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Here’s an interesting one about the unintended consequences of college admissions policies.

In 1996 a federal appeals court declared the affirmative action program then in effect for admission to the University of Texas unconstitutional. Barred by the courts from considering race in university admissions, the Texas state legislature moved to create an alternate, “race blind” mechanism for improving diversity in the UT system.

The solution the legislature crafted was a law, passed in 1998, providing that any student who graduated in the top ten percent of his or her high school class would be guaranteed acceptance to the UT school of his or her choice. This policy, it was expected, would increase UT enrollment from many schools with high proportions of poor students and students of color, and thus provide such students with greater opportunities — and incentives — for educational advancement.

That’s the background. Now here’s the story:

A new study looked at the effects of this policy, and found that it was having an effect not just on where students were going to college, but where they were going to high school as well. Promised UT admission if they graduated at the top of their class, a significant number of strong students were choosing to enroll in less-competitive local high schools over more intense magnet schools.

The first effect of this shift in enrollment should be obvious — those local high schools wound up getting an infusion of academically well-prepared students. Students who would ordinarily get cherry-picked by gifted and talented programs elsewhere were choosing to attend their local schools, improving those schools’ student bodies, their test scores, and — not incidentally — their attractiveness to other well-prepared students. In ordinary circumstances, no family, no student, wants to be the first of their peer group to attend a struggling school, but being the fifth, or the tenth, or the fortieth, is a different matter.

This is an outcome public school advocates strive for. This is a Good Thing.

But if you think about it for a moment, you realize that there’s a catch. Because if well-prepared students are attending struggling local high schools on the assumption that they’ll wind up at the top of their class, a good number of those students are likely to assume correctly. Which means that they’re likely to bump some of the students who would have attended those struggling schools without incentives out of the top slots.

And this is exactly what the new study found — that slightly fewer students of color wind up getting the ten-percent slots as a result of school shifting.

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole article yet — my request to buy it online got gummed up somehow — but I’ll have more after I do.

On December 7, Naomi Wolf posted a now infamous op-ed at the Huffington Post entitled “Julian Assange Captured By World’s Dating Police.” In it, she said that Assange stood “accused of having consensual sex with two women,” and that “both alleged victims are … upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first.”

Even at the time she wrote it, the Huffington Post op-ed was a gross misrepresentation not just of the facts on record, but also of the sources upon which she herself relied. Of her two central claims — that Assange stood accused of mere “consensual sex” and that his accusers were motivated by jealousy — one was contradicted by her sources, and the other was a matter of her spinning editorial speculation as fact. But don’t take my word for it…

Wolf’s supposed source for her two claims was an article in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. That article, though, claimed no particular insight into the accusers’ motives:

“How must Sarah have felt to discover that the man she’d taken to her bed three days before had already taken up with another woman? Furious? Jealous? Out for revenge? Perhaps she merely felt aggrieved for a fellow woman in distress.”

Just as problematic, though Wolf asserted that her account drew on “the alleged victims’ complaints to the media,” the Daily Mail article she cited included no such sourcing. As it turns out another Daily Mail article Wolf mined for anonymous gossip did include such a statement, but that statement contradicted Wolf’s claim that the sex was consensual:

“One of the women claimed in a Swedish newspaper: ‘The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a twisted attitude to women and a problem taking no for an answer.'”

That quote appeared nowhere in Wolf’s piece, and she has never, to my knowledge, publicly acknowledged its existence.

It gets worse.

Less than two weeks later, Wolf’s account was again contradicted by a lengthy account of the incident, based on leaked police reports, that appeared in The Guardian. This account further undermined Wolf’s central claims and cast serious doubt on other charges she’d lodged.

So much doubt, in fact, that Wolf herself now admits that the Huffington Post op-ed was inaccurate. Here’s how she described it in an interview on BBC Radio on Friday:

“When I wrote the first post, the police report hadn’t been reported yet. So it was based on early and not sound reports. So it was probably premature on my part.”

That was five days ago. The Guardian article appeared twenty-seven days ago. The op-ed was published ten days before that.

And yet the op-ed is still up on the Huffington Post site in its original form. No retraction, no correction, no nothing.

Wolf’s analysis of the Assange sexual assault case, and the policy proposals she’s made in its wake, have of course been criticized by many feminists. But this post isn’t about those criticisms. This is about something else.

This is about a self-professed feminist and anti-rape activist making inaccurate and derogatory statements about alleged sexual assault survivors, admitting it, and then refusing to correct the error where it originally appeared.

Think about that for a minute. Wolf acknowledges that her op-ed slamming Assange’s accusers was “based on early and not-sound reports.” She admits that she posted it prematurely. She admits that she got the story — a story which cast allegations of sexual assault in a negative, trivializing, and unfair light — wrong.

But nearly four weeks later, she’s done nothing to rectify her error.

Astounding.

January 18 Update | Still no retraction.

February 7 Update | Wolf has posted a “correction” that compounds the errors of the original piece in a shockingly flagrant way. I’m flabbergasted.

December 2 Update | It’s a year since Wolf’s original post went up, and ten months since her disingenuous “correction.” Neither has been withdrawn or amended.

The government of Tunisia has closed all of the North African country’s universities and high schools indefinitely in the wake of massive student protests that left at least 14 dead at the hands of police.

Protests against the government elite and rising unemployment have been going on for weeks, but police violence escalated over the weekend as cops in several cities fired into crowds. Protests against that violence then led the government to announce the closures yesterday.

I’m still getting up to speed on this story. I’ll have more later.

Update | This CNN story quotes a Tunisian government source as saying that 19 protesters have been killed in the cities of Thala and Kasserine, with activists claiming the number is “closer to 50.” Amnesty International is cited saying that there were at least 23 deaths over the weekend, and more yesterday.

More background from the New York Times, which reports that the unrest began three weeks ago when an unemployed 26-year-old college graduate committed suicide by self-immolation after police confiscated a container of produce he was attempting to sell on the street. The Times additionally reports that “the riots are believed to have spread in part through social-media Web sites, and the Tunisian government reportedly directed Internet service providers to hack into the accounts of individual users.”

“In a speakout on sexual violence at Yale University, the most common theme was a new crime that has been largely ignored: when a woman stipulates a safe, or nonpenetrative, sexual encounter, but the man ejaculates into her against her will. AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires.”

–Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1991

Edward Woollard, the student who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of Britain’s Conservative Party headquarters during raucous protests last November, was sentenced to 32 months’ imprisonment today.

Woollard, 18, was one of thousands of students and other activists who stormed the Millbank Tower building during the course of an anti-fee protest. Woollard threw the empty extinguisher from the roof of the building to the plaza below — his attorney said he aimed it at an unoccupied area, but police said they had to scurry away to avoid being hit.

The act was instantly condemned — not just by outside observers, but by protesters themselves, who immediately took up a chant of “stop throwing shit!”

In court, Woollard’s attorney described his client as “mortified … shocked, dazed, and horrified” by his action in its aftermath. Woollard turned himself in to police on November 15, after he was identified in the media, and pled guilty to the charges against him.

Woollard has been studying at a sixth form college this year, and had been hoping to be admitted to a university in the fall. He will serve at least half his sentence in an institution for youthful offenders.