ANOTHER VICIOUS CAMPUS TRIBUNAL

On Oct. 28, 2005, a rape allegedly occurred at William & Mary after a wild sorority party at Delta Delta Delta. Deepening controversy surrounds the alleged rape. On Oct. 30, a male student, who was publicly named as the accused by the university administration, was arraigned on rape charges. On Jan. 4, 2006, all charges were dropped. The accused is currently seeking to expunge his police record. He has filed a civil suit seeking $5.55 million in damages from his accuser. His accuser has filed a Grounds of Defense with the court.

In the intervening months, a judicial hearing at William & Mary led to the male student's expulsion. The expulsion is part of a deepening campus schism over W&M's judicial system and how criminal accusations should be handled by the administration. The stakes are high. If a black mark of "rapist" remains in a student's permanent files, his academic future and career options could be devastated.

The two incidents at Harvard and W&M dramatize the power PC still exerts wherever it has managed to embed itself into the policies and mechanisms along which academia functions. Summers was rendered ineffectual because, for decades, an intimidated academia handed gender feminists an almost blank check on policymaking. Summers' sin was to violated the feminists' speech code both in letter and spirit. His ousting drives home the point that no one is beyond their reach. It was in anticipation of an impending no-confidence vote from such "colleagues" that Summers resigned.

The situation at W&M is more typical of how PC functions on campus: quietly, bureaucratically and against the "little guy." The case is also significant because includes a blueprint of how to break the back of PC power. Namely, uproot the laws and policies through which it bites. A student newspaper at W&M, The Remnant, is demanding such an uprooting. Meanwhile, W&M defend its judicial system and recommends only minor reform. The "fixes" suggested by The Remnant are hardly minor. They include:

-- Accused students should be allowed the full use of an attorney. Currently, attorneys cannot participate in a hearing, for example, by questioning testimony or presenting the case.

--A higher standard of proof should be required, especially in criminal cases involving expulsion. Currently, a "clear and convincing" standard of evidence is used. This requires more than the "preponderance of evidence" [51 percent] used in civil courts but less than "beyond a reasonable doubt" [99 percent] employed by criminal ones.

-- Students who cannot testify because of pending criminal charges should be temporarily suspended and their hearings reasonably delayed. (The accused's attorney strongly advised him not to go on record with W&M before the criminal charges were resolved. Thus he was expelled without being heard.)

The Remnant is currently organizing an "initiative for change." On March 20, it will host a forum to which representatives from the Dean's office will be invited. The forum discussion will be heated. Remnant editor Will Coggin has a penchant for quoting the W&M's Student Handbook which guarantees students rights. It states that they "shall enjoy all rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed to every citizen of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia."

In short, the handbook guarantees the civil liberties of students. In criminal matters, these include the right to representation by an attorney, the presumption of innocence and high standards of evidence. Coggin has concluded that the guarantee "is a lie." I hope W&M makes Coggin eat his words by rehearing the case against the accused student and by instituting the individual rights it guarantees. If they do, I think Coggin will smile as he swallows.

More here





AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DOOMS LOTS OF BLACKS TO FAILURE

Stuart Hurlbert sends a timely and powerful reminder that the misrepresentations, distortions, and alarmist predictions from critics of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative are simply deja vu all over again.

Stuart is a biologist at San Diego State University with some experience in these matters.

My own initiation into these battles came eleven years ago when I was able to obtain some normally difficult to obtain information on admission and graduation rates at my own university. In an article in the student newspaper, I pointed out that as a result of racial preferences, the 6-year graduation rate for all African-American students had dropped to 10%. This was the unhappy consequence of 2/3 of the African-American freshman class being admitted in the mid 1980s without the minimum credentials normally required for entrance to the university. The article was sympathetic to the dilemma of the students, but not so sympathetic to the white administrators whose nearsighted and predictably damaging policies were responsible for the harm.

On appearance of the article, my department chair and another faculty member sent a letter to all faculty members in my department asking them to sign a letter censuring me for my "racial insensitivity". Par for the course in some segments of academia, as most of you will understand. But the effort badly boomeranged. Numerous colleagues told them they were way off base, and the letter was withdrawn. Eventually I received many positive responses from both within my department andÿ around campus for having addressed a serious, controversial matter in an honest and sensitive way. The PC forces have been, at least in my department, quiet ever since. Higher administrators have become aware that roughly half the faculty oppose racial preferences, and no longer talk about ways to circumvent Prop. 209 in open meetings.

When I asked Stuart's permission to quote the above, I told him I'd be happy to keep both his name and university anonymous. He replied:

John, Go for it! You need keep neither my name or university anonymous. I fly well above the radar here - in part so my special equipment can pinpoint those radar transmitting sites!

If every university had at least one professor willing to expose the corruption of racial preference with Stuart's verve, and had his ability to dodge the predictable politically correct flak, the future of racial preference would be even shorter than it is now.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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