Deaf President Now (DPN) was a student protest in March 1988 at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. The university, established by an act of Congress in 1864 to serve the Deaf, had always been led by a hearing president. The protest began on March 6, 1988, when the Board of Trustees announced its decision to appoint a hearing person as its seventh president.

Gallaudet students, backed by a number of alumni, staff, and faculty, shut down the campus. Protesters barricaded gates, burned effigies, and gave interviews to the press demanding four specific concessions from the Board. The protest ended on March 13, 1988, with the appointment of I. King Jordan, a Deaf person, as university president.

In honor of the anniversary of Gallaudet, one of my favorite TV shows featuring many actors who are deaf and hard of hearing, portrayed deaf students rallying around the school board’s proposal to close of their school and displace their student body to various hearing schools. They strategize, organize and execute an occupation of their school building: Occupy Carleton. You can watch it here.

Featured organization of the day: Dream Defenders

The Dream Defenders were formed in the aftermath of the murder of Trayvon Martin. They are black, brown, and allied youth working to end systemic inequalities in incarceration, education, voting, and immigration.

Dream Defenders Protest for Repeal of Discrimination Bills – Orlando Entinel

Students Lobby for Immigrant Rights – Miami Herald
Dream Defenders Deliver a Different State of the State – WCTV

Video of the Dream Defenders press conference

Important perspectives on educational injustice:

• School Closings Protesters Go to City Hall – Philly.com
• Lawmakers Prepare for Student Loan Fight – WSJ
• Youth Answer the Question ‘Do Police Make Schools Safer?’ – Colorlines
• For 20-somethings Ambition at a Cost – NY Times
• Randi Weingarten Arrested For Protesting Philadelphia School Closure Hearing – HuffPo
• Rape and Other Crimes: Sexist Policy and Campus Safety – Society Pages [Trigger warning: discussion of sexual assault]
• Students Allege Bias-Related Exchange With Professor – The Student Life
• Maple Spring Part Deux? – Waging Nonviolence

Last night on Girls there was a scene in which Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Adam sexually abuses his new girlfriend Nat.

The scene was written in such a way as to create ambiguity as to whether what Adam — a generally sympathetic, if overwhelmingly creepy, character — did was actually rape. Amanda Hess has a particularly good rundown, in which she describes the show as illustrating “what happens when a person you want to have sex with ‘has sex with you’ in a way that you do not want them to.”

Such equivocation focuses on the question of whether Nat can properly say that she’s been raped — whether she can prove that she’s been raped, whether she can show that she sufficiently articulated her discomfort. But that’s not the only way of framing the issue, and it seems to me that if we ask instead whether we can say that he raped her, it gets a lot simpler.

Because we, the viewers, know that he didn’t have Nat’s consent. We know that she wasn’t liking what was happening, and know that she was telling him to stop. And we know that when she said no, he didn’t slow down. He sped up. We know that he liked not having consent. We know that he wanted her not to be consenting.

The scene is only ambiguous if we adopt an adversarial relationship to Nat, or imagine her in an adversarial relationship to herself. It’s only ambiguous if we take our task as assessing whether she “did enough” to articulate non-consent.

But if we take it as a given that he knows she’s not consenting, and likes that she’s not consenting, then what she does or doesn’t articulate is irrelevant.

He’s raping her.

I’m not going to get into a whole huge thing about this, but in the grand order of the universe it does seem to me that snooping on your employees’ email to find out who’s been talking to the press is a more serious ethical violation than cheating on a college exam.

Update | Okay, one more thing. This…

“Several Harvard faculty members speculated that the administration had felt free to search the e-mail accounts because it regarded the resident deans as regular employees, not faculty members; Harvard’s policies on electronic privacy give more protection to faculty members.”

…is pretty messed up. As is this:

“Some of the resident deans said they considered the lack of notice — and even the searches, themselves — a violation of trust, but they refused to speak for the record because they lack job protection.”

The seating arrangements for a debate at University College London Saturday have led prominent atheist Richard Dawkins to accuse the event’s Muslim organizers of “sexual apartheid,” but the group is challenging his version of events.

The debate, “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?,” pitted physicist Lawrence Krauss against Islamic lecturer Hamza Andreas Tzor. Seating was in three sections — one reserved for men, one reserved for women, and one that was mixed. (More on that “mixed” section in a moment.)

Krauss, who had heard rumors about separate seating prior to the event, apparently asked for, and was granted, permission to announce that anyone could sit where they liked. But according to a colleague of Krauss’s, three men who then moved to the women’s section were soon ejected from the room.

At that point Krauss declared that he would not participate unless open seating was permitted — an iPhone video posted on Facebook shows him saying, “I’m not going to be an auditorium that’s segregated. I’m sorry. I’m not. Either you quit the segregation or I’m out of here.”

Krauss left the auditorium at that point, but returned after the three men were allowed to take seats in the section they had been ejected from. The debate then went on as scheduled.

In a blogpost earlier today, Dawkins claimed that the room was divided into sections for men, women, and “couples,” echoing language used by Krauss associate Dana Sondergaard, source of the iPhone video. Organizers, however, say that the sections for men and for women were for the use of those “choosing to adhere to orthodox Islamic principles,” and that “those who wanted to sit together, male or female,” were welcome to sit in the mixed seating area.

The debate’s organizers tell the Guardian that University College approved the seating arrangements in advance, but the Guardian reports that UCL has opened an investigation into the event.

Separate seating for those who prefer single-gender sections is not unheard of at Muslim student events in the United States, but if the organizers’ claims are accurate and mixed-gender seating was made available for anyone who wanted it, Dawkins’ rhetoric of “apartheid South Africa” and “Alabama in 1955”  seems inaccurate and ahistorical. There weren’t mixed sections for those who wanted interracial seating at public events in those societies — segregation was compulsory and enforced by law.

I’ll be following this story as it develops, and reporting what I learn.

Update | Krauss tweets that debate organizers told him today that their intent was for separation of audience into three sections to be entirely voluntary, and that the move to eject the three men sitting in the women’s section was a result of flawed “communication to and from staff.” He reiterates that he was told there was to be no separation whatsoever, voluntary or not.

This clarifies my own position a bit. I don’t have any problem at all with a group saying “we have attendees at this event who’d be more comfortable for religious reasons sitting in single-gender sections, and we’d ask that everyone respect that.” I have a big problem with only providing gender-segregated seating at a public event. As for the middle case, in which organizers ask (or tell) men to leave a women’s-only section? That’s one that I’d need to chew on more, and to consider the specific circumstances of.

Second Update | An apparent eyewitness account provided to the UCL administration by (Google suggests) London School of Economics grad student Chris Moos suggests that the provisions for gender-neutral seating were far less robust than the organizers have claimed.

Moos, as quoted on this blog, says organizers forced men and women to enter the lecture hall through separate doors. As for mixed-gender seating,

“There were no signs for a mixed seating area, and attendees were guided by the guards to either the “female” or “male” area. Only attendees who insisted not to be separated were guided towards a “mixed” area, which only comprised two rows.”

Moos also claims that only men and “couples” were allowed to enter through the men’s door.

Another post on the same blog quotes Fiona McClement, UCL’s “equalities and diversities adviser,” as saying priot to the event that the college “will not permit enforced gender segregated seating. All attendees are free to sit wherever they feel comfortable.” That blogpost also alleges that “male attendees were refused entry via the women’s door to the lecture theatre.”

So yeah. It sounds like this was quite a bit worse than I’d expected based on Dawkins’ original post. At the same time, however, there’s this:

“It’s insulting to be told that because I’m a man I can’t sit near women in the audience. I’m not in the habit of forcing my presence where it’s unwanted, but the event’s organisers have no business policing social matters of this kind. … In this case the segregation was non-voluntary. But voluntary or not, segregation is wrong.”

A couple of things.

First, voluntary “segregation” isn’t segregation. It’s separation. And it’s not wrong. If I want to sit with my friends at lunch, that’s not segregation. When the Black Student Union holds meetings and only black people show up, that’s not segregation. If women having a support group about sexual assault ask a guy who wanders in to leave, that’s not segregation. So no, voluntary “segregation” isn’t segregation, and it’s not (presumptively) wrong.

Second, if women would prefer, for religious reasons, to sit with other women, it’s not “insulting” anyone else if they do so, and it is “forcing your presence where it’s unwanted” to sit next to them.

This is complicated stuff. Reductive first principles don’t get us very far, and appeals to common sense get us even less far.

Again, though, having said that? It sounds likely that what went on at this event was pretty messed up.

Third Update | UCL has released a statement. They say that “enforced segregation” is prohibited on campus, and that they told the debate’s organizers that “the event would be cancelled if there were any attempt to enforce such segregation.” The statement continues:

“It now appears that, despite our clear instructions, attempts were made to enforce segregation at the meeting. We are still investigating what actually happened at the meeting but, given IERA’s original intentions for a segregated audience we have concluded that their interests are contrary to UCL’s ethos and that we should not allow any further events involving them to take place on UCL premises.”

This morning I went on a bit of a rant on Twitter. It was prompted by author Linda Hirshman’s Salon defense of Cheryl Sandberg, specifically by Hirshman’s disavowal of “intersectional race/class/gender/save the whales feminism,” and by reading this review of Hirshman’s 2012 history of the gay rights movement.

Here’s that rant, stitched together from its original 140-character bites, but otherwise unchanged.

Intersectionality isn’t a checklist. It’s not about making sure you give a nod to all the stuff and people you’re supposed to nod to.

The core problem with non-intersectional writing isn’t that it’s not broad enough. It’s that it’s not DEEP enough. The very word “intersectional” is a recognition that communities, identities, struggles are rarely discrete.

Even when you write about rich white straight people you need to remember that other people exist, because RWSP don’t exist in a vacuum. Hirshman’s history of gay rights screws up even the narrow slice it tries to cover because you can’t write even that slice in isolation. Likewise, the criticism of Sandberg’s book is that even that book, the book she intended, is poorer for not being more broadly informed.

If you’ve spent your whole life being centered by society, it weakens you. Decentering yourself strengthens you. It makes you better.

If I teach US history as a story about white guys I get all of it wrong, even the parts that actually are about white guys. My everything will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.

(Sometimes my everything is intersectional and it’s still bullshit anyway. I’m working on that.)