Tag Archives: Florida State University

Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform, Gates, Media

Buying the Academy, Good-Bye Scholarship

September 14, 2014 plthomasedd 3 Comments

Higher education is facing difficult economic circumstances. While many are confronting how universities can remain both relevant and financially stable, few are admitting that a huge problem is not a lack of money, but the lure of money—billionaires buying university departments with powerful strings attached.

In my books on school choice and poverty, I have addressed the powerful and misguided roles that the media and think tanks have played in public educational discourse and policy. One example highlights the warning offered by Gerald Bracey:

That is where we currently stand in the school choice advocacy discourse that drives a substantial part of the new reformers’ plans. The newest talking points are “do no harm” and that people opposing vouchers want to deny choice to people living in poverty. And throughout the school choice debate, ironically, the choice advocates shift back and forth about the validity of the research—think tank reports that are pro-choice and the leading school choice researchers tend to avoid peer-review and rail against peer-reviews (usually charging that the reviews are ideological and driven by their funding) while simultaneously using terms such as “objective,” “empirical,” and “econometrics” to give their reports and arguments the appearance of scholarship.

But, if anyone makes any effort to scratch beneath the surface of school choice advocacy reports, she/he will find some telling details:

“In education, readers should beware of research emanating from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Mackinac Center, the Center for Education Reform, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Paul Peterson group at Harvard, and, soon, the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Arkansas is home to the Walton family, and much Wal-Mart money has already made its way to the University of Arkansas, $300 million in 2002 alone. The new department, to be headed by Jay P. Greene, currently at the Manhattan Institute, will no doubt benefit from the Walton presence. The family’s largesse was estimated to approach $1 billion per year (Hopkins 2004), and before his death in an airplane crash, John Walton was perhaps the nation’s most energetic advocate of school vouchers.” (Bracey, 2006, p. xvi)

I have detailed the problems with the Department of Education Reform (University of Arkansas)—misleading charter advocacy as well as my own experience with being misrepresented in the name of their advocacy.

Now, Valerie Strauss has shared similar concerns about the Charles Koch Foundation’s influence at Florida State University’s economics department; as Dave Levinthal explains:

In 2007, when the Charles Koch Foundation considered giving millions of dollars to Florida State University’s economics department, the offer came with strings attached.

First, the curriculum it funded must align with the libertarian, deregulatory economic philosophy of Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist and Republican political bankroller.

Second, the Charles Koch Foundation would at least partially control which faculty members Florida State University hired.

And third, Bruce Benson, a prominent libertarian economic theorist and Florida State University economics department chairman, must stay on another three years as department chairman — even though he told his wife he’d step down in 2009 after one three-year term.

Education advocacy is now a very thinly veiled cover for much larger political and economic advocacy: Billionaires are buying the academy to create and maintain their powerful advantages.

One of the few walls protecting us against the tyranny of money has been academic freedom, securely (we thought) behind the wall of tenure.

And thus, while billionaires buy K-12 education and dismantle K-12 tenure and unions (Bill Gates, for example), billionaires are buying the academy and dismantling university tenure.

As we stand by and watch, we should be prepared to wave good-bye to scholarship, good-bye to equity, good-bye to democracy.

Reference

Bracey, G. W. (2006). Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Education

“He knows, or thinks he knows”: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

During the spring of 2006 when members of the Duke lacrosse team were first accused of rape (later to be dismissed by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper), I was teaching a freshman English course that focused on Kurt Vonnegut. Although my university is composed of a female majority, this class was mostly male students; since the university is a small, selective liberal arts university, the students in most ways identified with the lacrosse players.

Nonetheless, I was taken aback that the students almost unanimously (including the females) believed the lacrosse players were innocent. Class and race identification was central to these feelings, I believed, but when the case was exposed as a false accusation, I was placed in a much more complex position.

As the accusation against Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston unfolded, then, I was once again faced with the tension that accompanies high-profile public discourse about rape and sexual abuse. Beyond the issue of innocence or guilt of Winston, however, we have been confronted with something we seem almost unwilling to acknowledge, something Emily Bazelon frames as How Did Jameis Winston Evade a Rape Charge?:

At a press conference that turned weirdly jokey—at one point, a female reporter in the room blurted “Come on” in exasperation—why did Meggs make a point of the fact that the victim “acknowledged having sex with her boyfriend”? I suppose he felt he had to say something about the presence of someone else’s DNA, in addition to Winston’s, on her clothing. But the effect was to fuel the slut shaming she’s already enduring—treatment that has led her to withdraw from her FSU classes.

Here is what’s bothering me most: I’ve been looking for a case in which a woman accuses a big-time college athlete of rape, and he is charged and then convicted.

Bazelon has found few examples, and adds:

The underlying question about Winston, his accuser, and Meggs’ decision is this: Did she lie, or did she make an accusation of rape that is credible but too difficult, in the view of this prosecutor, to prove in court? One thing is clear: It is uncommon for victims to make false accusations of sexual assault. Yes, it happens, causing terrible damage for men who are falsely accused. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the time, women who go to the police about rape are telling the truth.

Reading through the police narrative of this alleged victim’s account, it is hard for me to imagine that she had consensual sex with Winston and then decided to lie and say it was rape. It’s not easy to call the cops and say, as she did, after explaining she was out drinking at a bar with friends, that “next thing I know I was in the back of a taxi with a random guy that I have never met. There was another person in the taxi. We went to an apartment, I don’t know where it was. I kept telling him to stop but he took all my clothes off. He started having sex with me and then his roommate came in and told him to stop. He moved us to the bathroom ‘because the door locked’ and I’m not 100% sure how everything in there happened.” She also said, according to the warrant, that after the drinks she had at the bar, her “memory is very broken from that point forward.”

Again, beyond the specifics of the Winston case, but in the context of high-profile sexual assault accusations such as those identifying Ben Roethlisberger and Kobe Bryant (both of which were not pursued), how must all women feel when sexual assault of any kind is aired publicly with smiles, smirks, laughter, and essentially derision exhibited in the press conferences by Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs and Winston lawyer Tim Jansen?

Are we to believe that women targeting athletes, as Jansen claims, is somehow more prevalent and a greater scar on our society than women being sexually assaulted?

As Laurie Penny declares in a discussion of Miley Cyrus, the agency of women and girls remains decontextualized from their humanity: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people”:

Another week, another frenzy of concern-fapping over teenage girls. A few days ago, I was invited onto Channel 4 News to discuss a new report detailing how young people, much like not-young people, misunderstand consent and blame girls for rape. The presenter, Matt Frei, tried to orchestrate a fight between myself and the other guest, Labour MP Luciana Berger, because it’s not TV feminism unless two women shout at each other….

The tone of the reports on girls’ lack of confidence, on the persistence of myths of ignorance about rape and sexual violence, is as patronising as ever. The implication is that girls fret about their appearance, are confused about sex and consent and worried about the future because they are variously frivolous or stupid.

Penny highlights both the specific mansplaining around Cyrus and the wider mansplaining, paternalism, and objectifying that remains pervasive in public discourse of girls and women. The “slutshaming” of women—whether it be aimed at Cyrus (as simultaneous sexualizing and de-sexualizing of females) or the wink-wink-nod-nod discrediting of Winston’s accuser by Meggs and Jansen—exposes the fact that it’s still a man’s (hostile) world for women, including when women are accused of slutshaming women.

A Man’s (Hostile) World for Women

A rare safe haven for challenging paternalism and slutshaming (see Penny’s The Miley Cyrus complex – an ontology of slut-shaming) is art, where writers (mostly women) and film makers have portrayed the aftermath of sexual assault as another sexual assault.

Poet Adrienne Rich‘s “Rape” is a stark and powerful recreation of a sexually assaulted woman doubly assaulted during her police interview, beginning:

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.

And then concluding:

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:
he has taken down your worst moment
on a machine and filed it in a file.
He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;
he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away;
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,
will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

With a dexterity that leaves the reader deeply uncomfortable, Margaret Atwood explores “date rape”—both as an unfolding of the reality of a woman in the context of the possibility of sexual assault by a male blind date and as a complicating of normative views of women having “Rape Fantasies.” (Atwood builds similar examinations in her The Handmaid’s Tale.)

While it raised considerable attention when released, The Accused and the real-life events it was based on, the gang rape of Cheryl Araujo, the film also anticipated discussions of slutshaming by highlighting what was then and still remains the pre-disposition to blame the victim, when the victim is a woman and when the violence is sexual.

But the attention achieved by the film and the sanctuary of poetry and fictional narrative bring us back to Penny’s charge: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people.”

For example, Lisbeth Salander is powerful and complex in the Millennium Trilogy, the fictional personification of blaming the victim:

“Our client on principle does not speak to the police or to other persons of authority, and least of all to psychiatrists. The reason is simple. From the time she was a child she tried time and again to talk to police and social workers to explain that her mother was being abused by Alexander Zalachenko. The result in every instance was that she was punished [emphasis added] because government civil servants had decided that Zalachenko was more important than she was.” (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, p. 733)

Salander’s entire life is the situation in Rich’s “Rape” writ large.

But we must not ignore that even in fiction—Lisbeth as symbol—the first book in the trilogy is given the English title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (why “girl” not “woman”?), instead of the literal translation from Swedish, “men who hate women,” and as in the film The Accused, why do we appear more concerned about women being assaulted in books and films than in real life? And is it possible that at least in the U.S. film version, we appear more drawn to Salander as vigilante than morally enraged by the repeated violence and sexual assaults she endures?

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It is without question that the human dignity of a man wrongly accused of rape is no less valuable than the human dignity of a woman raped; it is without question that I have no inside knowledge and cannot know the innocence or guilt of Winston or his accuser.

But unknowables do not excuse us from confronting the known: The smirks and grins, the innuendo and direct slutshaming aimed at Winston’s accuser were all the sort of double assault we have been warned about, the sort of double assault that affects all women, the sort of double assault that must not be tolerated:

“The victim and her family appreciate the State Attorney’s efforts in attempting to conduct a proper investigation after an inordinate delay by the Tallahassee Police Department,” Carroll [the accuser’s lawyer] said in a statement. “The victim in this case had the courage to immediately report her rape to the police and she relied upon them to seek justice. The victim has grave concerns that her experience, as it unfolded in the public eye and through social media, will discourage other victims of rape from coming forward and reporting.”

As Christine Brennan explains:

There was laughter. There were jokes. There were smiles. The news conference in which Florida state attorney Willie Meggs announced that Jameis Winston was not going to be charged with sexual battery was an extremely light-hearted affair.

Everyone seemed so incredibly happy to be talking about an alleged sexual assault.

The known has confronted us: relief that a football career and national championship would not be derailed combined with a levity not suited for public talk around the possibility of sexual violence—it’s still a man’s (hostile) world, and as Rich reminds us in “What Kind of Times Are These?”: