letters creates a lack of understanding that pushes college administrators to err on the side of caution when evaluating what is punishable under Title IX. “The fear that “Dear Colleague” letters put colleges under can cause it to be used in ways that could stifle various forms of free expression,” Callaway said. But Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said OCR is not to blame for the confusion among college administrators about how and when to enforce Title IX. Though the OCR could be more clear on its distinction between sexual harassment and hostile environment, he said, schools still have to remedy all harassment, whether they can impose discipline or not. Sokolow said some college administrators misinterpret OCR guidance, or misapply it as the result of malfeasance, but the lack of clarity “is not the culprit.” He said coherence is available for administrators willing to seek it out. If colleges or universities are violating anyone’s free speech rights, Sokolow said that’s “on them.” He said it is an administrator’s job to know when something is in violation of Title IX, and whether the school should impose discipline. “If an administrator doesn’t know, he or she isn’t doing their job,” Sokolow said. Still, Callaway said this confusion could cause student journalists to self-censor in an effort to avoid being disciplined through Title IX by administrators. “I think student journalists have a responsibility to serve their community, and if they are avoiding reporting on certain issues because of potential Title IX violations, they are not serving their community,” Callaway said. “To not talk about sexual assault on campus, that isn’t serving anyone.” But at Central Michigan University,that is exactly what student journalists are being told. Sydney Smith, managing editor of Central Michigan Life, said while attempting to publish the locations where sexual assault has occurred on campus, she was blocked several times by administrators and campus police. Smith said she thought it was vital to the safety of students on campus to know where sexual assault was most likely to occur, but was unable to obtain this information. She said she has attempted for months get this information through the Clery Act — which requires all colleges receiving federal funding to keep and disclose information about crime on campus and its efforts to improve it — but was unsuccessful. Smith tried several times to utilize the Freedom of Information Act — which allows the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased government documents — but administrators denied her requests. “Each time my requests were denied for the exact same reasons: invasion of privacy for those named in the report — even though I asked that the names be redacted — in violation of Title IX,” she said. “CMU administrators said that even though I wanted no names, someone could still ascertain and connect the dots to the person through the locations in the report.” She said the university police told her that CMU would not allow the releasing of the locations of sexual assault under Title IX, and that publishing those locations may “re-traumatize the victim.” “Leaving out information, especially regarding sexual assault on campus, does a tremendous disservice to the campus community,” Smith said. “As a woman, I feel it is my right to know where sexual assaults have occurred. What if there is a pattern?” Smith said publishing this information is crucial to the community because readers should know where sexual assaults have occurred because there could be clear indications of problem areas on campus. She said Title IX has a place, but universities need to follow the law more clearly when it comes to journalists. “I was told that obtaining police reports of assault was a ‘gray area’ of the law and Title IX required the university to be less transparent,” Smith said. “I highly doubt that is what lawmakers intended.” Steve Smith, a spokesperson for CMU, said redacting a name does not make it impossible to identify the survivor of sexual assault based on the location of the crime. He said location information, such as a dorm room, might lead to the identification of a victim, and would violate the student’s privacy. “Moreover, incident descriptions of an alleged sexual assault also may identify potential survivors and witnesses,” he said. “Imagine the massive chilling effect this would have on the reporting of rapes and other forms of sexual assault.” ‘A RECIPE FOR CENSORSHIP’ Despite a newspaper’s role to disseminate vital information to its readers, some administrators are treating student publications as an arm of the university by demanding compliance with Title IX and dictating what student journalists report on, First Amendment lawyers say. SPLC Executive Director Frank LoMonte said Title IX was built for severe, pervasive harassment directed at specific individuals that makes them unable to continue their education, and no one will ever be able to show that a newspaper article came close to reaching that point. Instead, he said, requiring student newspapers to comply with Title IX restricts free speech on campus and prevents student journalists from reporting key information regarding sexual assault that occurs on campus. “I think, whether accidentally or on purpose, a growing number of institutions are treating the campus publication like an extension of the college itself and claiming that a news story will breach the confidentiality of Title IX,” LoMonte said. “That just makes no sense.” A newspaper, just by definition, he said, cannot be harassment because it is “something you voluntarily pick up and can voluntarily put down.” He said there are constitutional boundaries that administrators can’t cross, and guidance by OCR has created confusion in the minds of administrators about where their authority begins and ends. This confusion, some say, creates a welcoming environment for censorship. Will Creeley, vice president of legal and public advocacy for FIRE, said there is an incredible chilling effect of overly broad, impermissibly vague interpretations of sexual harassment on free student press. “Any speech that has to do with sex or gender that rubs someone the wrong way — anything someone, somewhere doesn’t want to hear could be considered sexual harassment under OCR’s definition,” he said. He said the threat to student media posed by unclear Title IX compliance requirements is perhaps as great as the threat to any campus speech. “Student journalists are tasked with asking tough questions of those in power, like the student government or even administrators,” Creeley said. “People in power do not like being asked how they are exercising that power.” He said the OCR has opened the door for extremely broad restrictions on student speech, and it is “only a matter of time before some administrator decides to wield them.” He said unclear guidance from OCR and what he sees as the oversensitivity of today’s college students creates a “recipe for censorship.” Students and administrators alike, Creeley said, will censor student publications in order to avoid a Title IX investigation, if that becomes the norm. |
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-Underview |
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-1. Any is defined as some of not all. |
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-Cambridge Dictionary (Cambridge Dictionary. “Definition of “any” - English Dictionary”. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/any) //TruLe |
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-(used in negative statements and questions) some, or even the smallest amount (of): |
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-Outweighs – the resolution is negatively worded – this is the intended meaning of any - |
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-2. Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. |
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-Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) |
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-I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read, For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism” While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage. What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. |