Author Archive

The seating arrangements for a debate at University College London Saturday have led prominent atheist Richard Dawkins to accuse the event’s Muslim organizers of “sexual apartheid,” but the group is challenging his version of events.

The debate, “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?,” pitted physicist Lawrence Krauss against Islamic lecturer Hamza Andreas Tzor. Seating was in three sections — one reserved for men, one reserved for women, and one that was mixed. (More on that “mixed” section in a moment.)

Krauss, who had heard rumors about separate seating prior to the event, apparently asked for, and was granted, permission to announce that anyone could sit where they liked. But according to a colleague of Krauss’s, three men who then moved to the women’s section were soon ejected from the room.

At that point Krauss declared that he would not participate unless open seating was permitted — an iPhone video posted on Facebook shows him saying, “I’m not going to be an auditorium that’s segregated. I’m sorry. I’m not. Either you quit the segregation or I’m out of here.”

Krauss left the auditorium at that point, but returned after the three men were allowed to take seats in the section they had been ejected from. The debate then went on as scheduled.

In a blogpost earlier today, Dawkins claimed that the room was divided into sections for men, women, and “couples,” echoing language used by Krauss associate Dana Sondergaard, source of the iPhone video. Organizers, however, say that the sections for men and for women were for the use of those “choosing to adhere to orthodox Islamic principles,” and that “those who wanted to sit together, male or female,” were welcome to sit in the mixed seating area.

The debate’s organizers tell the Guardian that University College approved the seating arrangements in advance, but the Guardian reports that UCL has opened an investigation into the event.

Separate seating for those who prefer single-gender sections is not unheard of at Muslim student events in the United States, but if the organizers’ claims are accurate and mixed-gender seating was made available for anyone who wanted it, Dawkins’ rhetoric of “apartheid South Africa” and “Alabama in 1955”  seems inaccurate and ahistorical. There weren’t mixed sections for those who wanted interracial seating at public events in those societies — segregation was compulsory and enforced by law.

I’ll be following this story as it develops, and reporting what I learn.

Update | Krauss tweets that debate organizers told him today that their intent was for separation of audience into three sections to be entirely voluntary, and that the move to eject the three men sitting in the women’s section was a result of flawed “communication to and from staff.” He reiterates that he was told there was to be no separation whatsoever, voluntary or not.

This clarifies my own position a bit. I don’t have any problem at all with a group saying “we have attendees at this event who’d be more comfortable for religious reasons sitting in single-gender sections, and we’d ask that everyone respect that.” I have a big problem with only providing gender-segregated seating at a public event. As for the middle case, in which organizers ask (or tell) men to leave a women’s-only section? That’s one that I’d need to chew on more, and to consider the specific circumstances of.

Second Update | An apparent eyewitness account provided to the UCL administration by (Google suggests) London School of Economics grad student Chris Moos suggests that the provisions for gender-neutral seating were far less robust than the organizers have claimed.

Moos, as quoted on this blog, says organizers forced men and women to enter the lecture hall through separate doors. As for mixed-gender seating,

“There were no signs for a mixed seating area, and attendees were guided by the guards to either the “female” or “male” area. Only attendees who insisted not to be separated were guided towards a “mixed” area, which only comprised two rows.”

Moos also claims that only men and “couples” were allowed to enter through the men’s door.

Another post on the same blog quotes Fiona McClement, UCL’s “equalities and diversities adviser,” as saying priot to the event that the college “will not permit enforced gender segregated seating. All attendees are free to sit wherever they feel comfortable.” That blogpost also alleges that “male attendees were refused entry via the women’s door to the lecture theatre.”

So yeah. It sounds like this was quite a bit worse than I’d expected based on Dawkins’ original post. At the same time, however, there’s this:

“It’s insulting to be told that because I’m a man I can’t sit near women in the audience. I’m not in the habit of forcing my presence where it’s unwanted, but the event’s organisers have no business policing social matters of this kind. … In this case the segregation was non-voluntary. But voluntary or not, segregation is wrong.”

A couple of things.

First, voluntary “segregation” isn’t segregation. It’s separation. And it’s not wrong. If I want to sit with my friends at lunch, that’s not segregation. When the Black Student Union holds meetings and only black people show up, that’s not segregation. If women having a support group about sexual assault ask a guy who wanders in to leave, that’s not segregation. So no, voluntary “segregation” isn’t segregation, and it’s not (presumptively) wrong.

Second, if women would prefer, for religious reasons, to sit with other women, it’s not “insulting” anyone else if they do so, and it is “forcing your presence where it’s unwanted” to sit next to them.

This is complicated stuff. Reductive first principles don’t get us very far, and appeals to common sense get us even less far.

Again, though, having said that? It sounds likely that what went on at this event was pretty messed up.

Third Update | UCL has released a statement. They say that “enforced segregation” is prohibited on campus, and that they told the debate’s organizers that “the event would be cancelled if there were any attempt to enforce such segregation.” The statement continues:

“It now appears that, despite our clear instructions, attempts were made to enforce segregation at the meeting. We are still investigating what actually happened at the meeting but, given IERA’s original intentions for a segregated audience we have concluded that their interests are contrary to UCL’s ethos and that we should not allow any further events involving them to take place on UCL premises.”

This morning I went on a bit of a rant on Twitter. It was prompted by author Linda Hirshman’s Salon defense of Cheryl Sandberg, specifically by Hirshman’s disavowal of “intersectional race/class/gender/save the whales feminism,” and by reading this review of Hirshman’s 2012 history of the gay rights movement.

Here’s that rant, stitched together from its original 140-character bites, but otherwise unchanged.

Intersectionality isn’t a checklist. It’s not about making sure you give a nod to all the stuff and people you’re supposed to nod to.

The core problem with non-intersectional writing isn’t that it’s not broad enough. It’s that it’s not DEEP enough. The very word “intersectional” is a recognition that communities, identities, struggles are rarely discrete.

Even when you write about rich white straight people you need to remember that other people exist, because RWSP don’t exist in a vacuum. Hirshman’s history of gay rights screws up even the narrow slice it tries to cover because you can’t write even that slice in isolation. Likewise, the criticism of Sandberg’s book is that even that book, the book she intended, is poorer for not being more broadly informed.

If you’ve spent your whole life being centered by society, it weakens you. Decentering yourself strengthens you. It makes you better.

If I teach US history as a story about white guys I get all of it wrong, even the parts that actually are about white guys. My everything will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.

(Sometimes my everything is intersectional and it’s still bullshit anyway. I’m working on that.)

Oberlin College has seen no fewer than seven alleged bias incidents in the last month — five separate acts of racist and homophobic graffiti, one robbery, and a sighting of a figure in a klan robe. The college cancelled classes this Monday for a series of all-campus events relating to the incidents, and as many as a third of Oberlin’s undergraduates are said to have attended a rally against hate that afternoon.

Recently, however, some have alleged that the whole string of incidents may have been invented.

On Tuesday, Michelle Malkin accused the college’s students of “manufacturing hate crimes hoaxes.” Similarly, an article in the Daily Caller declared that, “given the liberal culture at Oberlin,” it is “highly unlikely that the student perpetrators were motivated by racial (or anti-gay or anti-Semitic) animus.” It’s far more plausible, that writer suggests, that “the students who vandalized the campus wanted to call attention to the horror of hate crimes by committing faux hate crimes themselves.”

As I was writing this story Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, chimed in with a similar allegation, saying that “the racial and anti-gay provocations scrawled on several posters and notes appear now to have been the work of two student hoaxers.”

What’s the evidence for these charges? It turns out that there isn’t much.

Oberlin police have suggested that the “klansman” a student saw on campus late on Sunday night may have been a person who was later seen on campus wrapped in a blanket. The two sightings were half a mile away from one another, however, and the student who made the klan report insists that she could not have been mistaken. A college spokesperson late Tuesday indicated that the incident remained unresolved.

Even if the klan incident was a case of mistaken identity, moreover, that doesn’t point toward a hoax. And as of right now the evidence that the earlier graffiti incidents were falsified is thin at best.

The first suggestion that the graffiti might have been fake came in a Monday Gawker story that quoted “a person with knowledge of faculty and administration discussion” as saying that he or she had heard that unofficial reports had suggested that a student connected with the Oberlin Multicultural Resource Center was behind the vandalism. That Gawker report, however, was later updated to stress that the anonymous third-hand allegation was nothing more than “a rumor.”

While the Gawker allegation was refuted almost as quickly as it appeared, conservative writers have leaned heavily on a story in the Guardian that quoted an Oberlin police spokesperson as saying that his “understanding” was that two students were involved in the graffiti, and that they had been identified and removed from campus. Later in the story the Guardian writer — no longer citing the officer — said that it remained “unclear if they were motivated by racial hatred, or – as has been suggested – were attempting a commentary on free speech.”

Conservative commenters have made much of Oberlin’s refusal to identify the race of the suspects or to comment on their motivations, but such a response is entirely appropriate, particularly given the fact that the accused appear to be students — and the fact that, according to Oberlin’s student newspaper, at least one of those students has denied responsibility for the graffiti.

It does not appear, however, that Oberlin is treating the situation as a hoax perpetrated by two (identified and neutralized) students. The campus has stepped up security measures and police patrols this week, and just yesterday the college announced that it had asked for and received the assistance of the FBI in investigating the incidents.

Hoax hate crimes are not unheard-of on American campuses, and it’s possible that some or all of this semester’s Oberlin incidents will prove to be examples of that. But there is as of now no publicly available evidence indicating that either Oberlin or the police have made such a determination.

Meanwhile, evidence to the contrary — that these were in fact actual bias crimes — continues to mount.

Oberlin’s student newspaper reported this morning that individuals expressing bigoted views have been active in recent months on various social media sites with ties to Oberlin. They quote the founder of one such site, who shut down his service when it became a magnet for bigoted postings, as saying that he saw the recent wave of graffiti as “a natural escalation” of what he had recently witnessed online.

Oberlin’s Dean of Students concurred, saying there had been “a flood of racist propaganda on campus in recent weeks, including general references to the KKK and other white supremacist groups.” Meanwhile, several faculty members of color have this week reported incidents of online harassment that took place prior to Monday’s cancellation of classes.

In just about every false hate-crime act I’ve seen on American campuses in the two decades I’ve been paying attention to this stuff, the hoax was a one-time thing, either an isolated incident or a faked campaign against a “target” who later turned out to be the perpetrator. The Oberlin situation, in which a variety of attacks have been launched across a number of online platforms and in real life over a period of months, doesn’t fit the pattern.

Again, it’s possible that these are all hoaxes. But the suggestion that they’ve been proven to be hoaxes, or that they’re presumptively hoaxes?

The evidence just isn’t there.

The cancellation of classes at Oberlin College on Monday in response to a wave of bias crimes was the biggest higher education story in the nation this week. And according to an account written by Oberlin students of color for the campus newspaper we all got the story completely wrong.

In their public statements, Oberlin administrators described the decision to cancel classes and hold a campus-wide series of teach-ins and rallies as their own. But a student timeline of the events of Sunday night and Monday morning portrays it as a plan that “was advocated for and organized by students,” one that administrators initially refused to accept.

Students got top Oberlin administrators out of bed in the middle of the night to present their demands, they say, and it wasn’t until they began organizing to shut down the campus that the administration gave in.

The timeline, written by “students of the Africana community” and posted on the website of the Oberlin Review student newspaper late this week, was based on “time-stamped text messages and status updates as well as minutes from the emergency meeting” late Sunday night.

According to the timeline, a resident of Oberlin’s Afrikan Heritage House saw an unidentified individual walking on campus “in what appears to be traditional Ku Klux Klan regalia” shortly before 1:15 Monday morning and contacted their RA. Within a few minutes residence officials, campus security, and Oberlin Dean of Students Eric Estes had been notified.

At approximately 1:30 am RAs in the Afrikan Heritage House woke the house’s residents for a house meeting to discuss the incident. Estes arrived at the Afrikan Heritage House at 1:40 am. Students from outside Afrikan Heritage House were called over the next while, and the group continued to meet with campus officials and police.

At 2:49 am, Oberlin president Marvin Krislov arrived at the meeting.

Sometime after 3 am students asked President Krislov to cancel classes for Monday, and he refused, saying that all of the college’s deans would have to agree, and that it would not be possible to contact them at that time of the night.

At 3:40 am Meredith Gadsby, the chair of the Oberlin Africana Studies Department, told the students assembled in the Afrikan Heritage House that her department would cancel its classes for the day and would work to organize a noon teach-in.

Between four and five o’clock, as administrators continued to dismiss the idea of a full cancellation of classes, students developed a plan to blockade the campus at the start of the day.

Two excerpts from the timeline describe what happened next:

4:44 a.m. Plans for a Rally and Blockade solidify and working groups form. One working group maps out the exits of academic buildings such as King and the Science Center for the Blockade. Another working group compiles a letter to faculty members asking them to cancel classes in solidarity with students. An additional working group creates signs and flyers for the blockade and another working group organizes the rally to take place at 2 p.m. During the planning, a student requests that Marjorie Burton leave to allow the students to plan.

…

5:12 a.m. President Krislov, Dean Estes and Dean Stull state that classes will be canceled.

Update | A friend forwards a link to a Wednesday blogpost by Oberlin Vice President for Communications Ben Jones, in which Jones writes that “the genesis of Monday’s program was largely the work of students and I take full responsibility for any college communications that misrepresented this.”

In a victory for students, alumni, and faculty, and a startling reversal for administrators, the Cooper Union board of trustees this week announced that they will retain the college’s free tuition policy while they continue to evaluate Cooper Union’s financial situation.

A vote on a proposal to impose tuition was widely expected at Wednesday’s meeting, with many expecting the trustees to break with the college’s history of free access to all undergraduate admittees. But months of increasingly strong and well-organized opposition from student activists, Cooper Union professors, and alumni groups appear to have made an impact.

Cooper Union has been tuition-free since the 19th century. Today, with fewer than a dozen free colleges and universities remaining in the United States, the struggle to keep Cooper Union on the list drew national attention.

Public opposition to the tuition policy has been led by Cooper Union undergrads. Though they are not in the administration’s crosshairs themselves — the college has never contemplated imposing tuition fees on currently enrolled students — they have portrayed the imposition of tuition as a betrayal of the college’s principles and a threat to its reputation. A group of activists occupied Cooper’s most historic building for a week in December, and others have staged a series of protests and actions that have drawn substantial media attention.

In a welcome departure from much recent precedent in tuition fights, faculty have largely stood with students in their campaign, affirming the centrality of CU’s free education policy to the college’s mission. (In retaliation for the Art School faculty’s refusal to approve a tuition proposal, the college’s administration last month cancelled all early admission decisions for the fall’s incoming Art School class.)

Although the trustees have not taken tuition off the table for the future in yesterday’s statement, free tuition for the class of 2017 has been preserved. A new cohort of students will enter the college under the current policy. And having been jerked around for months by the administration on this question, it’s hard to imagine them not arriving even more committed to free tuition than their predecessors.

In another potentially major development, the Trustees announced in their Thursday statement that they will be exploring “the matter of student participation at meetings of the Board of Trustees” in the near future. Currently no students sit on the board, and greater involvement in college governance has been one of the demands of the current wave of Cooper student activists.

The fight to preserve free education at Cooper Union isn’t over. No fight to preserve free anything ever is. But every Cooper Union trustee meeting that passes without a vote to impose tuition is a victory — for student activism and for faculty prerogatives in governance, but also for Cooper Union itself, and for the ideal of accessible higher education in the United States.