Fox News – 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!

Bill Cosby’s Case

(http://www.torontosun.com/2017/06/12/defendants-say-the-darndest-things)

A Philadelphia native, I was weaned on Fat Albert cartoons and grew up watching The Cosby Show. Bill Cosby’s face called out from billboards lining the Schuylkill Expressway and announced the greatness and accessibility of Temple University. Bill Cosby’s long and varied career made him a local and national legend. I’ve read with interest the reception his work has received, especially from different individuals and communities of African-Americans in the United States. Professor Mark Anthony Neal’s opinion piece in The Washington Post (6-17-17) provides ample cultural context for what Bill Cosby did and did not achieve in terms of cultural representation of family life and, specifically of black family life, in the United States. Neal declared that Cosby became largely irrelevant once The Cosby Show concluded in 1992 and the concurrent Rodney King decision made even more visible the criminalization and unjust adjudication of black men. In 2015, journalist Roxanne Jones stated that Bill Cosby had “betrayed black community”. Journalist Denise Clay takes Cosby to task in this June 18, 2017, piece in Philadelphia Magazine. In a recent NPR piece, journalist Gene Demby writes: “That’s why it’s worth noting how much the very real political position Cosby himself occupied — the kindly cultural ambassador of Negritude — has become if not entirely outmoded, then at least viewed far more skeptically.”

It is not mine to speak for, against, or in neutral terms about Bill Cosby’s interactions with definitions and interpretations of being black in the United States. No doubt, he already was a controversial figure in this regard in the 1990’s, and his recent increased visibility has heightened the controversy. While it is impossible and not desirable to remove the question of race from Bill Cosby’s case, I am going to focus more on the elements of the Cosby case that emerge from power, especially television star power, and decades of obscene privilege gone unchecked. These alleged actions (and some admitted to in the 2005 deposition; quotes from it at this link) are not unlike the alleged violence perpetrated by the likes of Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and other Fox News power players accused of rape, sexual assault, violence, and subsequent cover-up that occurred over decades. (*See this related Gender Shrapnel Blog post from 9-19-16). In fact, The New York Times’ and other newspapers’ editorial decisions to place much of the Cosby trial coverage in their “television” sections speak to the focus on entertainment and the media circus, rather than to the real-life possibility that a person seemed to have developed a pattern of administering powerful drugs to unwitting women and then doing to them whatever he pleased. Editors of respected national dailies have made similar decisions with rape cases surrounding athletic superstars—placing the coverage of the case in the sports section, rather than in sections that typically cover criminal and civil lawsuits. (*See this related Gender Shrapnel blog post from 1-2-17.) The fame and fortune of these alleged criminals help their stories to be reported as more pulp fodder, more Kardashian-esque gossip, more sensationalized rise and fall, and less of an actual criminal case that reveals cruel and predatory patterns of the dehumanization of women over multiple decades.

When there is a single he said-she said account of a single incident, we experience great difficulty in believing the person who makes the accusation and finding against the accused. This somewhat dated (2002) Department of Justice report, titled “Prosecutors’ Charging Decisions in Sexual Assault Cases: A Multi-Site Study, Final Report,” reveals that decisions to charge sexual assault cases do still hinge on perceptions of the accused (more likely to be charged if the person is black) and of the accuser (more likely to succeed in going forward if the person fits the “ideal victim image”, i.e. “pure” or “innocent”), thus striking at the core of race and gender shrapnel. This much more up-to-date 2016 report about prosecution of sexual assault cases in the District of Columbia demonstrates that police officers and prosecutors need better training on collection of evidence, language for interviewing people in sexual assault and rape cases, and shortened processing times and evaluation of so-called rape kits. The system still favors letting sexual assault and rape cases go, appearing at least tacitly to reinforce that rape is just supposed to happen. In this The New York Times piece from June 20, 2017, Susan Chira interviews Jeannie Suk Gersen, who says: “We chose to set up our system to be stacked in favor of the defendant in all cases,” she said. “So, in areas where most of the defendants are male, and most of the accusers are female, it’s a structural bias in favor of males. Even if we were to get rid of sexism, it would still be very hard to win these cases. I think this is what we have to live with on the criminal side, because we’ve made the calculation that this is the right balance of values.”

You would think, though, that if 50 or 60 people told their stories, each story with its own specific context and details, but each contributing to a composite indication of malicious intent to disable people and then to violate them, you might be able to believe the 50 or 60 people who were victims of a pattern of violence and privilege and to act on your belief that they are telling the truth. The pattern was able to establish itself, in fact, because each of the victims over this long stretch believed it impossible to take on the legendary Bill Cosby. A person rendered an object might believe herself less important and less able to tackle an enormously difficult task, that of confronting “America’s dad.”

Take a moment to review the accounts of the now 60 accusers (there were 50 back in 2015), outlined here by The Los Angeles Times (6-17-17). The first woman on this long list must wonder if there would have been fewer (or no more) victims had she been able to go up against Cosby and his star power. In Andrea Constand’s case against Bill Cosby, Cosby is reported (e.g. here) to have claimed to have given Constand an “herbal” pill and later to have told Constand and her mother that it was only Benadryl. Lili Loofbourow in the same opinion piece from The Week, quotes Cosby’s version of the events: “’I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything,’ Cosby says of the sexual contact. ‘So I continue, and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.’” What the hell? You were never looking for either permission or rejection because you had drugged the person so that you could ensure her silence and temporary ignorance of her own situation. Cosby here is trying to co-opt consent language to make the case seem more innocent, but instead confirms the worst—a decades-long pattern of administration of drugs, forceful incapacitation of women, and sexual assault and rape.

The power and privilege of Bill Cosby, television superstar and celebrated member of Temple University’s Board of Trustees, has protected him from the full freight of potential conviction and punishment. Here I give two specific examples. First, most individuals with multiple charges of sexual assault against them would quickly lose support from high-level institutions (although we have seen time and again that these individuals often do not lose the support of their wives and/or immediate family members). Cosby’s 2005 statement about drugging women did not get him removed from Temple’s Board of Trustees. It wasn’t until the multiple charges were issued ten years later that he “resigned” from the Board. This 2015 Washington Post piece analyzes Temple’s troubled relationship with Cosby. Cosby’s lawyer from 2015, Patrick J. O’Conner, is still the chair of Temple University’s board of trustees. This must send a rather fraught message to the university community about Title IX protections, or lack thereof, for students, staff (of which Andrea Constand was a member back in 2004), and faculty in the university community.

The second example of Cosby’s astounding sense of privilege and protection is his plan to offer “a series of town hall meetings this summer to educate people, including young athletes and married men, on how to avoid accusations of sexual assault,” as reported here in a 6-22-17 piece from The New York Times. (*See this related post in the Gender Shrapnel Blog.) This plan absurdly ignores that the best way to avoid accusations of sexual assault is not to sexually assault. This fake rehabilitative proposal is insulting, as is the statement by another Cosby employee that “anything at this point can be considered sexual assault” (same piece from The NYT). As I write this, another Cosby spokesperson has announced that the time isn’t right for Cosby to undertake these town hall meetings.

This is a Trump world in which reality t.v. glitz and glamour override logic, decency, and even the law.

Witches and Warlocks

This week Fox News removed Bill O’Reilly from its roster (reported on by The New York Times here). Finally. After multiple complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. (*See the Gender Shrapnel Blog post on Roger Ailes and Fox News here.) The New York Times reported: “Mr. O’Reilly and his employers came under intense pressure after an article by The New York Times on April 1 revealed how Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, had repeatedly stood by him even as he and the company reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.” The New York Times reports that O’Reilly was still able to hold a meeting with the Pope this week and will not lose his book contract with Henry Holt. Bill also keeps the $25 million (figure cited in this The Washington Post piece) that Fox News would have paid him in the upcoming year. I think Bill is doing just fine, in case you were worried.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has featured for several weeks now Laura Kipnis’ article titled “Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial.” The article, published in The Chronicle’s Review section, has given ample publicity to the publication of Kipnis’ new book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins). In this blog post, I am addressing only Kipnis’ piece in The Chronicle. I haven’t yet read the book. I disagree with the main points of the article, but maybe the book will offer more nuance.

In the lengthy review article (about her own book), Kipnis recounts at great length the process by which Northwestern University adjudicated a case against philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. The case has been covered in The Chicago Tribune, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Daily Northwestern. I’m only familiar with this case through reading these articles and therefore am no expert on it. I understand that Ludlow was accused by an undergraduate student, who had been Ludlow’s student, of forcing her to drink alcohol and making unwanted sexual advances towards her. Soon after this became a formal lawsuit, a graduate student (from the same department as Ludlow, but not his student) accused Ludlow of raping her. These are the two cases at the center of this story. Northwestern University had no policy prohibiting faculty-student relations (called “dating” by Kipnis in the Chronicle piece).

Kipnis takes issue with Northwestern University’s handling of the case in the lengthy hearings of Ludlow, at which were present the faculty panel and “three outside lawyers, at least two in-house lawyers, another lawyer hired by the university to advise the faculty panel…,” (cited here) along with Ludlow’s lawyer. Kipnis was there in the role of “faculty support person” to Ludlow. Her account of the hearings is supplemented by Ludlow’s file of e-mails, text messages, memos, and formal university documents. I appreciate Kipnis’ detailed account and willingness to question Title IX proceedings that are still woefully inadequate on most college and university campuses. She believes that the university was trying to respond to unclear Title IX guidelines and that this resulted in the “witch trial” of Peter Ludlow.

Laura Kipnis is implicated in the case as well because her earlier defense of faculty-student “dating” had resulted in a Title IX complaint against her at Northwestern. Kipnis believes that prohibitions on such behavior are paternalistic and remove sexual agency. I believe we need to understand this entanglement to analyze well Kipnis’ highly public (and well remunerated) opinion on this case.

I would like to examine the language Kipnis uses in this piece. Kipnis remarks, “So when Ludlow’s lawyer called, of course I said yes—I was being offered a front-row seat at a witch trial.” The “witch trial” analogy seems poorly applied in the case of Ludlow, who has enjoyed great privilege and position for years. I get that “warlock trial” doesn’t do the trick, but I’d rather go in that direction. I also don’t completely understand the desire to witness a so-called “witch trial” because I don’t wish the pillory upon people, whether they are innocent or guilty. On the other hand, if Kipnis had made clear that her goal in being present at the hearings was to bear witness in the name of justice surrounding fraught Title IX policies, practices, and procedures, then her participation in, association with, and writings about the case to me would be more convincing.

The conflation of the term “sex” with “sexual harassment and discrimination” and “sexual violence” presents problems that weaken some of Kipnis’ arguments. “Sex” refers to (1) biological determinations that have been appropriately complicated by gender and sexuality studies and (2) physical contact (often officially referred to as sexual intercourse, with reference to genitalia) between and/or among individuals. Kipnis states, “I soon learned that rampant accusation is the new norm on American campuses; the place is a secret cornucopia of accusation, especially when it comes to sex” (cited in her 4-2-17 Chronicle piece). The hyperbolic language (“rampant” and “cornucopia”) belies the realities of sexual assault on college campuses, where 2016 statistics (RAINN statistics here) still tell us that one in five women is sexually assaulted during her time at college or university. The figures are worse for transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming individuals. Kipnis uses the bald term ‘sex,’ instead of giving it context in the hierarchical layers of colleges and universities.

Nowhere in this lengthy piece does Kipnis deal with actual statistics that speak to a culture of sexual violence, embedded in power hierarchies, on our college and university campuses. Kipnis claims that “new codes banning professor-student dating infantilize[d]students—this wasn’t feminism, it was paternalism.” Kipnis’ foray into questions of feminism and sexual agency is interesting and necessary, but becomes much more complicated when the professor-student relationship is added to the mix.

Professors do wield power. We design syllabi, determine the flow of class, assign grades, vote for assignment of department awards, and write (or don’t) letters of recommendation. Undergraduate and graduate students can develop a type of hero worship (something I detect in Kipnis’ enraptured tone as she describes Ludlow) that might translate as sexual attraction. No matter an institution’s lack of policy on “dating” (Kipnis’ oversimplified term), or “fraternization” (a charged term in and of itself often used in the workplace), a professor who gets entangled in a relationship with a student in his class or department is exercising power. Students in the same department are often nominated for the same awards, scholarships, and grants, and therefore departments breed competition, a competition that takes on a different look and a less fair landscape if a professor is sleeping with one of the students involved.

When things go wrong in the relationship (however we choose to define it), and we know they often do, this power piece is at play. College students are often trying to figure out sexual desires and identities, and, so, yes, questions of power and sexual agency are more than just a little complicated. If and when students and professors sleep together, structural systems of power become even more apparent. Kipnis’ use of the term ‘sexual paranoia,’ in this review piece and in the book title itself, trivializes this important developmental stage for 18-22-year-olds and conflates sexual exploration with sexual discrimination and violence. Kipnis also reduces real concerns about rampant sexual discrimination, harassment, and retaliation and about rape and sexual violence to one oversimplified, offensive phrase, ‘sexual finger-pointing.’

Kipnis praises Jessica Wilson, a philosophy professor and former student of Ludlow, and Wilson’s character defense of Ludlow at the hearings. Kipnis writes, “Like a great teacher, Wilson flipped the question [about Wilson’s own account of “unwelcome behavior” from a different former professor] around. She’d been speaking from her own experience, she pointed out. Yet didn’t the panelists have to ask whether she was telling the truth? They hadn’t been there, so how would they know? And if she were being entirely honest, she herself wasn’t sure if the disturbing thing was a professor trying to kiss her, or simply that she was getting unwanted attention that she ‘wasn’t participating in.’” Kipnis neglects to make clear that “getting unwanted attention that you’re not participating in” can be or can easily lead to real violation. In addition, Kipnis replicates sexualization and hero worship in her description of Wilson: “Here was a smart, attractive, successful woman from one of the top philosophy departments in North America who revered Peter Ludlow.” She later remarks that, after Wilson completed her testimony, “it felt as if there were an erotic current in the room.”

Kipnis also tires of “exhausted clichés about predatory males and eternally innocent females…” I think it’s fair to say that anyone who follows the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the major national dailies might find these “clichés” to not be exhausted enough. Of course it makes sense to get away from the polarized language Kipnis critiques, but college and university campus statistics and the underlying realities of sexual violence on campus are still acutely bad. The tone Kipnis uses when speaking of the two complainants is condescending at best. When Kipnis blames herself for not coming to Ludlow’s defense in a particularly tense moment in the hearing, she wonders if she hadn’t done so because she was “so shaken [her]self, so frozen and appalled” that she couldn’t. This is exactly what happens to many people who have experienced aggression and assault (and to some who have witnessed it), just like the two complainants in this case had claimed themselves. If the two complainants are deserving of scorn, I would like more information to understand why.

The strength of Kipnis’ article (and, I surmise, her book) lies in the legitimate questioning of the efficacy of legal processes in Title IX hearings on college and university campuses. She rightly criticizes Northwestern for running hearings soaked with lawyers from all sides, hiring an outside lawyer to advise the university panel, and worrying more about image than justice (Kipnis writes: “Ludlow was bad for the brand.”). Kipnis also says that she “was being warned off the subject,” and I am certain that was the case. Universities have many direct and subtle means to silence unpleasant subjects and cases that sully the brand. My simplified view of the stance that universities adopt is that they support the side that brings the fewest monetary and public relations risks. Oftentimes this means that complainants are silenced and run off campus, and, on far fewer occasions, it means that alleged perpetrators are.

We should all be wary when a university hires outside counsel to “advise” an internal panel. The advice provided stems from whatever is in the university’s best interest. At that point, the university can be considered wholly separate from the complainant and the alleged perpetrator. Kipnis points to the fraught intervention of universities in their own processes when she writes, “The university was set on getting rid of Ludlow, and the hearing was a formality. I also knew enough about the procedures to know that the faculty panel’s vote was merely advisory; the provost would make the final call, and it had been the provost’s decision to put the dismissal machinery in motion to begin with.” Exactly! This is a profound problem not only because it is evidently unjust, but also because it exploits student, staff, and faculty labor and their potentially sincere belief in the benefits of university adjudicative processes.

No matter where we readers fall on matters of sexual agency and exploitation of professional power, we can certainly question the Big Brand Machine of colleges and universities, whose students and employees have become little more than additional institutional risks.

The Chronicle has featured Laura Kipnis on several occasions and for several weeks running. It might be a good moment to consider other editorial decisions that take into account real statistics and violations of actual people.

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