College Pressures Students To Not Post 9/11 Posters Because May Hurt Muslims’ Feelings

Honoring the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is an admirable cause, but one university says no matter how honorable the intent, such a memorial shouldn’t be done with images of the World Trade Center attacks.

Administrators at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, have ruled that posters created for Young America’s Foundation’s “9/11: Never Forget Project” create an “environment” in which “students from a Muslim background would feel singled out and/or harassed.”

YAF undertakes its 9/11 memorial project at campuses around the country every year. The posters created for last year’s 9/11 remembrance also sparked complaints.

There is no direct reference to Muslims in the text of the poster.

The posters displayed at Ripon sparked complaints to the school’s “bias incident team” over the posters’ perceived anti-Muslim tone.

According to YAF, administrators claimed objections were “raised to the administration and the bias incident team about the environment that that (the poster) creates … That because of the focus, in this case relentlessly on one religious organization, one religious group, one religious identity — in associating that one religious identity with terrorist attacks which go back far before 9/11 and after 9/11 — creates for some students here an environment which they feel like they are not able to learn.”

A member of Ripon College’s Bias Protocol Board seemed to be looking for ways to ban the posters beyond the fact some students claim they were uncomfortable with them, YAF said.

“There is nothing that this poster, in particular, adds to the conversation about 9/11, or about the politics of terrorism, or about national security or responses to it that couldn’t be done easily and more constructively without it,” one member of the board told YAF.

School administrators also questioned some of the other images used on the poster beyond the World Trade Center photo.

“Some things (on the poster) don’t have anything to do with 9/11 — ISIS, for example,” claimed one administrator.

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Send campus sexual assault to court

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has a plan to overhaul Title IX policy on campus sexual assault and harassment. It's a clear improvement over Obama-era policies that traduced due process. Reports say the new rules would oblige campus authorities to respect due process rights, including cross-examination of witnesses, and mandates both that accusers be treated as innocent until proven guilty and that clear legal standards be adopted.

Sexual assault is a serious crime, a felony in every state, and it should be treated as such with accuser and accused receiving the full benefit of all protections offered under law.

Unfortunately, in part because of the Obama-era guidelines, in part because of public demands, and perhaps mostly because university administrators have increasingly involved themselves in the nonacademic side of higher education, sexual assault adjudication often occurs in campus administrative offices rather than in court.

DeVos' proposal may just be a first step, but the problem is that it continues to allow colleges and universities to conduct quasi-judicial proceedings. DeVos wants the overhaul to be more than just threatening guidelines, but to carry the full force of law. This could allow an unfair, unequally enforced, and unprepared parallel judicial system for college students to be codified by law.

In most campus sexual assault cases, where the lines between conviction and consent are often blurred by alcohol, drugs, and newfound freedom, campus bureaucrats cannot be the beginning and the end of the pursuit of justice. Such a system would still deny rights to the accused, who deserve protections denied under the Obama guidelines, but also to the accuser, who should be able to see their attacker, if proven guilty, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the criminal law.

No amount of reform by the Education Department will make a campus proceeding the equivalent of a court of law. Some campus proceedings are necessary to determine whether a student should be suspended or expelled. Campuses also have to adjudicate offenses that violate campus rules but are not illegal, such as sexual harassment or student-professor relationships. But when formal legal action can be taken, administrators and counselors should encourage victims to file police reports, and campus proceedings should not be the beginning, middle, and end of the judicial process.

Having a separate system for college students and the world beyond campus is inherently unfair.

A legal case means legal consequences for violent crime. But colleges and universities have no authority to convict anyone. Administrators may find someone guilty, but they cannot send that person to prison. Even if he or she is expelled, enrollment elsewhere is an option, and further crimes an obvious possibility.

A legal proceeding also offers the accused full, transparent, and appealable justice. Investigation of an alleged crime, and its prosecution, defense, and judgment would be undertaken by professionals, not by campus administrators who often have little training and no legal background.

Accusers can opt to move a case to a real courtroom by filing a police report, but they rarely do so. If the accuser wants to proceed with a campus trial, the accused will be subjected to that process, however flawed it is. Universities also have an interest in keeping proceedings on campus because they can limit bad publicity. Universities have used this authority to protect those accused of sexual assault and to deny students due process to claim support for victims. In one case, highlighting the inability of campuses to arrive at impartial findings, administrators collaborated inappropriately with campus police and failed to reveal this when the case went to trial.

Universities should not be serving as judge, jury, and executioner. DeVos’ proposal shows that she has identified a grave wrong that was encouraged by the Obama administration. For this, she deserves credit. But university administrators have a conflict of interest, and should not be allowed to compromise justice. Students would be better served with sexual assault cases adjudicated in a proper, impartial courtroom.

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Australia: Christians are turning to home-schooling amid a massive rise in religious bullying – with some kids targeted for opposing same-sex marriage

Families with deeply religious values are resorting to home schooling their children more frequently, as schools report an increase in religious bullying.

Disgruntled parents cited incidents in which their children were taunted and targeted for opposing same-sex marriage.

New figures reveal the number of pupils being educated by their parents has soared 50 per cent in just four years to 4,479, The Saturday Telegraph reported.

A shift in school values, showing a more general hostility toward Christian and Islamic ideals and beliefs are allegedly at the root of the problem, according to Accelerate Christian Home Schooling co-ordinator Stuart Chapman.

'In our celebration of a diversity, Christians are now the ones who are the target of bullying and in the minority,' he said.

'[Parents are] feeling their children are being targeted because they believe in the traditional family.'

He said in one case students who opposed same sex marriage were forced to stand at the back of their classrooms.

After the vote in favour of same-sex marriage, Mr Chapman and the families of students who are suffering fear the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, resulting in a need to pull children from school to avoid nasty attacks.

With religious schooling considered a luxury some families can't afford, home schooling as a more convenient and price-conscious option may also have contributed to the 50 per cent rise.

A spokesperson from the New South Wales Department of Education said a parent's decision should be respected when it comes to home schooling children. 

Geoff Brailey, a McCrindle Social Researcher, said the challenges the religion as a whole is currently facing is a multifaceted concern. 'I think there is a lot of challenges the Christian religion has faced, ranging from the royal commission through to some responses from the same-sex marriage plebiscite.' 

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