Yesterday the New York Times reported on the arrest of four college athletes accused of raping two women. In the body of their story, the Times described the allegations plainly, saying that the four stood “accused of raping two female students from nearby Spelman College in Atlanta.”

In the article’s headline, however, in print and online, the paper said the students had been arrested on “Sex Charges.” Not rape charges, sex charges.

Over the course of the afternoon feminists questioned the Times’ choice of headline on social media, with several — including myself — addressing complaints directly to the paper’s Public Editor and Standards Editor. Neither has responded directly so far, but not long after the paper’s critics hit Twitter the online version of the headline was amended — it now says the students “Face Sexual Assault Charges.”

As it turns out, the Times is unusual in that its in-house style manual specifically warns against euphemism in rape reporting. It discourages the use of terms such as “criminal attack” and “criminal assault” in such cases, and directs writers to use the word “rape” in reference to “forced intercourse, or intercourse with a child below the age of consent,” even where state law uses the term “sexual assault.” (The Associated Press Stylebook,” the most widely consulted style manual for journalists in the United States, is silent on these issues.)

In a 2011 blogpost on the Penn State rape scandal, the Times’ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane addressed just this question, declaring that “journalists should avoid using the language of consensual sex” when reporting on sexual assault “and, when appropriate, they should call a rape a rape.” Though that post bore the title “Confusing Sex and Rape,” however, Brisbane used the phrase “sex crimes” no fewer than five times within it. (Brisbane has since been replaced as Public Editor by Margaret Sullivan.)

Some may argue that the presence of the word “crime” or “charge” is enough to make clear that what is being described is a violation, not a consensual act. But unlike the phrase “sexual assault,” “sex crime” and “sex charge” carry no unambiguous connotation of non-consensuality. Consensual sodomy is a crime in many places (and was in the United States until recently). Other sexual acts — public sex, prostitution — are still criminal even in circumstances in which all parties are freely consenting.

Last month the Associated Press announced that it would no longer permit the use of the term “illegal immigrant” in its reporting, and the New York Times deprecated its use a few weeks later. The terms “sex,” “sex crime,” and “sex charge” are inappropriate euphemisms when used to describe allegations of non-consensual behavior. The Times should explicitly ban them from its pages, and the Associated Press should follow suit.

An excerpt from my dissertation:

President Nixon revealed the US invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970, in a televised speech. At a news conference the next day National Student Association president Charles Palmer, flanked by ten collegiate student body presidents, denounced the invasion and Nixon’s “odious disregard of the constitution” and called for his impeachment.

The nation’s first student strikes in response to the invasion had already been called by the time Palmer spoke, and by Monday walkouts had begun, with NSA’s enthusiastic support, at dozens of campuses. Throughout the weekend NSA staff worked with an impromptu national strike center at Brandeis University to coordinate, encourage, and publicize strike activity as best they could.

Many campuses closed as the protests escalated, but Kent State in Ohio stayed open, and that state’s governor — facing a deteriorating situation on campus in the final stages of a tight re-election race — called out the National Guard. On Monday, a little after noon, Guard troops on the campus fired on a crowd of protesters. The gunfire killed four people, including two students who were walking past the protest on their way to class.

This was not the first time, or even the first time in recent years, that American students had been killed by agents of the government in the course of a campus protest. In early 1968 police had fired on anti-segregation activists at South Carolina State University, killing three. And it would not be the last — nine days after Kent State, two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi were killed in circumstances similar to those of the South Carolina shootings.

But unlike in South Carolina and Mississippi, the students killed at Kent State were white. And crucially, the Kent State killings were documented on film — a Kent State photography major took two rolls of photos of that day’s protest and its aftermath, and his photographs went out over the AP wire that night. One image — of a young woman kneeling over the body of one of the dead, screaming with arms outstretched — appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the country the next day. The Kent State killings unleashed an unprecedented wave of protest, forcing hundreds of campuses to close for the semester.

Last Friday a group of about fifteen Dartmouth students staged an action at an event for prospective students, chanting “Dartmouth has a problem!” The group interrupted the gathering in the middle of a welcome skit, detailing a number of recent anti-gay and racist incidents and sexual assaults, and criticizing the college’s responses to them.

As word spread about the demonstration, other Dartmouth students criticized the protesters online, often using racist, sexist, homophobic, or violent language themselves. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, one commenter asked why “do we even admit minorities if they’re just going to whine?” while another wrote that if they had had a shotgun they “would have blown those fucking hippies away.” Many of the comments appeared at the unofficial Dartmouth website Bored At Baker, while others were posted on Facebook or other social media sites.

Soon a new blog called Real Talk Dartmouth appeared, composed primarily of screenshots of comments such as the following:

Yesterday evening college officials announced that as a result of “threatening and abusive online posts used to target particular students,” all classes would be cancelled today, with a series of community events taking the place of scheduled coursework. (Classes were last cancelled at Dartmouth in 2007, after a blizzard.)

Sometime yesterday evening, Bored at Baker went offline, with a note posted thereafter citing traffic volume, not content concerns, as the cause. The site administrator predicted that the site would be restored by nine o’clock this morning, but as of this writing (at nearly ten) it has not yet come back up.

New York City’s prestigious Cooper Union college, which has been tuition-free for undergraduates for well over a century, intends to begin charging new students annual tuition of more than $19,000 in the fall of 2014.

This is likely the largest one-year tuition increase imposed by any educational institution on earth, ever.

The decision was announced by CU board of trustees chair Mark Epstein at a hastily-arranged lunchtime meeting today. According to tweets from meeting attendees with the Cooper Union Task Force and Free Cooper Union, the tuition charge will replace the college’s longstanding automatic 100% scholarships for all students with a new 50% scholarship. Since the college’s  official tuition rate is $19,275 a semester for 2012-13, new students can expect to be charged at least that much beginning next year.

The New York Times reported this afternoon that a consulting firm hired by Cooper Union last year advised against cutting the scholarships by more than 25%, concluding that a tuition rate above $10,000 a year would drive away desired applicants and raise students’ expectations regarding amenities. The  board rejected this advice, which mirrors arguments I made last fall, on the grounds that a 75% scholarship rate would not produce sufficient revenue to balance Cooper Union’s books.

At today’s meeting Epstein said that Cooper Union admissions would remain need-blind, and that about a quarter of 2014 admittees would receive full scholarships. As much as half of the entering class, however, could find themselves paying the full $19,000 rate. He declined to reveal the vote tally for the tuition decision, though he did admit that it was not unanimous.

Students and faculty grew increasingly vocal during the course of the meeting, as Epstein cherry-picked from questions submitted in writing, refusing to answer — or even read aloud — those he characterized as “offensive” or “inflammatory.” He ended the meeting after less than an hour,

Epstein says 25% of students will receive free tuition via financial aid. As many as half could wind up paying full $19,000 rate.

“We may lose some students but we have a cushion of other students to rely on.”

12:50 | The public meeting has ended, less than an hour after it began.

Note | This post has been revised and updated over the course of the day as new information became available.

Yesterday the United States Senate voted by a 55-45 margin to require background checks before all commercial sales of guns. Because of the filibuster threat, however, the proposal failed, needing 60 votes to move forward.

That in itself is bad enough. That a measure supported by 90% of Americans and 55% of their elected officials could be torpedoed by the other 45% is a reflection of the dysfunction of the Senate in our era of the knee-jerk filibuster. But as it turns out, the full story is even worse.

Senate seats are, of course, allocated by geography, not population. The phrase “one man, one vote” had not yet been coined when the founders drew up the Constitution, and the Senate’s two-seats-per-state structure was intended as a drag on democratic pressures.

In the two centuries since, however, as the idea of democracy has become less controversial, the anti-democratic character of the Senate has become more pronounced. In the nation’s first census, Virginia, with 734,000 residents, had a population thirteen times the size of Delaware, with 55,000. Today California has a population of more than 38 million, some sixty-five times as large as Wyoming, with 576,000 residents.

Yes, you read that right. Fewer people live in Wyoming today than lived in Virginia at the time of the Revolution. Wyoming has half the population of the Bronx. It’s a little bigger than Fresno. It’s small, is what I’m saying.

Now, on many issues, Senate votes wind up more-or-less representing the will of the country as a whole. When Idaho and Maine cancel each other out, and Georgia and Michigan do, and so on, then the full tally can wind up somewhere close to where it should be. But on other questions — mass transit funding, say, or guns, the tiny rural states can wind up outvoting the huge urban ones, in defiance of the national popular will.

Yesterday’s vote was one of those times.

In twenty-one of the nation’s 50 states, both Senators yesterday voted in favor of the Manchin-Toomey background check amendment. Although those 42 Senators represent less than half the body, they represent more than half the country — 157 million people out of 313 million. The 16 states whose Senators both voted against the amendment, in contrast, represent less than a quarter of the nation, but nearly a third of the senate. That’s the equivalent of dividing the country up into states of equal population, but giving the no-vote states three senators each, and the yes-vote states just two. It’s wildly disproportionate.

And what of the other states, the ones who split their votes yesterday? Well, if you allocate half of their population to each senator, and add up the totals, you find that senators representing 62.7% of the nation’s population voted for Manchin-Toomey yesterday.

Ninety percent of the country supported it. The representatives of sixty-three percent of the nation supported it. Fifty-five percent of the Senate supported it.

But still it failed.

That’s not democracy. It’s the other thing.