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Just a quick link on this, since I’m having a ridiculously busy day. I’ll try to come back to it later.
Short version: A California court has ruled that a Christian high school had the legal right to expel two students who it claimed demonstrated a “bond of intimacy … characteristic of a lesbian relationship.”
It also found that school officials did not violate the students’ rights when they revealed the reason for the expulsion to the students’ parents.
The University of Michigan has completed its investigation of a professor who paid a student for sex and allegedly assaulted her.
As we reported at the time, a Michigan law student told police last December that Yaron Eliav, an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, had struck her with his hand and a belt in the course of a sexual encounter they had arranged through Craigslist.
Police refused to arrest Eliav, who claimed the acts were consensual, for assault, instead charging both student and professor with misdemeanor offenses relating to the exchange of money for sex. Both were ultimately fined and charged court costs.
A university spokesperson told the Ann Arbor News last week that Eliav is currently on paid leave, and that an internal investigation of his role in the incident has been completed. She refused to comment on the outcome of the investigation, or to say what administrative actions, if any, had been taken against Eliav, who has tenure.
The House of Representatives has adopted changes to its standing rules that include thirteen pages of amendments replacing terms like “he,” “him,” and “his” with gender-neutral language.
I’m particularly pleased by the change of “chairman” to “chair,” outlined here:
(1) In the standing rules —
(A) strike “chairman” each place it appears and insert “chair”; and
(B) strike “Chairman” each place it appears and insert “Chair” (except in clause 4(a)(1)(B) of rule X).
As someone who’s spent a lot of time over the years in academia and activist circles, I’ve chaired my share of meetings, committees, and boards, and it seems like I always have at least one well-intentioned colleague to whom insisting on referring to chairs as chairmen is a point of honor.
I’ve never been a chairman of anything. I’ve always referred to myself as a chair. But I’ve found “chairman,” sitting as it does at the place where process geekery and language geekery collide, one of the toughest bits of gender-exclusive language to dislodge.
So the next time that comes up, this will be a nice data point to have on my side. If “chair” is good enough for Barney Frank, John Conyers, and Henry Waxman (not to mention Louise Slaughter and Nydia Velasquez), it’s good enough for me.
(If you’re curious about why clause 4(a)(1)(B) of Rule X was an exception, by the way, it refers to “the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.”)
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
studentactivism.net 
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