Tremble Administrative Swine: Reports From The Field On Sexual Assault

How about we go to court on our first date?

Tenured Radical is out of town and a little slow on the flip-flop lately, but here's news:  following an incident in which  fraternity pledges chanted sexist slurs on the Old Campus last fall, sixteen Yale students have filed charges with the federal government that Yale University has a sexually hostile environment.  As CBS News reported in its online edition,

“What we’re saying is that Yale, in its failure to respond to both public and private instances of sexual harassment and sexual assault, has said to the campus ‘this is OK’,” said plaintiff Alexandra Brodsky.

That belief pushed Brodsky, Hannah Zeavin, and 14 other men and women at Yale to file a complaint, charging the university has repeatedly failed to take action on harassment and sex crimes, including rape.

The students, who include men and women, are alleging a Title IX violation, and the Department of Education has launched an investigation

This follows on the occupation of an administrative building at Dickinson College earlier this semester by students demanding that anti-rape efforts be jacked up at that school.  Here's a hint, ladies:  if you've asked for action at your school and they don't hire anyone, if your school offers "consent training" rather than anti-rape workshops, they don't open a women's center, faculty are not receiving mandatory sexual harassment training, and the bulk of the website on rape is still devoted to all the things you, as a woman, can do to "avoid" being raped -- your school might benefit from a Title IX investigation too.

Bro's Before Ho's and Fraternity Hazing Lows

"Spank him hard, but after each spanking make
 sure to caress his tender cheeks." Photo Credit.

By doing things like forcing your pledges/rooks to eat human shit or do an elephant walk you are basically saying, “Hey, by learning what your fellow bros’ shit tastes like you will be better bros,” and I have to say - I really respect that....Everytime I say, “I’m going to make your fucking life a living hell,” I still get a half-chub. Bros fucking love power. You know who else loves power? Slam pieces. By hazing the shit out of pledges/rooks in front of slam pieces, 9 times out of 10 they will go down on you immediately. The other time they will give it up doggy.  Bros Like This Site, July 23 2009.


Two days ago, residents of Oligarch University's historic quad, where all first year students are housed, were interrupted in their evening activities by a line of young men chanting. As the Oldest College Daily (OCD) reported,

At their pledge initiation....DKE members shouted phrases such as “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f--- dead women.” Some of the students were blindfolded and being led in a line with their hands on each others’ shoulders.


Perhaps even more stunning than the fact that any young man thinks that declaring himself a rapist is a reasonable prerequisite for joining a campus organization, was a senior DKE brother claiming in Thursday's story that the pledges, and only the pledges, were responsible for this incident.  Saner heads prevailed, or someone from the national and/or the university administration called with a stern warning.  As of today, the president of DKE has apologized for the chants.

The good news is that the Oligarch Women's Center went into action almost immediately.  The bad news is that, with the exception of SAE which has had a steep learning curve on hazing and sexual violence since an incident in 2008, the other fraternities still don't have a grip on what is wrong here.  According to the OCD,

When William Bradley ’12, president of SAE, heard of the event Wednesday night, he contacted the Women’s Center and the Pi Beta Phi sorority to express his regrets about the incident and apologize on behalf of SAE.  But Bradley referred to the pledge’s chanting of “SAE” during their initiation as part of the good-natured rivalry between the two frats and “friendly banter.” President of Sigma Nu Matt Chesky ’12 said he thought despite the campus reaction, DKE did not intend to offend anyone.  James Berry ’12, president of SigEp, said he did not see the issues of sexism and sexual violence as limited to Greek life at Yale, but rather as a larger issue that is not talked about enough.  Harry McNamara ’11, president of Sigma Chi, and Bill Toth ’11, president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, declined to comment on the incident.

Some confusion in the ranks, isn't there? Wouldn't want to screw up pledging by deferring to a bunch of feminazis and their pu$$y-whipped male counterparts.  OK, let's get to the takeaways.

First, all fraternity members are always responsible for anything that happens in any initiation ritual.  Always.  Any fraternity chapter that does not understand this should have its charter lifted immediately. A hallmark of hazing, and a reason why it is against the law many places, is that it is a lot like rape.  Hazing depends on inspiring fear and humiliation by making people do dangerous, physically intrusive things against their will.  Because of this, unless tightly controlled by sober people who understand the elements of physical safety involved and the limits of consent, hazing becomes more and more extreme depending on both the tolerance/fear of the pledges and the new normals that are set as the hazing process escalates.  This is true whether you are talking about scavenger hunts, forced drinking or pranks (check out this one, where an SAE pledge at the University of Kentucky was set on fire, or this one in which a Sig Ep at Florida Atlantic was kidnapped, bound with duct tape, verbally abused and forced to drink until he vomited repeatedly and passed out.)

Second, a strong women's center, staffed by professionals, is essential to any campus that cares about preventing sexual violence against women or men.  The quick response, and prior organizing efforts, of Oligarch's women's center was important to initiating a positive and firm institutional response to this incident rather than the de-centered rage and tension that can sometimes obscure the issues at stake around sexual violence.  What is more important is that the university can only punish the individuals involved.  But a community informed by institutionalized feminism can do the kind of consciousness raising necessary to address the fraternity's underlying assumption that sexual violence can be "just" a joke, or worse, is necessary to men creating intimate bonds with other men and therefore isn't anyone's business but theirs. In fact, it is the cloistered quality of frat hazing, and its homoerotic content, that makes initiation violence so dangerous to the campus community as well as to individual pledges.  Consider the following suggestion for effective hazing rituals over at Frat Beat:

Inserting objects into a Little Brother's rectum is a tradition that stems all the way back to Prostatus Engorgum and his Unity of Anal Fixation. Keys, whisks, squash racquet handles, boots, bottles, whatever. It may pain him, but it will teach an important lesson: sometimes life hurts. Indeed, the Little Brother might even cry while learning this. He might fight the handcuffs and bleed, but you can diffuse his misery quite easily. Masturbate afterwards and this will show him how proud you are. Upon completion of your self-pleasure, mark him as your territory and he will surely squeal with delight. The two of you have a bond that can never be broken. So crack a beer and hit the sororities, dude!

Other suggestions include nipple torture, urine play and group-humping a water melon.

Frat rituals that turn young men into "bitches" are so powerful because of the pre-existing assumption that women and gay men are already "bitches" to proper men.  Even when hazings do not simulate S/M sexual practices that should only be attempted by highly knowledgeable and consenting adults, fraternity initiations are always, in some degree, sexually abusive to men.  Hazing  temporarily makes men into "women" and "queers;" it then recuperates them back to proper masculinity from what the ritual itself has articulated as a despicable and lowly socio-sexual position.  Until college and university administrations address the role male eroticism and sexualized violence have in fraternity and team hazings, they will not be able to come to grips with sexual violence and homophobia on campus either.

It Will Be Different Teaching The Liberal Arts In Singapore: No Pizza, and The Occasional Caning

I don't know who else cares about the deal to start a new liberal arts college by 2013 that Yale is cutting with the National University of Singapore , but as a loyal Old Blue and a Shoreline neighbor, Tenured Radical is interested.  What is particularly odd is that the Yale faculty couldn't care less.  According to Nora Caplan-Bricker at the Yale Daily News (otherwise known as the Oldest College Daily), when invited to a special meeting to discuss the new venture, "Of the more than 2,000 professors who received an e-mail invitation, roughly 25 attended the event, which was closed to the press, and several of those were on Yale-NUS planning committees. Eleven of the 17 professors contacted about the proposed college said they had not read much of the University’s literature about it, did not know enough to comment or did not have reservations about the plans."

President Richard Levin is a little concerned about academic freedom, "since the Singaporean government does not guarantee free speech for all its citizens."  Well make that any of its citizens, Rick, and according to the State Department, caning is "a routine punishment for numerous offenses." Preventive detention is also routine. For you DKE bros considering a rampage on your semester abroad? That means being jailed indefinitely without being charged.  Just saying.  If you go to prison for any length of time, expect conditions to be "Spartan," although they will "meet international standards." That said, "a member of an opposition party who served a 5-week prison sentence in 2002 said after his release that he and other sick bay inmates had been chained to their beds at night. The Government responded that the inmates were restrained to minimize the risk of hurting themselves, medical staff, or other inmates."

Any more questions from the faculty on this one?  OK, let's move on then.

Item two on the agenda:  should Yale be doing business in, and sending its employees to,  a country where being gay is illegal?  No one seems to be asking this question, but it does seem relevant unless the university simply plans to use NUS as a cash cow and send no Yale students, administrators or faculty there.  Although rarely prosecuted, homosexual acts, otherwise known as "gross indecency," are punishable by two years in prison, and probably a good caning too (the caning for homosexuality wasn't mentioned on the British High Commission website, undoubtedly because it would cause English travelers to go there in droves.)  In 2007, the government considered voiding that law and didn't, despite good advice from the first Prime Minister of independent Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, that "homosexuals are creative writers, dancers. If we want creative people, then we have to put up with their idiosyncrasies."  I've never heard anal sex described as an idiosyncrasy, but you know what?  I like it!

Freedom of the press?  Not really, so don't expect a branch of the OCD any time soon. The last State Department report noted that "Government pressure to conform resulted in the practice of self-censorship among journalists. Government leaders continued to utilize court proceedings and defamation suits against political opponents and critics. These suits, which have consistently been decided in favor of government plaintiffs, chilled political speech and action and created a perception that the ruling party used the judicial system for political purposes."

Other than that, Singapore is a lovely country, with the fastest growing economy in the world, where everyone can be expected to pay full tuition -- er, I mean, the Yale spirit is sure to thrive.  And don't get me wrong:  I would go there in a shot.  But does anybody but me think it strange that so many universities are starting branches in wealthy, semi-totalitarian countries and nobody is talking about the lack of civil liberties as a real problem?

Newsflash: Ned Blackhawk to Join Yale Faculty

This latest in from our friends on the Native Studies Listserve:

On January 23 the chairs of the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Yale University circulated email announcements stating that Yale successfully concluded negotiations with Ned Blackhawk and Birgit Rasmussen. Blackhawk, a leading scholar of American Indian history whose first book Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West garnered awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, the AmericanSociety for Ethnohistory, the American Studies Association, and the Western History Association, will join the Department of History as Professor of Native American History. Birgit Rasmussen, as scholar of early American literature, will join the American Studies Program as Assistant Professor. (Hat Tip.)

Birgit Rasmussen's work I know less well, but your Radical is a huge fan of Ned Blackhawk, and in addition to congratulating her friends in the History and American Studies Departments at Yale for pulling this off, is running up the Radical flag in celebration of soon having Blackhawk and Rasmussen as neighbors. In other Native American Studies news, anyone in the Zenith vicinity is invited to attend a public lecture by Phil Deloria, American Studies, University of Michigan, this Thursday, January 29th at 8 p.m. The talk is titled "Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family Memoir," and is at the Center for African American Studies Lounge, 343 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, 06459. Deloria is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.

What Time Is It? It's Senior Thesis Time

Actually, it's past senior thesis time. I advised two wonderful honors students, read five other theses (also real labors of love -- my Zenith students never fail to impress me when they put their hearts into something), awarded a prize or two (or six, depending on who and what you are counting), and I have two more comments to write. Then I am done for this year. And of course, just as we send this group off into the sunset, the juniors start poking their heads around the doorjam and saying, "Professor Radical -- I'd like to talk about my idea for a thesis?"

It's the time of year that I am full of gratitude: gratitude for students who did their work with integrity and shared it with me, gratitude that a new group has enough faith in my powers of whatever to give it a whirl despite my obvious flaws, and gratitude -- well....

That I wasn't Aliza Shvartz's tutor at Yale!

You knew I had to get around to this story eventually, didn't you? I am proud to say, as a former member of the editorial board of the Oldest College Daily, that the Yale Daily News report on this strange event is still the best and least sensational account of Aliza's senior art project -- which may or may not have happened -- a performance piece for which she claims to have inseminated and aborted herself repeatedly. Yale says it didn't happen; Aliza says it did, although initially (apparently) she said it didn't and then she changed her mind. What we can infer is that she doesn't appear to have any politics whatsoever, since the project was all about her feelings and experiences as she turned her body inside out, but not about abortion per se.

All the same, incoherent and weird as this seems from the sparse and contradictory information that has leaked from meetings where Yale officials are ripping their hair out, subsequent media coverage has just been too bizarre. FOX quotes NARAL communications director Ted Miller's opinion that Shvartz's project "is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage" (since when has miscarriage been a critical issue for NARAL?); and National Right to Life Committee President Wanda Franz's view that the Yale senior is "a serial killer."

As FOX says: We Report. You Decide. Just like on Tenured Radical.

Perhaps in an attempt to be helpful, Discover Magazine suggests that Yale test the installation (which never got installed) for Shvartz's DNA, while the New York Times helpfully notes that it could also be tested for the presence of hormones only produced during pregnancy. Oh, let's not and say we did. Maybe instead Yale could gift some DNA testing to some poor schmuck on death row somewhere, now that the Supremes have decided that death by lethal injection is not cruel after all.

Sigh. Such a mess. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has some pretty good coverage, although click here if you want to read ninety-six ways to call someone you don't know, and know almost nothing about, a sicko. However, in yet another moment where women become responsible for all the moral outcomes of reproduction, no one but the OCD is interested in pursuing the question that first popped into my head (after, I admit, "What was her advisor thinking?") which was -- where and how did she collect the alleged sperm? As Yale Daily News reporter Martine Powers explained,

"The 'fabricators,' (nice touch, Martine - sift through these articles, and you will see that I am not the only person who thinks there was no sperm) or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. (Really? Perhaps because the doctor would have told her she was completely insane. Just a thought. And anyway, she had an advisor in the Art department for that kind of conversation!)

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, (ok, I'm thinking you loiter around Tang Cup practices, ask for volunteers, plastic cups are right there and can be rinsed out) as well as the number of times she inseminated herself....Pia Lindman, Schvarts' senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night."

Well, I'll just bet that Professor Lindman was not available for comment. I would have been at home, cell phone at the bottom of the toilet tank, heavily medicated and wishing I had really insisted on those weekly tutorial meetings after all. And my guess is that the next time she is available for comment she will be working somewhere else. Yale -- otherwise known as Oligarch in these pages -- does not take kindly to having been made a fool of.

But my other thought is -- if Shvartz is not deranged, which she might be (it is also worth noting that academics at all levels who are otherwise sane are capable of telling giant, improbable whoppers, so it's hard to know) -- maybe the "abortions" were never the "performance" in the performance art at all -- maybe it's the rest of us responding to it that is the actual art! Now, how radical would that be?