Brad Weiner, Dean of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, has a new blogpost up at Huffington Post attacking the UPR student strikers and defending the decision to bring police onto campus. There’s already a vigorous debate over his claims beginning to heat up in comments to his post, but there’s one piece of his argument that’s worth looking at in detail.

Weiner writes:

Many of the recent UPR student conflicts have received national and even international attention. As a result, my stateside colleagues invariably have many questions. I always try to carefully explain the issues. Inevitably, I get the following question: “How much do students at the University of Puerto Rico pay for tuition and fees?” My answer: $1200-$1500, depending on the number of credits. Per semester? No, per year. At that point, the discussion usually ends in disbelief because they cannot believe (1) how low the tuition and fees are, and (2) how it possibly can be an issue, given the cost of higher education everywhere else, including other institutions in Puerto Rico.

But tuition isn’t the only cost of attending a university — there are mandatory fees to be paid as well. And according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in-state tuition and fees at UPR Rio Piedras last year were actually $1,814, not “$1200-$1500.”

That’s still pretty good, though, right? Well, sort of. Because as Weiner surely knows — but many of his stateside colleagues presumably do not — income in Puerto Rico lags far behind that of households in the continental United States. According to the census bureau, in fact, median household income there is only $17,500 — less than 35% of the national average of $50,221.

The national average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, according to the Chronicle, is $6,633. That means that UPR’s planned $800 a year tuition hike would push UPR tuition up to 104% of the income-adjusted national average, and it would do so by hiking tuition the stateside equivalent of nearly $2,300 a year.

And there’s one more thing that needs to be understood — comparing income medians between Puerto Rico and the United States as a whole is a bit deceptive, because income inequality in Puerto Rico is much higher. The Gini Coefficient, a standard measure of the gap between the rich and the poor, is 0.469 across the US. In Puerto Rico, it’s 0.532, a number higher than any American state.

So yes, tuition and fees at UPR are pretty low right now by national standards. But what’s being planned would change that dramatically, and would do so abruptly and in the middle of a very tough financial climate.

Update | Victor Sanchez of the United States Student Association tweeted the following response to this piece: “Tuition is low, comparable to what? Other public institutions? Ha! #sameoldassargument #privatization.” Victor makes an excellent point, and it’s one worth expanding to more than 140 characters.

By definition, about half of all universities are going to have tuition lower than the national average at any given time — that’s how averages work. If every institution with below-average tuition raises their prices to the national average, the national average will go up. And suddenly all the institutions that had already had national-average tuition will be below average, and have a new justification for raising their tuition. A chase to the national average will produce an unending rapid upward spiral in college costs.

And of course it’s not just institutions with below-average tuition who are raising their rates. The University of California, long one of the nation’s more expensive public universities, has been raising rates through the roof recently. And with each California tuition hike, the national average — and thus the benchmark for what’s “reasonable” — rises accordingly.

If tuition costs are going to be kept to any sort of limits, some of the institutions with below-average tuition costs are going to have to stay below average. That’s not politics. It’s just math.

The “honeypot” explanation for the rape allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — the theory that his accusers had been CIA plants, recruited for the purpose of seducing him and crying rape — was always a weird one.

The whole thing had a bit of an Ian Fleming vibe, for starters. The one accuser’s supposed links to the CIA turned out to be embarrassingly tenuous. And then there was the problem of the scripting — if these women had been sent to lie, why wouldn’t they have been sent with a simpler, cleaner lie? Why not claim rapes that would be immediately understood by all as rapes, rather than assaults that would themselves become the subject of heated dispute?

The stories circulated, though, as stories do, and they wound up getting passed along by some pretty prominent people. One of Assange’s lawyers speculated that they might be true. Bianca Jagger tweeted about it all — and was notoriously retweeted by Keith Olbermann.

But now Assange has come out with his own explanation for the charges, and he dismisses the honeypot theory — which he calls “that kind of classic Russian-Moscow thing” — as “not probable.” (He claims that the women who accused him were in a “tizzy” because of STD fears, and were “bamboozled” by police, for what that’s worth. He also suggests that his lawyer was misquoted.)

This winter’s student strike against tuition hikes at the University of Puerto Rico saw new levels of violence yesterday, as protesters claimed that students were viciously beaten by police and cops claimed eight police officers were left injured.

Police have been stationed on UPR campuses this month for the first time in more than three decades — a strike this spring left the university closed for 54 days, and university officials and politicians are desperate to avoid a replay of that outcome. A week ago, a local court banned demonstrations on university property.

Cops say that yesterday’s clashes began late in the afternoon when activists lit smoke bombs in an attempt to clear classrooms, and escalated as students threw rocks and other objects at police.

It has been reported that one student protester’s shoulder was dislocated by police, and urgent messages on Twitter last night spoke of intense fear and anger at police behavior. A second clash between police and demonstrators is said to have taken place at a police station later in the evening.

“Consent” means words or overt actions by a person indicating a freely given present agreement to perform a particular sexual act with the actor. Consent does not mean the existence of a prior or current social relationship between the actor and the complainant or that the complainant failed to resist a particular sexual act.

–Minnesota state code, section 609.341/4b

December 21 Update | In the piece below, and the lengthy comments thread that follows, most of us have taken it as a given that this week’s Guardian piece on the rape allegations against Julian Assange was a full and thorough summary of those claims. But a Guardian editor now says, in reply to charges that the paper quoted the documents in a way that was unfair to Assange, that their reporter actually “left out a lot of graphic and damaging material in the allegations because he thought it would be too cruel to publish them.”

On Democracy Now this morning, Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf debated the sexual assault allegations that have been lodged against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

In the course of the debate, Wolf repeatedly insisted that what Assange is alleged to have done could not have been rape because his accusers never told him “no.”

But here’s the thing. According to the published account that Wolf herself cited, one of them did tell him no. She told him no repeatedly and forcefully enough that he was first dissuaded from pursuing sex, then later complied with her demands.

Here’s the relevant passage from the Guardian:

Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when “he agreed unwillingly to use a condom”.

They start to have sex. He doesn’t want to use a condom. She insists. He refuses. He gives up and goes to sleep. They wake in the night. He doesn’t want to use a condom. She insists again. He complies.

And then what happens?

He fucks her in her sleep without using a condom.

She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no.

I’ll write more later about Wolf’s treatment of the other allegation, but this is just completely egregious. It’s frankly astounding.

And I should note that this particular debate has nothing to do with Assange’s guilt or innocence. In her Democracy Now appearance, Wolf — an Assange defender — assumed the veracity of his accusers’ claims for the purposes of the discussion.

And then lied about what those claims were.

Update | The video of the debate is now up online. Here are the most relevant quotes from Wolf:

“The Guardian account … doesn’t say that he had sex with either of these women without their consent.”

“Jaclyn, with full respect, where did they say no?”

“Of course I agree … that consent isn’t a given, and that obviously with every sexual act, everyone needs to be sure that everyone’s consenting. There’s no doubt about that.”

“Again and again and again Assange consulted with the women about what they wanted and they didn’t say no.”

Again: According to this account, Assange and W start to have sex. He doesn’t want to use a condom. She insists. He refuses. He gives up and goes to sleep. They wake in the night. He doesn’t want to use a condom. She insists again. He complies. She falls asleep.

She wakes to find him fucking her in her sleep without using a condom.

And Naomi Wolf calls this consensual sex. Unbelievable.

Second Update | A second part of the debate between Friedman and Wolf, which didn’t air during the original broadcast, has now been posted online. Here’s a key passage:

Wolf: Again and again and again, Assange did what Jaclyn, and everyone who cares about rape, and I, say you should do. He consulted with the women. … He stopped when women said ‘let’s talk about the condom,’ he discussed it, they reached an agreement, and they went ahead. He didn’t have sex with that woman when she was asleep. I agree that you need to be awake and conscious and not drunk to consent. We agree about that.

Friedman: He did have sex — that’s the allegation —

Wolf: Can you just bear with me?

Friedman: He started when she was asleep. That is the allegation.

Wolf: Well, you know — he started to have sex with her when she was asleep. Correct.

Friedman: And that’s rape.

Wolfe: She was half asleep. Then she woke up. Then they discussed how they would have sex, under what conditions, which is to me negotiating consent … they had a negotiation in which they both agreed not to use a condom, and then he went ahead and they made love.

Oof. Okay.

Let’s start by looking at the Guardian’s discussion of this incident — which is, again, the one that Wolf herself is relying on:

She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

So she’s asleep. Not “half asleep.” Asleep. She wakes up. He’s fucking her. He’s inside her. And what’s the “discussion” that follows? Is it initiated by him? No. Is it conducted on neutral terms? No.

It’s her asking him, while he’s fucking her, whether he’s complying with her previous explicit, non-negotiable demand that he use a condom.

And him saying he isn’t.

And continuing to fuck her.

And her giving up and letting him.

That’s the “discussion.” That’s the “negotiation.” That’s the prelude to their “making love.”

This isn’t a situation in which two people collectively negotiate the terms of consensual sex. This is a situation in which one person wants to do something, the person he’s with says no, and he waits until she’s asleep and does it anyway. Without asking. Without even telling her he’s done it until she asks him. And without stopping, once she’s awake and grilling him, to see whether what he’s doing is okay.

That’s not negotiation. That’s not discussion. That’s not ambiguous. That’s rape.

Third Update | Still watching. This exchange says it all:

Friedman: If someone asks me twenty times, do I want to have sex with them, or do I want to have sex without a condom, or whatever sexual act we’re negotiating, and I say no twenty times, and the twenty-first time I say yes because I am worn down, and because I’m being pressured and coerced and I’m afraid, and because I woke up to him already raping me, and I’m freaked out, that is not real consent. That is not a chance to have actual consent. That’s not legitimate consent.

Wolf: Well, I guess you and I will have to part ways.

Guess so.

Trigger Warning | There’s some very intense, very troubling stuff in the (377!) comments that follow. It’s also important to note that comments are now closed.