Betsy DeVos – Gender Shrapnel

Dear Colleague

TOO

What is it going to take for a large group of people to believe that women of all races and many individuals from the LGBTQIA+ community have been sexually harassed, discriminated against, and assaulted and then made to believe it was their fault? We didn’t protest vociferously as we heard cases and allegations against Fox News, our current “president,” and Bill Cosby (2005 and again in 2015). Do white women actors from Hollywood have a certain clout that is waking people up to the pervasiveness of workplace harassment (hostile work environment and quid pro quo), street harassment, and sexual violence? We have to hope that the visible and audible outrage about the Harvey Weinstein case expressed in traditional media outlets and copiously on social media raise awareness and allow us to make real incursions into social and legal change.

I wrote last week about how unsurprised we should be about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged 30-year campaign of sexual harassment and assault. The textbook elements of the case include: predatory and criminal behaviors enacted by those higher in the hierarchy on those lower in the hierarchy (power differential); the person harassed is taken aback by the situation and feels threatened, and therefore often doesn’t respond in a way that she might otherwise have done (she is hit by gender and/or race shrapnel); cronies of the higher-up accommodate the illegal behaviors of their colleague and maintain their own power (male networks of power and boys-will-be-boys attitudes); those who have been harassed and/or assaulted and are brave enough to speak out are silenced in any number of ways (threats; tabloids, black lists; lack of employment; etc.); society reinforces negative responses to the women who speak out (can’t take a joke; nags; drags; exaggerators; liars); the boss preys again.

I dare say that this The New York Times piece, which reports on Woody Allen’s BBC interview about the Weinstein case, reveals again how those accused of these serious crimes rarely understand what they did (or continue to do) wrong. Allen states that he’s grateful for the work Miramax gave him after his own sexual harassment and violence cases, makes clear that no one should be interested in hearing these types of allegations (“You’re not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie”), and warns of a “witch hunt atmosphere,” which sounds curiously like the “president’s” words about the Justice Department’s inquiry into Russian involvement in our most recent presidential election. The New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens applauds Betsy DeVos for ending “a campus witch hunt” in her removal of Obama-era Title IX guidance for colleges and universities. Who are the witches and who are the hunters here? In this opinion piece in The New York Times, campus sexual violence researchers Miriam Gleckman-Krut and Nicole Bedera insist that “Obama-era policies did not malign men. What they did was make it easier for victims to come forward.” The headline asks the poignant question, “Who Gets to Define Campus Rape?”

As I write in Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace, many people who are harassed have to change their daily paths to avoid the person in power and often have to turn down job opportunities that would require them to have contact with that person, thus permanently changing the course of the careers of the people who have been harassed. These acts of avoidance occur in every career and on many college and university campuses. The power systems set in place are replicated in the social lives of the students, thus demonstrating again the continuum through which sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation are linked to sexual assault and sexual violence. If we don’t take issues of harassment and discrimination seriously, then we will not get at the enormous problem of sexual assault and sexual violence.

Sexual harassment in the higher education context is important for many reasons. Turning a blind eye to it reinforces for young men, women, and people of all genders that young men are supposed to have, exercise, and retain power, both during the college years and beyond. It sets the tone for the workplace, since we presumably are educating students to be the workers of tomorrow. The blind-eye habit in higher education also sends a message to students in middle and high schools that boys have the power and girls should shut up. This doesn’t bode well for their futures in higher education and/or the workplace. The sexual harassment problem in Hollywood, at Fox News, in the White House, and in so many other industries, simply reproduces itself in other power-dependent settings, like schools.

President Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011 (now included on the Office of Civil Rights’s website only as “archived information”) sent a direct message to United States colleges and universities that the reduction of sexual assault and sexual violence on higher education campuses was a priority for the Obama administration. The “significant guidance” included in the letter comes with great detail, and in the second footnote of the document, sexual harassment is directly linked to sexual violence and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is invoked. In other words, the document recognized the more acute context for people who find themselves at the intersection of gender, race, and/or national origin. These moves, along with the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, reveal the Obama administration’s understanding of the problem and the seriousness with which the administration approached recommendations for adjudication. I strongly recommend this 19-page document to anyone interested in reducing the incidence of sexual harassment and violence and in understanding links between and among Title IV, VII, and IX law.

Last month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded the Obama-era guidelines. (*See this previous post on DeVos and public education.) DeVos has replaced the “Dear Colleague” guidelines with a Q&A document, which arguably creates a “both sides” false equivalency that had been eased by the Obama-era guidelines. (*See Jeannie Suk Gersen’s and Christina Hoff Sommers’s support of “both sides” approaches. ) One report cites “confusion over specifics” of the interim guidelines provided by DeVos’s office. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s September 11, 2017, commentary by Scott Schneider analyzes in legal and practical terms “what DeVos got wrong in her speech on the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter.” Information and clarifications have come out in drips and drabs (e.g. this updated piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education), thus sowing more confusion and making victims wonder whether it is worthwhile to report traumatic incidents of sexual assault and violence. A reporter from The Chronicle has chronicled his numerous attempts to get straight answers out of the Education Secretary.

DeVos’s replacement of the Obama-era guidelines (both 2011 [“Dear Colleague”] and 2014 [Q&A format for clarification of “Dear Colleague”]) speaks again to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s idea that the current “president’s” “presidency” (quotation marks around these words are mine) “hinges on the fact of a black president” and “has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own” (these brilliant quotes are from Coates). Recent college graduate Jamil Smith in this piece in The New York Times states that: “Instead, my experience taught me that we need to be proactive in preventing sexual assault, and much of that involves something that should be a natural fit for college campuses: education. The workshops I taught to captive audiences of fraternity brothers are a start, but even they weren’t enough. Rape prevention education should be more than an hour, and it should be mandatory for everyone, not just those involved in Greek life. And beyond the legal landscape of sexual assault, men should be disabused of the beliefs that lead to it and should be required to understand its effects on victims.” The United States could clearly use several thousand more Jamil Smiths, young men who understand structural oppression of women and do something to change it.

DeVos has taken her marching orders from this “president.” It’s time to dance to an entirely different tune. Let’s get it right here, on campus, the place guided by lofty mission statements that usually assert that we are all people.

P.S. After this blog post was published, I saw Professor Mikki Brock’s excellent piece on witches and witch hunts in The Washington Post. Check it out!

Day of Reckoning

Every so often we need to list actions that are insane, inane, and inhumane. Today, let’s do some accounting.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and José are not just a part of hurricane season. They are part of an ever more worrisome chain of cataclysmic events caused by climate change. Yes, we should care about the people affected—those who have lost life, property, livelihood, and clean water—in every way we can, and we have to stop causing these events, then throwing up our hands as if we don’t understand their origin, and then calling upon people to clean up the messes.

Colin Kaepernick and dozens of other NFL players are not just well-paid professional athletes with a bone to pick. They are brave individuals who are responding to a system of oppression that we white people have created and perpetuated. We have all witnessed the excessive use of force on African Americans, resulting in death, incarceration, and entrenched patterns that we are only now starting to acknowledge. We shouldn’t foment racism and then criticize those who protest it, those who have a legitimate cause to question allegiance to a flag whose country has never chosen to represent their interests. Colin Kaepernick should have a solid Title VII case working, especially given the retaliation he has suffered for his important gesture of resistance, a gesture made in a context highly visible to white men, the group perhaps most in need of lessons about United States history and present-day realities.

The events of Charlottesville didn’t happen in a vacuum. We have spent too long neglecting the evolution of the First Amendment and indulging a long outdated interpretation of the Second Amendment. Jeff Sessions is busy accusing college and university campuses of serving as echo chambers for people with homogeneous opinions and fragile egos, hearkening back to some mythical good old days when tough people argued out tough opinions. Whatever good old days he may be referring to were days when colleges and universities had not yet opened their doors to many people who weren’t white or male. Not all white males have the same opinions, but an environment that welcomes them and them only also protects them from heterogeneity and challenges to their privilege. It creates power systems for them and them only, power systems that manifest themselves in the very type of government that is not working for many of us at this moment. The powerful weapons available to the common person give the Second Amendment a ferocious sway over the First, as we witnessed so clearly in Charlottesville. Open-carry laws on campuses such as The University of Texas certainly chill free speech freedoms and impulses.

It is no coincidence that Betsy DeVos is unraveling all of the equality work done by President Obama. We created Betsy DeVos, and her toady, Candice Jackson, by allowing attack after attack on the character and actions of the most qualified candidate for the presidency, demonstrating that we can’t stand women who have earned power, and giving power to someone wholly unqualified to be Secretary of Education just because she is (1) a billionaire and (2) willing to assume that women who have been raped are liars and to give alleged rapists (Brock Turner, for example) the overwhelming benefit of the doubt. DeVos serves to dismantle Obama-era protections, yet another demonstration of the racist need to undo all the good work done by a black president. Trump’s proposal to Congress to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) again erases an Obama-era program and, according to this article from The Atlantic, reverses upward mobility for many of the nation’s young people.

The travel ban imposed upon Muslim-majority nations, a ban rearing its ugly head anew, now includes Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela, much to the confusion of most people who are experts in information-sharing among nations with an interest in eliminating state-sponsored terrorism. Chad’s inclusion, even in a Trumpian worldview, is quite confusing. Trump has baited North Korea and then blamed the nation for its (admittedly) dangerous and (hopefully) unwarranted missile tests. The ban of Venezuela, whose citizens are suffering in many ways, including vast food shortages, seems cruel and, to put it lightly, un-neighborly, especially for a nation that offered aid to the United States after Harvey and Irma. The inclusion of non-Muslim-majority nations represents a chess move on Trump’s part to attempt to make the ban appear less targeted at one religious group.

Despite recommendations from his top military advisers and servants, the “president” continues to insist that transgender individuals should not serve in the military. We shouldn’t have to be in an uproar about having a president treat people as less than human for their race, religion, national origin, and gender identity. These groups are supposed to be protected under the law (Title VII, 1964, and Title IX, 1972) of the United States and are now targeted by the government of the United States.

What happened to infrastructure and jobs? Why have the “president” and Congress spent nine months trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, only to find that it is the best solution we have so far? (They could have spent those nine months fixing certain elements of the ACA to make it even stronger.) Where are the “progress” and “greatness”? What is beneficial, humane, kind, generous, or noble about the way the United States is conducting business these days, within the country and beyond it?

Even Forbes has a list of the ten most offensive tweets from our “president.” A man who uses his Twitter account and the Oval Office as a policy machine, bully pulpit, and series of contradictions is running our country into the ground.

Education in the Trumpocracy

(http://www.ushistory.org/us/39a.asp)

Oak Plains School (North Carolina; built in late 19th century for white children)

When the “president” appointed Betsy DeVos to the education secretary post on November 23, 2016, and she was confirmed on February 7, 2017, I groaned out loud, along with many of my friends and colleagues who are teachers. DeVos seemed uniquely unqualified to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education in that her principal experience with education is having been a high school and college (undergraduate) student. She has no experience as a teacher, administrator, or educational policy expert. On her own website, DeVos describes herself as “a proven leader, an innovator, a disruptor and an advocate.” She also uses the word “pioneer” in her self-description. This billionaire and former chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party is co-opting revolutionary language to promote herself and to cement traditional platforms that take us back to the 19^th century (or probably before, since positivist, pro-science philosophy thrived in the late 19^th century). If she is a “proven leader,” then the direction in which she is moving her followers is most definitely backwards. If she is a “disruptor,” then it is due to her utter lack of experience in the educational realm. This Gender Shrapnel Blog post examines damage wrought by DeVos in the areas of public education, education access and affirmative action (also a Justice Department issue, of course), and Title IX protections for women and transgender individuals. This is a shrapnel cluster, hitting religion, race, class, and gender.

The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of The Constitution of the United States (also linked here through the White House site), taken together and interpreted through centuries of jurisprudence, “[build] a wall of separation between Church & State” (Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists). Garrett Epps’s article in The Atlantic (6-15-2011) uses abundant textual evidence that the founding fathers never intended to build a Christian nation. For all that the GOP claims to be the party of “constitutional correctness,” the intentional Christianization of our public school system thumbs its nose at the purpose and practice of the First Amendment. In 2001, DeVos stated, “There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s kingdom” (cited in this Mother Jones article from March/April 2017). DeVos & Company must feel a dizzying sense of power as they promote Christian charter schools (see here what DeVos did to public education in Michigan) and funneling public monies into Christian schools. This 3-20-2017 article from The Atlantic explains the ways in which the Trump-DeVos team might dismantle school integration.

In its Manichean view of the world, does the Trump-DeVos axis realize that the tables could be turned and their own children and grandchildren might have to attend public schools dominated by religions other than Christianity? As a resident of the United States, I believe in the free practice of religion, which means not having religion of any kind imposed in the public school system. In our area, the moment of silence built into the public school day, the prayer gatherings on public school buses and at public school flagpoles, and the invitation to Christian “inspirational” or “motivational” speakers already demonstrate the much more dangerous and more slippery slope of the DeVos regime in education. The ACLU warns the same here.

While Jeff Sessions is at the helm of the Justice Department’s initiative to sue universities over affirmative action (described in this 8-1-2017 piece in The Washington Post), Betsy DeVos is to blame as well. One of the first hires she made in the new post was that of Candice Jackson as acting head of the Department of Education’s (DOE’s) Office for Civil Rights (OCR). This NBS News (4-14-2017) piece probes how well Jackson’s disapproval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and her anti-affirmative action stance meshes with the mission statement of the OCR. DeVos does not seem as riled up about legacy admissions to colleges and universities, perhaps principally because they still favor white people. (See related pieces in The Washington Post; The New York Times; Business Insider; The Chronicle of Higher Education; and another in The Washington Post.) The DeVos regime, as part of the Trumpocracy, is all about accomplishing the opposite of the office’s mission. Again, this is DeVos, through Jackson, leading us backwards.

While we’re on the subject of the now-infamous Candice Jackson, let’s not forget that she has followed her boss’s lead in advocating for men’s rights over women’s in campus sexual assault cases. The New York Times (7-13-2017) says about Jackson: “Investigative processes have not been ‘fairly balanced between the accusing victim and the accused student,’ Ms. Jackson argued, and students have been branded rapists ‘when the facts just don’t back that up.’ In most investigations, she said, there’s ‘not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.’ ‘Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’ Ms. Jackson said.” Jackson does not even use the term “rape” or “sexual assault,” but rather, “students overrode the will of a young woman.” Although Jackson later attempted to clarify the statement, she has made it clear that she does not believe campus sexual assault happens and, by extrapolation, does not believe rapists exist.

In the meantime, Jackson’s boss, DeVos, was meeting with men’s rights activists. As Jon Krakauer and Laura L. Dunn say in this op-ed (8-3-2017) from The New York Times, “The Department of Education is taking a hard look at its policies on campus sexual assault. The result may make colleges safer. For rapists.” (*See Mili Mitra’s 7-18-2017 op-ed in The Washington Post for an eloquent rationale of the need for a strong DOE and OCR to follow up Dear Colleague letters issued under the Obama administration; see Katz’s and Alejandro’s 8-3-2017 op-ed in USA Today; see also this 1-2-2017 Gender Shrapnel Blog post.)

DeVos is also crippling Title IX protections in the realm of transgender rights, as detailed here by the ACLU (3-29-2017), although she is reported to have been initially in favor of maintaining Obama-era protections. Through DeVos, and of his own accord, Trump is using the transgender community to pander to his base in the face of epically low approval ratings.

None of this is about education (DOE; DeVos) or civil rights (OCR; Jackson). It is about fake-revolutionary rhetoric and continuing to assert power to the benefit of few and the detriment of many.

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