You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Governance’ category.
Though many US universities have cooled to the idea of opening overseas campuses in the last few years, Yale is just now jumping on the bandwagon. Its new Yale-NUS College, scheduled to open next year, will be, Yale says, “Singapore’s first liberal arts college, and the first with a full residential college model.”
What it won’t have, if all goes according to plan, is student protest, or student political organizations.
Singapore’s restrictions on civil liberties and freedom of expression are extensive, and Yale has chosen to accept the government’s limits on its campus. The college’s one thousand students will not be allowed to form political parties or clubs, and protests and demonstrations will be banned on campus just as they are in the rest of the country.
Yale-NUS is funded entirely by the government of Singapore and private donations, primarily originating within Asia.
An independent report on Penn State’s handling of child sexual abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky has been released, and it’s damning. The report, written by a team headed by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, finds that PSU’s top leaders engaged in a fourteen-year conspiracy to protect Sandusky from justice, a conspiracy that had beloved football coach Joe Paterno at its center.
Some excerpts from Louis Freeh’s remarks on the report, delivered just moments ago:
- “Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State. The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized. “
- “[Penn State President Graham] Spanier, [Vice President Gary] Schultz, [Coach Joe] Paterno and [Athletic Director Tim] Curley never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest.”
- Penn State leaders considered reporting Sandusky in 2001 but “changed the plan … after Mr. Curley consulted with Mr. Paterno … and decided not to make a report to the authorities.”
- “Their failure to protect the February 9, 2001 child victim, or make attempts to identify him, created a dangerous situation for other unknown, unsuspecting young boys who were lured to the Penn State campus and football games by Sandusky and victimized repeatedly by him.”
- “Further, they exposed this child to additional harm by alerting Sandusky, who was the only one who knew the child’s identity.”
- Freeh rejects the four administrators’ stated reasons for failing to act, declaring that “it is more reasonable to conclude” that they “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the Board of Trustees, Penn State community, and the public at large … in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity.”
- “Although concern to treat the child abuser humanely was expressly stated, no such sentiments were ever expressed by them for Sandusky’s victims.”
- Paterno was aware of an earlier “criminal investigation of Sandusky relating to suspected sexual misconduct with a young boy in a Penn State football locker room shower,” and indeed “followed it closely, but failed to take any action, even though Sandusky had been a key member of his coaching staff for almost 30 years, and had an office just steps away from Mr. Paterno’s.”
- “Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley also failed to alert the Board of Trustees about the 1998 investigation or take any further action against Mr. Sandusky. None of them even spoke to Sandusky about his conduct.”
- “In short, nothing was done and Sandusky was allowed to continue with impunity.”
It goes on like this for another page and a half, detailing what Freeh calls the group’s “callous and shocking disregard for child victims” of sexual abuse by their friend and colleague.
Freeh also notes that the Penn State Board of Trustees “failed in its duty to make reasonable inquiry into these serious matters and to demand action by the President” after they became aware of them via media reports in March 2011. In doing so, the board “failed to create an environment which held the University’s most senior leaders accountable to it,” allowing President Spanier to continue to stonewall them even as Sandusky, Curley, and Schultz were arrested in November of last year.
• • •
More details from the main body of the Freeh Report:
When Sandusky retired in 1999 — after top university officials were already aware of child sexual abuse allegations against him — he asked for and was granted a six-figure lump-sum payment above and beyond his substantial pension, a payment that several PSU officials said was unique in the recent history of the university. He was also granted emeritus status in violation of standard PSU policy on the awarding of that honor.
In addition to the unprecedented $168,000 payment and emeritus status, Sandusky requested while negotiating the terms of his retirement that he be given opportunities “to continue to work with young people through Penn State.” PSU granted this request, giving him and the youth group he worked with open access to the campus. In the next two years Sandusky would go on to sexually assault at least three more children on university property.
In 2001, following new evidence of child sexual abuse against Sandusky, PSU President Graham Spanier signed off on a proposal from his athletic director and head of campus police to “indicate” to Sandusky that “we feel there is a problem and we want to assist [him] to get professional help,” but not to provide their evidence to legal authorities. In a 2001 email, Spanier said that “the only downside for us” to this plan “is if the message isnʹt ‘heard’ and acted upon” — if Sandusky went on to sexually abuse other children — “and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.” He called the decision not to inform police a “humane” and “reasonable” one.
The only action taken at the time was a March 2001 request that Sandusky no longer bring children to campus, a request he ignored — in August that year he committed another sexual assault on a child in the university’s showers.
Utterly bizarre, yet somehow unsurprising.
George Zimmerman, the self-proclaimed neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, has made his first public comments since the killing, on a website he’s created “to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally” and solicit funds for legal and living expenses.
One page of that website is a photo album “dedicated to persons whom have displayed their support of Justice for all.” At the time of this writing, the album has just two pictures in it — an image of a poster reading “Justice for Zimmerman” and one of the words “Long Live Zimmerman” spray-painted in white on a red brick wall.
That’s right. George Zimmerman, the guy who once called the cops on a group of kids popping wheelies, is now thanking supporters for vandalizing a building on his behalf.
And it’s not just any building, as it turns out. This particular pro-Zimmerman graffiti was scrawled on the side of Ohio State University’s black cultural center last week, in an incident that the university’s president denounced as racially motivated.
Not long ago, Zimmerman’s defenders leaped to condemn Trayvon Martin over allegations that he once drew on a school locker. It’ll be interesting to see what — if anything — they have to say about Zimmerman’s public embrace of vandalism.
Update | As the blog Plunderbund notes, the “Long Live Zimmerman” graffiti went up on the night of April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Last fall a student at the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt-Johnstown campus was banned from the men’s locker room at the university gym. The student, Seamus Johnston, is listed as female in the university’s records, but has been living as a man for three years and carries a driver’s license identifying him as male. When Johnston refused to comply with the ban, he was brought up on campus disciplinary charges and arrested for disorderly conduct.
In February the Pitt Anti-Discriminatory Policies Committee (APDC) issued a unanimous ruling opposing Johnston’s ban and calling on Pitt to craft clear policies on the use of bathrooms and locker rooms. Those new policies, announced last month, require all Pitt students, faculty, and staff to use bathrooms and locker facilities consistent with the gender assigned on their birth certificates.
This policy puts many transgender members of the Pitt community in an extremely difficult — and potentially dangerous — position.
By state law, Pennsylvanians may receive a driver’s license bearing a gender other than that assigned at birth on presentation of a reference from a doctor or counselor specializing in transgender issues. The federal government has issued passports on the basis of similar documentation since 2010. And the NCAA allows transgender athletes to play on teams reflecting their gender identity after one year of hormone treatment. But Pennsylvania state law mandates gender reassignment surgery before amending a birth certificate.
Under Pitt’s new policy, then, a student enrolled in college as a woman, listed as a woman on her driver’s license and passport, playing women’s sports for Pitt or a visiting team, would be barred from changing into her uniform with her teammates if her birth certificate did not declare her to be female.
And some states — including Ohio, Pennsylvania’s neighbor to the west — do not permit amendment of birth certificates for any reason.
The whole situation is a huge mess. Students, who were not consulted on the ruling and have not yet been provided with it in written form, are up in arms. Transgender faculty have announced that they will defy the ban. And the chair of the city of Pittsburgh’s Commission on Human Relations believes that the ban is a violation of city law. Pitt’s student newspaper lambasted the “bizarre,” “despicably self-serving” way in which the decision was made and announced, saying the decision showed “the University’s blatant disregard for its transgender students” and for the student body as a whole.
University officials are refusing to comment.
Update | I want to say a little more about this.
Until now, Pitt’s policy on gender and bathroom/locker-room use has been to address the issue on a “case-by-case” basis. That can mean a lot of things, of course, and it has the big drawback of not providing trans folks with reliable, predictable institutional backup, but as an approach — at least in the abstract — it has the virtue of recognizing that the relevant questions here are questions of interpersonal dynamics, not taxonomic order.
If you think about it for even a moment, the reason why the Pennsylvania DMV and the State Department have issued progressive policies on gender and ID becomes obvious: The point of identification is to identify you cleanly and clearly. If you consistently present as a man, and your driver’s license or your passport identifies you as a woman, that’s going to cause all sorts of problems — not just for you, but for police, bureaucracies, businesses, everybody. The vast majority of the time a person is out in the world, nobody has any reason to know or care about their biological sex. It’s just not relevant.
And it’s no more relevant in the bathroom than it is at the airport or in a traffic stop.
The DMV and the State Department have both come to terms with the fact that prescriptive, mechanistic policing and enforcement aren’t viable responses to the lived realities of gender expression in 21st century America. Here’s hoping Pitt figures that out sooner rather than later.
As I noted last month, only one of the dozens of police officers involved in the notorious November 18 UC Davis pepper-spray incident has yet been publicly identified. Now a police demand for continued anonymity has delayed today’s intended release of the university’s report on the incident.
Attorneys for the officers claim that because the report includes “confidential peace officer matters such as the name of the peace officers and some sort of description of wrongdoing,” its release would violate state law.
The report, originally slated for a December release, has already been delayed multiple times. The most recent stumbling block came in response to a police union request for redaction of information about individual officers. A judge has scheduled a March 16 hearing on the issue.
The authors of the report have compromised with police before, but it seems like their patience may be wearing thin.
Retired California supreme court justice Cruz Reynoso, the chair of the commission, said in a statement that he was “very frustrated” by the delay, and remains committed to releasing “the complete and unredacted work of the task force.”
UC president Mark Yudof, who has presided over multiple incidents of police violence against non-violent student protesters over the last three years, took a similarly aggressive posture. He has, he said, “asked the UC General Counsel’s office to do everything in its power in court to turn back this attempt to stifle these reports” to ensure “a fully transparent and unexpurgated accounting of the incidents in question.”
In a separate statement, UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi said “the campus’s own internal affairs investigation into complaints of officer misconduct, which would be the basis for any personnel actions concerning the accused officers,” was “near completion.”
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments