Fabricating Hate Crimes Is a Byproduct of Victimhood Ideology on College Campuses

Anna Ayers, a student government leader at Ohio University, reported finding threatening messages in the drawer of her desk a few weeks ago.

Ayers, an LGBT student, said the three notes were “hateful, harassing,” according to The Post Athens, a student-run news outlet, and made specific attacks on her sexual identity.

“Senate will never be the same for me,” Ayers told The Post of the notes, the first of which she said appeared Sept. 27 in her desk at the Student Senate. “The friendships will continue to grow, and our successes will always evoke pride, but the memory of my time in senate and at OU will be marred by this experience. We will all have a memory of a time when this body failed one of its own.”

The incident caused a stir on campus. The problem was, that stir was based on a lie. Police quickly concluded that no hate crime had taken place, and that Ayers actually had written the notes to herself. The authorities charged Ayers with a misdemeanor, to which she pleaded not guilty. She is no longer a student at the university.

Incidents like this have become a strikingly common trend in the past few years, especially on college campuses.

While most alleged hate crimes on campus go unsolved, it is hard to ignore the fact that  so many hoaxes have occurred.

A variety of motivations may prompt a student to make up a hate crime, but one thing is for certain: The overwhelmingly dominant ideology on college campuses celebrates victimhood, even above achievement, and achievement itself is worthless without victimhood.

If one doesn’t maintain some kind of victimhood status, your opinion is worth less, your accomplishments are dismissed, and your success is written off as the product of privilege.

It’s no wonder Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., continues to maintain that she has Native American heritage—which Harvard Law School once openly celebrated—despite the thinnest of evidence that she has any connection to the Cherokee tribe.

For students seeking attention and accolades from peers on a modern college campus, it may make sense to create the false impression that you have become the victim of a hate crime or some other kind of oppression.

This is especially true given how quickly the stories are exploited for political effect by social justice warriors and an eager media, regardless of whether the stories are actually true.

The infamous 2014 report by Rolling Stone magazine on an entirely made-up rape at the University of Virginia is a prime example. The media soaked up and ran with the story about a violent rape on campus that turned out to be a bizarre scenario created by a troubled student.

Portraying American college campuses as bastions of rape, misogyny, and homophobia is almost laughable, but that is the story activists wanted to run with.

Unfortunately, the number of prominent bogus incidents creates a “boy who cried wolf” effect where people begin to stop believing such stories out of hand because so many have been fake.

“I would say now 80 percent of the events that happen on campus are hoaxes or pranks,” Laird Wilcox, author of the book “Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America,” told Fox News. “It’s a place where consciousness of discrimination, sexism, and homophobia is at a peak, and when there’s nothing happening, and they need something to happen, they can make it happen.”

This makes it even worse when crimes really do take place.

We must consider what all of this means for American society, that those who attend our elite universities are so saturated with the victimhood ideology that it seems better to create stories of oppression to get attention rather than strive for excellence or individual accomplishment.

We’ve now told generations of young Americans that it’s better to be oppressed and fight oppression—real or fake–than develop oneself to do the great things we should expect from our nation’s “elite.”

Yet, in cases where it appears actual discrimination is taking place, such as in Harvard admission policies that critics allege are biased against Asian students, it is excused away as defending race-conscious “diversity.”

Why is this?

It’s because we’ve wrapped up identity politics and victimhood ideology into a toxic stew that both dehumanizes and leaves its adherents with little personal satisfaction.

Identity has overcome individual merit as the barometer for what we put on a pedestal.

Now, we are too busy knocking off their pedestals those who have actually accomplished great things to focus on what we will do to make ourselves and future generations better off than we are.

This monumentally destructive ethos is eating away at the integrity of our schools and the fabric of our country.

If we want fewer hate crime hoaxes on campus, perhaps we need to change what is openly valued in academia, to focus on achievement rather than knapsacks of privilege and ladders of oppression.

That’s not likely to happen any time soon.

No wonder Americans are in a populist mood.

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Question at center of Harvard trial: What counts as discrimination?

The numbers are stark: For at least 18 years, through 2013, the admissions rate for Asian-American students at Harvard University was less than that of white applicants and most other minorities.

But is that actually proof of anti-Asian bias at one of the country’s premier universities?

That’s at the heart of a trial over Harvard’s admissions system that will continue Monday in Boston federal district court.

A string of top-level Harvard admissions officers and researchers took the stand last week to testify that the university does not discriminate against Asian-American applicants, and has never done so. This week, several others, including former president Drew Faust, are expected to be in the hot seat to defend Harvard’s use of race in admissions.

Students for Fair Admissions, which has sued Harvard, alleges that the university is limiting the number of Asian-Americans it admits every year. The university’s rating system and its inclusion of a personal score, which measures everything from applicants’ grit and “effervescence” to their blandness and immaturity, disadvantages Asian-American applicants, the group alleges.

E-mails show how donors are considered in Harvard admissions

When Harvard University admitted several applicants tied to influential donors to its Kennedy School, the school’s dean sent an e-mail calling the head of admissions “my hero.”

Students for Fair Admissions has pointed to Harvard’s own statistics as proof that Asian-American applicants, despite their grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, are hamstrung by the Ivy League school’s selection process.

According to Harvard’s data presented at the trial, in 2013 the university’s admissions rate for Asian-American students was 5.6 percent, lower than for whites (7 percent), blacks (6.8 percent), and Hispanics (6.1 percent). Only international students were admitted at a lower rate (3.3 percent). The overall admission rate for that year was 5.8 percent.

Asian-Americans were consistently admitted at lower rates than most other large racial groups dating back to 1996, according to court documents.

Harvard argues that while Asians make up about 6 percent of college-age residents in the United States, they make up a significantly larger share of the university’s applicant pool, about 20 percent, and a similar proportion of its admitted students.

The university also weighs a whole host of factors when admitting students that go beyond academics, extracurricular activities, athletics, and race, Harvard officials said.

When those 200-plus variables that are part of the admissions decision are considered — from whether applicants’ mothers or fathers are deceased, to their intended careers, how much they have worked, the average math SAT scores at their high school, and whether their parents attended Harvard — the difference in admissions rates between Asian-Americans and white students disappears, according to the university’s analysis.

“It’s never been test scores and grades alone” that will earn an applicant a seat at Harvard, said William Fitzsimmons, the university’s dean of admissions, who spent four days on the stand last week delving into the inner workings of the selection process.

While Harvard officials have been famously guarded about their admissions process, at one point arguing that their internal documents were the equivalent of trade secrets, the trial has forced thousands of pages into the public domain. Some are illuminating, others are embarrassing; many explain how Harvard whittles down an annual applicant pool of more than 42,000 students to just over 2,000 students admitted.

In an effort to convince federal district court Judge Allison Burroughs that the admissions process is comprehensive and free from racial bias, Harvard has also taken the unprecedented step during the trial of sharing charts and data about admissions, reading aloud portions of applications, and talking openly about what characteristics officials are looking for in applicants.

“We want you to know, because once you understand how the process works, what the information is, what the evaluations are, you can understand how the decisions get made,” said William Lee, a Boston attorney representing Harvard.

Students from certain geographic regions earn a “tip,” or a boost, in the admissions decision, including applicants from urban areas and specifically those from Boston and Cambridge.

A student’s future major can make a difference in admissions. Harvard is on the hunt for more humanities scholars, such as those who have studied Greek and Latin, because “we think they’ll be great educators for our engineers,” Fitzsimmons said on the stand.

A low-income child of a migrant worker can receive a lift in the admissions process. But it’s even more advantageous to be a top-ranked tennis player or skier. A child of a Harvard alumnus, especially one who is active in hosting events and promoting the institution, will get a closer look by the admissions office’s top staff. And giving $1 million or more to Harvard will likely earn interest from the university for the donor’s relative.

In one e-mail shared in court, a Harvard dean congratulated Fitzsimmons for admitting several high-profile applicants into an incoming class, including one tied to a donor who had committed to a new building for the university.

Harvard officials defended their wooing of the rich and the connected, arguing that it helps ensure that the university can be accessible to students with scarce resources who need financial aid to come to Harvard.

Students for Fair Admissions said that Harvard was aware as early as 2013, because of its internal research, that some of these preferences — or as some university officials described them in a memo, a “thumb on the scale” — were hurting Asian-American applicants, who were being admitted at a lower rate. A draft report by Harvard’s researchers found that if students were accepted on academics alone, Asian-Americans would be admitted at more than twice the current rate.

Harvard argues that research was incomplete and that a more comprehensive analysis of the data done for the trial shows no bias.

Yet whether Harvard admissions officers are unconsciously providing preferences for some students while holding back others remains an open question.

“Are there times when you don’t realize that you’re tipping for something or, like, anti-tipping for something, and then you go to the data and it shows that there actually is a tip that you didn’t really intend or know about?” Burroughs asked a Harvard admissions official on the stand.

Economists for Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions will take the stand later this week and begin dissecting the data in the hope of answering that question.

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Australian university will offer paid leave for transgender staff undergoing reassignment surgery

How is it part of an educational role tosupport mental illness?  Gender dysphoria is a mental illness if ever there was one.  And those who "transition" are rarely happy.  There is a high suicide rate among them. 

I doubt that this policy will be good for the reputation of the university.  Among normal people it could well become known as "the poofter university".  But only in private, of course. There is no free speech in what words you use in public for homosexuals

Aussies at a major university will get paid while undergoing gender reassignment surgery in an Australian first initiative.

The staff of Deakin University will be given just as many days of paid leave to change their gender as they would if their partner has a baby.

Aspiring to be the leading LGBTIQ+ inclusive educator and employer, Deakin is allowing the leave to be used at the staff members discretion.

Deakin University adopts the best practices for diversity and inclusion strategies for LGBTIQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer plus) students and staff.

The 4,700 employees of the Victorian university will learn of the new entitlements on Tuesday.

Chief operating officer Kean Selway told the Geelong Advertiser: 'Under Deakin's existing leave provisions, all staff experiencing exceptionally difficult personal circumstances can, with the support of management, apply for 'special leave' directly to the Vice-Chancellor.'

Deakin launched its LGBTIQ+ 2017-2020 Plan in 2017 and has already started rolling out initiatives to support the inclusion and well being of it's LGBTIQ+ community members.

'The paid leave is backed by a new gender transition policy which provides security and clarity around the process for Deakin staff who are undergoing a gender transition,' Mr Selway said.

'Fostering a genuinely inclusive environment affords all our staff and students a sense of belonging and an equal chance of success whether it be through study or work.'

According to the institute's gender transition procedure, effective from October 19 2018, Deakin will also offer students wishing to undergo sex transition surgery a gender transition plan.

Transitioning students will be given communication assistance, alternative assessment arrangements, longer library loan periods and off-campus library services.

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