You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Gender’ category.
East Georgia College has reinstated a professor it suspended in August, withdrawing charges of sexual harassment it had lodged against him. But it has reprimanded the prof for using “offensive language” in the workplace, and asked him to sign a letter of understanding that includes the statement that he is “expected to act in a professional manner at all times.”
Professor Thomas Thiebault’s suspension came after a faculty meeting about sexual harassment policy in which he described a recent a conversation with a female student. The student had, Thibeault said, complained about another professor’s habit of staring at her breasts, in response to which he told her that she had no right to complain because she was dressed provocatively. During the course of telling that story, he provided identifying details of, and gratuitously offensive comments about, the student’s appearance.
Update | It’s worth laying out what exactly Thibeault said, and how various news organizations and advocacy sites have characterized it.
Here’s Thibeault’s own account of his remarks:
Last week two students were talking to me in the hallway after class. One student said that she didn’t want to go to a professor’s office because he looked down her cleavage. The woman was wearing clothing that was specifically designed to draw attention to her cleavage. She even sported a tattoo on her chest, but I didn’t get close enough to read it. The cleavage was also decorated in some sort of sparkly material, glitter or dried barbecue sauce. I couldn’t tell. I told the student that she shouldn’t complain, if she drew such attention to herself. The other female student then said, and I hope you’re not offended by her actual words, ‘if you don’t want anyone looking at your titties, I’ll lend you a T-shirt. I have one in the truck.’ The first student then said, ‘No. I’m proud of the way I look.’ I left the conversation at that point.
The purpose of the anecdote is to ask the question “what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious, or in this case ridiculous?”
Here’s how the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education characterized Thibeault’s comments:
Thibeault … related a story about another professor and asked, “What provision is there in the sexual harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?”
Here’s the Chronicle of Higher Education’s take:
Mr. Thibeault said students’ complaints of sexual harassment could be frivolous, and as evidence he related an encounter he said he’d had with a young woman who he said was dressed provocatively, with her cleavage showing. Yet she complained to Mr. Thibeault that another professor always stared at her breasts, the instructor said.
Inside Higher Ed referred to Thibeault simply as
…an English professor who, ironically, had openly criticized the lack of protections for the falsely accused in its sexual harassment policy.
Conservative news site WorldNetDaily says Thibeault
…questioned the assertion – as he understood it – being presented by Mary Smith, the school’s vice president for legal affairs, that the feelings of the offended constituted proof of offensive behavior.
As I noted in my previous post on this case, I think the way that EGC treated Thibeault is reprehensible. But the nature of his public comments are relevant to the story, and it’s startling to me how far some have been willing to go to obfuscate them.
In late September the Student Government Association of the University of North Texas, under heavy pressure from UNT parents and alumni, voted down a bylaw amendment that would have allowed same-sex couples to run for homecoming king and queen.
Now the SGA is letting UNT’s students decide the issue for themselves.
In a 22-1 vote on October 21, the UNT student senate voted to call a student referendum on the bylaw change. Balloting will be conducted online from November 16th through the 20th.
The vote reportedly followed a protest at the SGA one week earlier, at which more than fifty students descended on a meeting chanting pro-equality slogans.
The original proposal to allow same-sex couples in the homecoming court deeply divided the student senate, who rejected it by a vote of 10-5 with 8 abstentions.
Update | Students rejected the proposal to allow same-sex homecoming couples by a margin of 58% to 42%. Thirteen percent of UNT students took part in the referendum.
FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — is on the right side of the issues a fair chunk of the time. Their (right-wing) politics aren’t mine, by any stretch, but when they’re beating the drums for freedom of expression and due process on campus, they’re doing important work.
I just wish they could do that important work better.
Here’s the latest example. Back in early August, Professor Thomas Thibeault of East Georgia College was called to the office of EGC president John Bryant Black. By Thibeault’s account, Black demanded that he resign from the college that morning, and threatened to make public Thibeault’s “long history of sexual harassment” if he did not.
Thibeault refused to resign and was escorted from the campus, under threat of arrest if he ever returned. In the two months since, Thibeault says, he has not been given a hearing, been permitted to defend himself against the sexual harassment charges, or even been told what exactly he’s being charged with, despite the fact that Black convened a faculty committee to investigate him.
This is seriously screwed up. If Thibeault’s version of events is true (and neither Black nor EGC have publicly disputed it), the EGC administration has behaved shamefully — attempting to bully him into resigning with vague and ominous threats, then refusing to allow him a timely opportunity to be informed of, and respond to, the charges that have led to his removal from the classroom. Bravo to FIRE for shining a light on this situation.
…And that’s where I stop praising them. Here’s why.
Two days before Thibeault was brought into Black’s office, he attended a faculty training session on sexual harassment, where he made some remarks from the floor. In FIRE’s gloss, “he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, ‘what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?’ ”
FIRE sees this as “Kafkaesque irony,” saying that “Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out — at a sexual harassment training seminar — that the school’s sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused.” But Thibeault’s own account of his remarks makes it clear that FIRE’s summary of his comments is woefully inadequate.
Here’s how Thibeault himself describes the “scenario” he presented at the sexual harassment training:
Last week two students were talking to me in the hallway after class. One student said that she didn’t want to go to a professor’s office because he looked down her cleavage. The woman was wearing clothing that was specifically designed to draw attention to her cleavage. She even sported a tattoo on her chest, but I didn’t get close enough to read it. The cleavage was also decorated in some sort of sparkly material, glitter or dried barbecue sauce. I couldn’t tell. I told the student that she shouldn’t complain, if she drew such attention to herself. The other female student then said, and I hope you’re not offended by her actual words, ‘if you don’t want anyone looking at your titties, I’ll lend you a T-shirt. I have one in the truck.’ The first student then said, ‘No. I’m proud of the way I look.’ I left the conversation at that point.
Let’s break this down, shall we?
- A female student told Thibeault that another professor’s habit of staring at her breasts made her uncomfortable.
- Thibeault told her, in front of another student, that she had no right to complain because she was dressed provocatively.
- A week later, Thibeault recounted this story to a large group of faculty members at a public meeting, complete with identifying details of, and gratuitously offensive comments about, the student’s appearance.
- To top it all off, he presented the student’s complaint about the other professor as an example of a “ridiculous” sexual harassment charge.
According to the EGC faculty handbook, by the way, “conduct of a sexual nature” that “has the purpose or effect of … creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive academic environment” is sexual harassment.
FIRE has all this background. But they chose not to mention it.
And this is why I find FIRE so frustrating. It’s not “Kafkaesque irony” that Thibeault was hauled in to the president’s office on a sexual harassment complaint two days after the training. It’s not ironic at all. It’s not even surprising. By Thibeault’s own account, he made wildly inappropriate sexualized comments to a female student, told that student that it was her own fault if a professor leered at her while she was wearing a low-cut top, and then shared this anecdote at a faculty meeting in a bizarrely insulting way. (Barbecue sauce? Come on.)
I don’t know whether any of this is actionable as sexual harassment. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what Thibeault’s history is, or whether the university’s claims that he has a “long history” of misbehavior have any merit at all. As I said at the top of this post, I’m inclined to believe that Thibeault has been treated unfairly, and that EGC has violated his right to academic due process.
But this whole incident serves as yet another reminder to me that when I see a piece on FIRE’s site, I can’t just take their analysis and run with it. I can’t even assume that they’re presenting the basic outline of the story in a fair and complete way. I have to research and fact-check the whole thing from the beginning. And because they break so much news — because they are out there digging these cases up — I have to ignore their stuff if I can’t find independent corroboration of their claims.
Because they just can’t be trusted to tell a story straight.
And that sucks.
Note: As I indicated above by linking to Thibeault’s statement at FIRE’s website, and again by saying that “FIRE has all this background,” FIRE did post that statement as a PDF document, and link to it from other documents. I never intended to suggest otherwise, and I’m happy to make that clear.
Back in September, when the alleged-then-retracted Hofstra gang rape was front page news, I made the following observations about it:
If a woman is raped by a man she’s been intimate with before, or raped in the course of a sexual encounter that began as consensual, or raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question, she can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.
I don’t know what happened that night, and I expect that I never will. I’m not accusing any of the five men who were named of anything, and I’m not saying that the fact that they were accused means they must have done something wrong. I don’t know, and I’m not interested in speculating.
I do, though, want to say clearly that the question of what happened isn’t a binary one of “she told the truth, and they’re guilty” vs. “she lied, so they’re innocent.”
It’s possible that she lied and that some or all of them are guilty.
Yesterday the historian KC Johnson stumbled across that post, and concluded from it — I swear I’m not kidding — that I’m a “campus ideologue … trained to believe that women never lie about rape.”
We know for a fact that Danmell Ndonye lied about rape, because she told two contradictory stories about an alleged rape. My entire post was premised on the obvious fact that women sometimes lie about rape. In a comment on that post — a comment Johnson quoted from — I said that Ndonye’s “allegation should not have been taken as proof that she was the victim of a sexual assault.”
But apparently I believe that women never lie about rape.
And that willful misreading isn’t enough for Johnson. He goes on to pull the last sentence of my post out of context, snip away the crucial italics, and offer it as my “startling claim” that “it’s possible that [Ndonye] lied and that some or all of them [the falsely accused men] are guilty.”
As I said in a (long trapped in moderation purgatory) comment at Minding the Campus, the Manhattan Institute blog where Johnson’s post appeared, there are two factual claims in my blockquoted passage above: first, that “a rape survivor [may] alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family,” and second, that it was possible — not likely, not probable, just possible — that Ndonye’s original lie was a lie of that kind.
Johnson finds these suggestions preposterous.
And I find that deeply depressing.
Postscript: Four days after my original post on the Hofstra case, the Nassau County DA decided that she would bring no criminal charges against Ndonye. Under the terms of an agreement between Ndonye and the DA’s office, Ndonye stipulated that she had not been sexually assaulted or sexually abused by the men she had accused. The DA was later quoted as saying that she was convinced that what happened that night was consensual, and I have no reason to doubt her assessment.
October 14 update: It took two Twitter messages, an email, and a week’s wait, but the folks at Minding the Campus have finally posted the comment referenced in this post, as well as a link to this post.
The student senate of the University of North Texas last week rejected a bylaw amendment that would have allowed same-sex couples to run for king and queen of homecoming.
Student government regulations at UNT do not bar LGBT students from running for homecoming king and queen, but they do provide that the court be elected as a male-female couple. The proposed bylaw amendment would have eliminated that restriction.
The bill, which had been introduced a week earlier, generated a strong negative response from UNT parents and alumni.
Debate on the proposal lasted for an hour, and at times grew heated. The final vote was five in favor of the change, ten opposed, and eight abstentions.
One student who voted against the bill said that he had been swayed by threats from alumni to end charitable donations to UNT, and from parents of students who had gone so far as to threaten to force their children to withdraw from the university.
Student government interns conducted an informal poll of two hundred students before the vote, and the UNT student newspaper, the NT Daily, said the results were “generally negative.” Comments on the Daily‘s coverage of the vote have, however, been mostly supportive of the defeated amendment.
(Thanks to @ericstoller on Twitter for the heads-up on this story.)
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments