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Tomorrow (Thursday) night at 8 pm SAFER Campus is hosting the New York premiere of University Silence, a documentary on campus sexual assault which SAFER describes as follows:
University Silence is a short documentary film created by Sarah Richardson. It’s a candid narrative by a survivor of a campus assault, describing her struggles with her college administration, and shows how a lack of effective policy and honesty can further compound trauma. If you have any questions about why policy reform is so crucial, this is necessary viewing.
The screening will be held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center at 208 West 13th Street, with a Q & A to follow. You can find out more info on the screening and RSVP at its Facebook Event page.
Anita Hemmings, the first African-American graduate of Vassar.
Anita Hemmings became the first black woman to graduate from Vassar College in 1897 — forty-three years before Vassar opened its doors to black students.
The whole story is here, and it’s a great one. (I found it via this excellent post by TransGriot discussing the use of the term “passing” to describe transpeople.)
“No one likes to be a rat,” University of Minnesota vice provost for student affairs Jerry Rinehart said today. But he’s hoping at least a few students will do it anyway.
The U of M plans to put up a website featuring recognizeable photographs and video of participants in last weekend’s off-campus riot, and will encourage students to anonymously identify those pictured. The information gathered in this way will be turned over to the police. (see update below)
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Daily, the U of M student newspaper, does not intend to grant the university access to the more than one thousand photos its staff photographers took at the riot.
April 29 update: University officials are giving varying statements about whether website IDs would be turned over to the cops. The Minnesota Daily says Rinehart told them that such students “would most likely face University code of conduct punishment, not criminal charges,” but says that the campus police intend to “forward any information they receive from the website that involves criminal activity to [the Minneapolis Police Department].”
Student parties turned into riots at two American colleges last night.
At the University of Minnesota, an off-campus student party associated with the campus’s Spring Jam got rowdy when a fire was built in the middle of a street. Bottles and rocks were reportedly thrown at police, who retaliated with tear gas, pepper spray, and “foam rounds.”
Here’s commenter Sun from the Minnesota Daily website with a first-hand perspective:
“I wouldn’t call this a riot as much as a large get-together that was slightly out of hand. People were not hurting each other or raiding houses. There was a strong communal understanding of respect, however, there was some bottle smashing and fire starting. If you were there you know what I’m trying to get at … the majority of the activity was allotted to mere standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs.”
Standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs, bottle smashing, and fire starting. Got it.
Only four people were arrested in the UM incident, but KentNewsNet is reporting that police made 125 arrests in the course of an off-campus confrontation at Kent State. There, participants suggest that the party turned into a riot because of police action.
May 9 update: Police search teams have found a corpse a little over a mile from where George Zinkhan’s Jeep was abandoned after the April 25th shootings discussed below. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the body has been tentatively identified as Zinkhan’s.
Earlier today, three people were shot to death in Athens, Georgia, and UGA marketing professor George M. Zinkhan III has been identified as the alleged shooter.
The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website has a mostly straightforward article up on the incident, linking to local media coverage and noting the steps that the university has taken to inform the campus community.
At the bottom of the piece, however, the Chronicle added an eyebrow-raising passage. After noting that students had been quoted in the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black saying that the news of the shooting was “hard to believe” and that Zinkhan was a “nice guy,” the article concluded with this:
“His ratings on the Rate My Professors Web site, however, were mixed. One commenter described him as ‘brilliant and really funny,’ but others said he was ‘cold hearted’ and a ‘creep.’ “
I’m a big proponent of student evaluation of faculty, but this strikes me as wildly inappropriate.
8:30 pm update: Via Womanist Musings, a reminder that the obligatory “nice guy” quote in articles about white middle-class men accused of murder is problematic too.
10:45 am update: Comments at the Chronicle are running heavily against the decision to include the Rate My Professor quotes in the article, and many of them are based on the premise that RMP is inherently worthless as a source.
I just posted this over there:
“If commenters at Rate My Professor had posted that Zinkhan had been violent or bizarrely aggressive toward them, that would have been something to at least consider mentioning in this article. Such comments would have been relevant to what he is accused of now, and might have raised the question of whether there were warning signs in Zinkhan’s relationship with students that UGA should have been aware of.
“But the comments posted weren’t those kinds of comments — they barely rose above the level of generic insults. Even if one believes, as I do, that RMP ratings can provide real information about a professor, these particular comments did not, and they should not have been quoted here.”
1:00 pm update: Huh. The Chronicle has now eliminated the references to RateMyProfessor from the article, and deleted all eighteen of the reader comments that criticized their decision to include the quotes. No note, no explanation, no other changes to the article.
9:00 pm update: The Chronicle has now posted an explanation of their decision to excise the Rate My Professor quotes and conducted another purge of the comments to the article, removing about half a dozen new comments critical of their original decision. They’ve also closed comments on the article, so that nobody can post criticizing their decision to censor the comments thread a second time.
Lordy.
11:00 pm update: It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The Chronicle has disabled comments on its follow-up article on the Zinkhan case, apparently because people were using that comment thread to air their grievances about the previous thread. As of this writing, the sole comment on the Chronicle’s article on another recent campus shooting, from commenter “Bing,” reads as follows:
“I am disgusted that all comments critical of the Chronicle’s decision to use anonymous RateMyProfessor screeds in reporting of the Georgia shooting have been taken down and that commenting has been disabled. It’s sad that I have to let the Chronicle know how disappointed I am through another posting. I have no doubt that this one will disappear too, thereby making it perfectly relevant to the article. The irony.”
As long as they keep doing this, I’ll keep updating this post, I guess.
11:20 pm update: And now that newest comment has been taken down too.
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