Category Archive

Dozens of protesters have been killed and untold thousands have taken to the streets as Tunisia’s young people have begun to stand up to their government in recent weeks. Protests began in December after the suicide by self-immolation of a young college graduate, and have swelled to envelope the entire North African nation.

Here’s the latest:

Tunisia’s president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, declared in a speech yesterday that he would step down at the end of his current term in 2014. He also announced new constraints on police action and new internet freedoms while promising lower food prices, but his words were greeted by a deeply skeptical public and had little effect on public opinion.

Today Ben Ali went further, announcing that he would call new elections within six months. But again the protesters rebuffed him, marching on the capital demanding his immediate resignation.

Now word is arriving that Ben Ali is attempting once again to clamp down on protests, declaring a state of emergency banning public gatherings, imposing a nation-wide curfew, and authorizing the use of live fire by security forces against anyone defying police orders.

Things are moving very rapidly in Tunisia right now, and there’s a lot of rumor and unconfirmed information flying about. Follow the #sidibouzid hashtag on Twitter for the latest, but be sure to take what you read there with a grain of salt.

Update | Here’s a good overview of the Tunisia crisis from Mother Jones.

Update | Sources are telling Al Jazeera and Agence France Presse that President Ben Ali has left Tunisia and been stripped of power. Contradictory reports as to who is now in power.

Update | Tunisian Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi has gone on state-run television to declare that he has stepped up as interim president, pledging to respect the constitution and restore order. It’ll be a while before there’s much clarity about what’s going to happen next.

This one is so messed up in so many ways.

A student in a veterinary medicine class at UC Davis recently gave birth. Her delivery came near the beginning of the semester, and it was unclear how many classes — and quizzes — she would miss. Her professor wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation…

So he asked her fellow students to vote on what her grade should be.

Yep. He instructed the student “presidents” of the class to send around an email proposing six possible approaches to the problem, and announcing that the class would be conducting an online vote on which one to adopt. The choices were these:

a) automatic A final grade
b) automatic B final grade
c) automatic C final grade
d) graded the same as everyone else: best 6 quiz scores out of a possible 7 quiz scores (each quiz only given only once in class with no repeats)
e) just take a % of quiz scores (for example: your classmate takes 4 quizzes, averages 9/10 points = 90% = A)
f) give that student a single final exam at the end of the quarter (however this option is only available to this one student, all others are graded on the best 6 quiz scores and the % that results)

Isis, the blogger who broke the story, calls this a “shameful” act of “gender discrimination,” which it is. She also notes that the university has policies on incompletes and medical leave which would apply to this situation. Finally, she notes that making this kind of decision is a professor’s job:

The other part of this that bothers me is that it is not the responsibility or privilege of students in a graduate program to determine the fate of their peers.  This is why there are graduate faculty and if Dr. Feldman was truly so baffled about what to do with this student, he should have turned to his peers or more senior university officials for guidance.

This wasn’t a new faculty member or a grad student, by the way. The professor who did this, Edward C. Feldman, is a department chair. Reached for comment yesterday, he had this response to an Inside Higher Education reporter: “I don’t care what people say. It is between me, my students and my school.”

Grading fairly and ethically is one of a professor’s most serious obligations. To see it treated so recklessly is shocking to me, and I’m not easily shocked.

Update | I was too busy boggling to point this out in the original post, but four of the six options provided to the students strike me as pretty obviously unethical, however they were arrived at. To give a student an unearned grade (whatever that grade may be) is completely improper, as is flunking a student on a test missed for a legitimate medical reason.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

–Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

 

So no, I don’t think Dr. King would have been a big booster of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here’s an interesting one about the unintended consequences of college admissions policies.

In 1996 a federal appeals court declared the affirmative action program then in effect for admission to the University of Texas unconstitutional. Barred by the courts from considering race in university admissions, the Texas state legislature moved to create an alternate, “race blind” mechanism for improving diversity in the UT system.

The solution the legislature crafted was a law, passed in 1998, providing that any student who graduated in the top ten percent of his or her high school class would be guaranteed acceptance to the UT school of his or her choice. This policy, it was expected, would increase UT enrollment from many schools with high proportions of poor students and students of color, and thus provide such students with greater opportunities — and incentives — for educational advancement.

That’s the background. Now here’s the story:

A new study looked at the effects of this policy, and found that it was having an effect not just on where students were going to college, but where they were going to high school as well. Promised UT admission if they graduated at the top of their class, a significant number of strong students were choosing to enroll in less-competitive local high schools over more intense magnet schools.

The first effect of this shift in enrollment should be obvious — those local high schools wound up getting an infusion of academically well-prepared students. Students who would ordinarily get cherry-picked by gifted and talented programs elsewhere were choosing to attend their local schools, improving those schools’ student bodies, their test scores, and — not incidentally — their attractiveness to other well-prepared students. In ordinary circumstances, no family, no student, wants to be the first of their peer group to attend a struggling school, but being the fifth, or the tenth, or the fortieth, is a different matter.

This is an outcome public school advocates strive for. This is a Good Thing.

But if you think about it for a moment, you realize that there’s a catch. Because if well-prepared students are attending struggling local high schools on the assumption that they’ll wind up at the top of their class, a good number of those students are likely to assume correctly. Which means that they’re likely to bump some of the students who would have attended those struggling schools without incentives out of the top slots.

And this is exactly what the new study found — that slightly fewer students of color wind up getting the ten-percent slots as a result of school shifting.

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole article yet — my request to buy it online got gummed up somehow — but I’ll have more after I do.

On December 7, Naomi Wolf posted a now infamous op-ed at the Huffington Post entitled “Julian Assange Captured By World’s Dating Police.” In it, she said that Assange stood “accused of having consensual sex with two women,” and that “both alleged victims are … upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first.”

Even at the time she wrote it, the Huffington Post op-ed was a gross misrepresentation not just of the facts on record, but also of the sources upon which she herself relied. Of her two central claims — that Assange stood accused of mere “consensual sex” and that his accusers were motivated by jealousy — one was contradicted by her sources, and the other was a matter of her spinning editorial speculation as fact. But don’t take my word for it…

Wolf’s supposed source for her two claims was an article in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. That article, though, claimed no particular insight into the accusers’ motives:

“How must Sarah have felt to discover that the man she’d taken to her bed three days before had already taken up with another woman? Furious? Jealous? Out for revenge? Perhaps she merely felt aggrieved for a fellow woman in distress.”

Just as problematic, though Wolf asserted that her account drew on “the alleged victims’ complaints to the media,” the Daily Mail article she cited included no such sourcing. As it turns out another Daily Mail article Wolf mined for anonymous gossip did include such a statement, but that statement contradicted Wolf’s claim that the sex was consensual:

“One of the women claimed in a Swedish newspaper: ‘The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a twisted attitude to women and a problem taking no for an answer.'”

That quote appeared nowhere in Wolf’s piece, and she has never, to my knowledge, publicly acknowledged its existence.

It gets worse.

Less than two weeks later, Wolf’s account was again contradicted by a lengthy account of the incident, based on leaked police reports, that appeared in The Guardian. This account further undermined Wolf’s central claims and cast serious doubt on other charges she’d lodged.

So much doubt, in fact, that Wolf herself now admits that the Huffington Post op-ed was inaccurate. Here’s how she described it in an interview on BBC Radio on Friday:

“When I wrote the first post, the police report hadn’t been reported yet. So it was based on early and not sound reports. So it was probably premature on my part.”

That was five days ago. The Guardian article appeared twenty-seven days ago. The op-ed was published ten days before that.

And yet the op-ed is still up on the Huffington Post site in its original form. No retraction, no correction, no nothing.

Wolf’s analysis of the Assange sexual assault case, and the policy proposals she’s made in its wake, have of course been criticized by many feminists. But this post isn’t about those criticisms. This is about something else.

This is about a self-professed feminist and anti-rape activist making inaccurate and derogatory statements about alleged sexual assault survivors, admitting it, and then refusing to correct the error where it originally appeared.

Think about that for a minute. Wolf acknowledges that her op-ed slamming Assange’s accusers was “based on early and not-sound reports.” She admits that she posted it prematurely. She admits that she got the story — a story which cast allegations of sexual assault in a negative, trivializing, and unfair light — wrong.

But nearly four weeks later, she’s done nothing to rectify her error.

Astounding.

January 18 Update | Still no retraction.

February 7 Update | Wolf has posted a “correction” that compounds the errors of the original piece in a shockingly flagrant way. I’m flabbergasted.

December 2 Update | It’s a year since Wolf’s original post went up, and ten months since her disingenuous “correction.” Neither has been withdrawn or amended.