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Jesse Cheng announced on Monday that he would be stepping down as Student Regent of the University of California system. The announcement came just days before the final Regents meeting of his term.
The student conduct office at UC Irvine, Cheng’s home campus, ruled in March that Cheng had sexually assaulted a former girlfriend the previous fall. He appealed the finding, stepping down only after his appeal was rejected. (Cheng had admitted to sexual assault in an email to the woman, but later claimed that the confession was false, and written under pressure from his accuser. He was arrested in connection with the incident a few weeks after it allegedly occurred, but released without charges.)
In an era in which the University of California has pursued student activists with the aggressive use of both criminal and campus judicial sanctions, the mild treatment of Cheng — who, though he now denies any wrongdoing, both admitted to and was found guilty of sexual assault — stands out. In particular, it contrasts dramatically with how the university and local prosecutors have treated the “Irvine 11,” a group of students who are currently facing trial for allegedly disrupting a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US.
I’ll admit that I’m ambivalent about the charges against Jesse Cheng. I know Jesse, and I’d like to believe that he’s not capable of what he’s been accused of. But whatever my personal thoughts on his case, the fact is that he was found by a student conduct board to have committed a sexual assault, and given his confession, it’s difficult to argue that the board’s conclusion was egregiously in error.
That Cheng received probation, and was allowed to keep his seat on the UC Regents until he himself chose to give it up, while the Irvine 11 saw the student organization to which they belong suspended and now each face the possibility of six months in jail? That’s not right. That’s not proportionate. That’s not legitimate.
And that disproportion, that illegitimacy, casts the whole University of California judicial system, as well as the UC’s relationship with law enforcement, into question.
Update | Read this post from Reclaim UC for more on the university’s recent history of bungling sexual assault charges. Seriously. Go read it.
A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
Yesterday Yahoo put up a post on its search blog titled “Teens Don’t Know Who Osama Bin Laden Is, According to Yahoo! Search Trends.”
The story has been picked up by a long list of other outlets — PC Magazine and Gawker both claimed that “many” teens don’t know who Bin Laden was, while one site went so far as to claim that a “majority” are unaware. BoingBoing hedged its bets, claiming that “a non-insignificant number of teenagers in America do not know who Osama bin Laden is.”
But what did Yahoo’s published data actually show?
Not much, it turns out. According to the blogpost, “who is osama bin laden” was the fifth-most searched question relating to Bin Laden on Sunday, which made it more popular than questions about his height, but more popular than questions about his age. How many people searched that question? Yahoo doesn’t say. Could have been millions, could have been a handful. What it does say is that two thirds of those searching were between the ages of 13 and 17.
As for what this factoid means, I have a few thoughts. First of all, as I’ve suggested above, it doesn’t mean that large numbers of teens were asking this question. Again, we just don’t have any data on that. Also, even the fact that a high proportion of askers were young teens is ambiguous — I’d be inclined to guess that young people are more likely than older people to phrase search queries as questions. If that’s true, then the stat makes teens look comparatively less informed, because it excludes all the fortysomethings who didn’t recognize the name and just searched “osama bin laden” to find out.
I’d also question the assumption that anyone searching on “who is osama bin laden” has no idea who Bin Laden was. A Google search on the question shows that at various times in the last ten years it’s been asked by, among others, BBC News, the PBS Frontline documentary series, and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission.
“Who is Osama Bin Laden,” in other words, can be, and often is, used as a synonym for “Tell me some stuff about Osama Bin Laden.” And “tell me some stuff about Osama Bin Laden” is a perfectly reasonable request for a thirteen-year-old to have made last Sunday night.
Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has pointed out that September 11, 2001 was almost ten years ago, and that for many of the folks in the 13-to-17 age bracket, it’s been a really long time since he was in the news. That’s a good point, and it would be worth pointing out if it had been demonstrated, as Drum suggests, that “a goodly number of teenagers don’t know who Osama bin Laden is.”
That’s the thing, though. It hasn’t.
Update | TechPresident covers much the same ground, with this lovely zinger: “We could just as easily reading the data as ‘Teenagers Eagerly Search Out Information on Current World Events, and Good for Them.’
Second Update | Inspired by Judith Butlertron’s suggestion, I just did Google searches on “who is barack obama” and “barack obama.” Turns out that adding the “who is” skews the results toward third-party, informational sources, and away from DNC/White House promotional materials. So the joke is on Yahoo, and everyone who promoted this meme — if you want to learn more about someone, starting your search with “who is…” appears to be the internet-savvy way to go about it.
Third Update | The ignorance being expressed in these snark stories really is astounding. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper says, on no evidence at all, that teens “flooded … the internet” with “who is osama bin laden” queries, while Good magazine claims “thousands” asked the question. Good also claims that it’s “the fifth most popular Osama search,” rather than the fifth most popular Osama question, which is a very different thing. Glenn Beck has gotten into the act too, claiming — falsely — that the query “was one of the most popular tweets and searches over the past few days.”
Fourth Update | Oof. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, who uncovered the fake MLK/OBL quote earlier this week, has fallen for the Yahoo crap. Worse yet, she’s titled her blogpost on the story “Youth Culture.”
Often student activists are criticized for not proposing concrete solutions to the problems that others have identified. “Sure, you’re against our plan,” administrators and politicians ask, “but what alternative can you offer?”
Sometimes the “problem” is invented, of course, and sometimes students have detailed proposals at the ready, but not always. When the problem is real and students are offering no solution of their own, “what do you suggest we do?” is a legitimate question.
It’s a legitimate question. But “not this” is a legitimate answer.
Consider Mario Savio’s speech to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 — probably the most famous speech ever given by an American student activist:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Faced with a university that was breaking his heart, Savio said “no.” He said “stop.” He didn’t say “here’s an alternative.” He said “not this.”
Sometimes students, organizing against an act or a decision or a proposal or an administration, have an alternative at hand. Sometimes they have a suggestion as to what should happen next, what should take the place of the current plan or the status quo. Sometimes they have many such suggestions.
But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes what they have is “not this.” Sometimes what they have is “no.” Sometimes what they have is “stop.”
And sometimes that “stop” is the most radical, most cogent, most effective, most reasonable intervention there is.
This is so weird.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new opinion piece out today in which an adjunct professor named Elayne Clift describes a class that went completely off the rails. Apparently the first session was a disaster (although Clift refuses to say what happened), and she was never able to get things back on track. In twenty years of teaching, she says, she had “never … seen such extraordinarily bad behavior in [her] students.” Even some of their classmates agreed: “I’ve never seen such disrespect for a teacher,” she quotes one of them as saying.
I get this. Sometimes you wind up wrong-footed early in the term, and things just … deteriorate. Whether it’s because a relationship with a vocal student has turned adversarial, because you’ve failed to articulate your expectations clearly, or just because you can’t quite manage to dispel an odd mood, it’s surprisingly easy to discover, a month or two in, that a class has gone weird on you.
But that dynamic isn’t what this prof wants to talk about. Executing a sharp rhetorical pivot in her fifth paragraph, Clift emerges in the sixth with this:
“The sad thing is, I’m not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it’s rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.”
Wait, what? You just said that the students’ behavior in this class shocked both you and their own peers. You just said — twice — that this group’s behavior was utterly outside your experience. This class was three semesters ago. How can it reflect a universal trend already?
The rest of the piece is standard-issue student-bashing boilerplate. Students suck these days, she says. They’re lazy and entitled. They’ve got cellphones. They cheat.
But the kicker for me is that her biggest academic complaint about this new generation — and I swear this is a direct quote — is their fondness for “unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, [and] ungrounded polemics.”
Yeah. I hate that stuff too.
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