Author Archive

Last week’s ten most-read posts…

1. Reports: Rutgers Student Killed Himself After Roommate Videotaped Him in Gay Encounter

My first post on Tyler Clementi. See also the followup here.

2. The Tyler Clementi Tragedy: Five Takeaway Lessons for Jackasses

Thoughts on “the inevitable creepy backlash” to the reporting on Clementi’s suicide.

3. Oak Is My King: School Yanks Transgender Student’s Homecoming Crown

A Michigan high school refused to allow Oak Reed to serve as homecoming king because he was born female.

4. What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks

A response to Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.”

5. Did Tyler Clementi Ask His RA for Help the Day Before He Died?

Evidence emerges that Clementi reached out to dorm staff for assistance dealing with his roommate’s spying.

6. Andrew Shirvell, Gay-Student-Obsessed Michigan Assistant AG, Takes a Breather

An assistant Attorney General in Michigan wages a bizarre campaign against a college student government leader.

7. It Gets Better

Dan Savage’s YouTube project to assist LGBT youth.

8. College Dean Forced Scholarship Students to Work as Her Servants

Allegations of forced student labor in the Asian Studies program at St. John’s University in New York.

9. Your Move, Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s weird response to my critique of his social media essay.

10. On-Campus Punishment for Off-Campus Activity

The growing trend of university judicial sanctions for off-campus student behavior.

Taking a bit of time this weekend for other work. I’ll be back with new content on the blog this evening.

Federal prosecutors are charging that an administrator at St. John’s University in New York forced scholarship students — most of them from overseas — to work as her personal servants without pay.

Feds say Cecilia Chang, dean of the university’s Institute of Asian Studies, made scholarship recipients do “menial tasks” unrelated to the university for twenty hours a week. They say Chang made students drive her and members of her family to personal appointments, as well as cooking meals, shoveling trash, and emptying the garbage at her home.

Chang, who worked at St. John’s for three decades, was fired in June after allegations surfaced that she had embezzled more than a million dollars from the university.

Evidence is mounting that Tyler Clementi turned to online forums for help in addressing his roommate’s invasion of his privacy, and that he was convinced to bring his concerns to his RA on the evening of September 21 — the day before he died.

Earlier this week it was reported that anonymous poster using the name “cit2mo” left a series of messages on the gay message board site JustUsBoys on September 21 and 22 that appear to match what is known about Clementi’s dilemma. Yesterday, a lawyer representing JustUsBoys told CNN that cit2mo had indeed connected to their site via a computer at Rutgers.

In the first message, posted early in the morning of September 21, cit2mo writes

so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else’s room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy.

He describes himself as “kinda pissed,” but unsure what recourse he has. He says he’s not sure whether he’s up for the hassle of changing roommates, adding that he doesn’t want to “report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me.”

Several other posters then chime in with advice, and cit2mo responds with more details. Later that morning he says that he’s planning to request a room change, and by the afternoon he has decided to bring the issue up with his RA, though he suspects that “the school really prolly won’t do much of anything.”

That evening he texts his roommate to ask if he can have the room again that night. The roommate says yes, but then, he writes

when I got back to the room I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed. And he had posted online again….saying….”anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight”…or something similar to that….

soooo after that…..

I ran to the nearest RA and set this thing in motion…..
we’ll see what happens……

The following morning cit2mo posted a further update saying that the RA

seemed to take it seriously…
he asked me to email him a written paragraph about what exactly happened…
I emailed it to him, and to two people above him….

That message, posted hours before Tyler Clementi died, was the last that cit2mo ever posted to the board.

In the days since these posts were first linked to Clementi, many commenters have noted that cit2mo seems in them to be taking his situation in stride. But it’s clear as well that the situation escalated rapidly over the course of the 24 hours that elapsed after his first post to the last, and that by the time of his last message he regards the situation as far more serious than he initially did.

If cit2mo was in fact Tyler Clementi, then it appears that Rutgers dorm staff were made aware of Dharun Ravi’s spying before Clementi’s death.

And if that is the case, then the question must be asked: What was their response?

Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan Assistant Attorney General who has been waging a creepy internet campaign against an openly gay student government leader for half a year, is temporarily stepping down from his position. The AG’s office announced Shirvell’s “voluntary leave of absence” this morning.

Shirvell has been running an increasingly unhinged blog devoted to sliming Chris Armstrong, president of the University of Michigan student assembly, for nearly six months. Shirvell has called Armstrong a “pervert” on the blog, and depicted him juxtaposed with a swastika-bedecked rainbow flag (see photo at right). Shirvell has also shown up several times at Armstrong’s house to harass him, leading Armstrong to seek a restraining order against the attorney.

Shirvell served as Attorney General Mike Cox’s campaign manager in 2006, and though his employee’s bizarre behavior has been a matter of public record for weeks, Cox has thus far refused to take disciplinary action. This week, however, as the story broke in the national media, pressure on Cox has grown — just yesterday Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm tweeted that if she “was still Attorney General and Andrew Shirvell worked for me, he would have already been fired.”

Update | Published reports say that Shirvell will face a disciplinary hearing if and when he returns from his “leave.” In other news, the University of Michigan confirmed yesterday that Shirvell was from setting foot on its Ann Arbor campus, where Armstrong is a student, more than two weeks ago.