I wear a few hats, and one of them is that of a teacher, an academic. I spend a fair amount of time over summer revising my lectures: a fair amount of time every week doing, reading and reviewing research in my field. I have been called an expert: however I know how big the gaps are in my field and I consider myself ignorant.
I am perplexed as to how people can be certain, confident: assuming that the data is correct and the numbers are reasonable. However, many within academia consider themselves as some kind of secular priesthood, with the authority and duty to not merely teach and question, but to regulate, cajole, and ban humanity, because parts of our behaviour are less than noble, and may cause pain.
Consider the current rules of consent for young people who — as they have from time immemorial — get drunk and end up in bed together. Now, my advice to my sons remains two fold: God says this should remain within marriage and if you sleep with a woman you may find yourself raising her child. But we have not reached the point where this has happening in California, but only on campuses.
The bill holds hostage funding for colleges and universities unless “the governing board of each community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the governing boards of independent postsecondary institutions shall adopt a policy concerning sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking…”That policy is strictly defined within the bill, and mandates new, uniform procedures for the reporting, counseling, and investigation of alleged sexual misconduct on campus.
The terminology used in the bill itself is vague to the point that it endangers the rights of the accused, and the dignity of the accuser.
Section 1 of the bill states that “the accused’s belief in affirmative consent” cannot have arisen “from the intoxication or recklessness of the accused.”
It also states that “it shall not be a valid excuse that the accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented to the sexual activity if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity under any of the following circumstances: (A) The complainant was asleep or unconscious; (B) The complainant was incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication, so that the complainant could not understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity.”
Coupled with the campus “kangaroo court” system currently in place at so many American universities — including California — this bill is a recipe for disaster.
Real talk: sex happens. Drunk, sloppy, reckless sex happens on college campuses and there’s not a bill in the world that can eliminate the oft-depressing reality of “the morning after.”
This bill not only assumes a drunk male is guilty of assault, but assumes a drunk female is incapable of consenting to sex, and does not define what it means to be “incapacitated.”
Now, by law, in a situation where a substantial amount of alcohol is involved, consent cannot exist, the aggressor is by default a rapist, and an even-willing partner is by default a victim.
It’s insulting.
Not surprisingly, throughout the entirety of the bill, there is not one provision dedicated to ensuring the preservation of the rights of the accused
#HeForShe when this is what she thinks of him? #WomenAgainstFeminism #GoFuckYourselvesFeminists pic.twitter.com/HjnDvPY55u
— JanetBloomfield (@JudgyBitch1) September 29, 2014
Well, I have some other issues with the university system as it is, and our educational system, which Hosea has comments on. But there is a third bit of advice I give my sons: Do not have a Girlfriend from the USA or Canada, for their courts are full of morons and they will destroy your life.
Stanford could call offering my boys a free ride and I would forbid them from accepting it. What California has done is the ex post facto criminalization of normal, healthy human behavior. Because let’s be clear about this: It’s already rape-rape to have sex with somebody who drank enough to pass out, but getting to know someone a little better over cocktails and then deciding to make the beast with two backs is a tradition predating, so to speak, the written word.
And now it could make one or both of my sons into criminals.
What this is doing is making it unwise for any man to go to university, and making the academic halls a nunnery. It fits into how most fathers think of the tertiary system: a series of trade schools. Boys are strongly advised to do something practical, and since in New Zealand there are no general prerequisites, we do our training as diplomas and bachelor’s degrees. Staying away from the liberal arts: there be dragons.
But this means that the door to knowledge has been drawn up. The academics are akin to the priests of Hosea’s time, turning knowledge into esoterica, and encouraging vice, for they could profit from that industry.
Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land; there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away.
Yet let no one contend, and let none accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest. You shall stumble by day; the prophet also shall stumble with you by night; and I will destroy your mother. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
The more they increased, the more they sinned against me; I will change their glory into shame. They feed on the sin of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity. And it shall be like people, like priest; I will punish them for their ways and repay them for their deeds. They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the LORD to cherish
(Hosea 4:1-10 ESV)
I tell my sons to avoid the Arts. Not because I think the Arts are valueless: I think they have great value. But because Academics do not read. Instead the take a palette knife and smear paint over the great masters, destroy the poets, and turn everything into power structures and polemic.
Foucault was a fool, and Derrida a manipulative psychopath, but they had an education. They knew their mythos, their Bible; the common history of the Western culture, which includes enough science to understand that there are hard limits on what we can do. However that they liked not: as their existential nihilism moved into a sense of unreflexive action (so much like the fascists, who act, but then do not think).
But the modern Academic hates knowledge. He wants to be an activist, a social justice warrior. The study of the writings of previous generations is invalid because their skins have no melanin, their chromosomes lack an extra X chromosome, or their personal life was not perverted enough. Instead of introducing Shakespeare and Pope, we get the Hunger Games and song lyrics (but not Cohen or Cave, for they write well, and that has to be shunned).
And thus the people lack knowledge: despite the fact that we can now access the works of all the Victorians and before that freely, we are taught we should not.
We cannot change this system, young man. We cannot. It is too corrupt, it is too entrenched.
Instead we should avoid it. Let the arts faculty become a rainbow ghetto. Ignore your English Teacher: read the old stuff, the good stuff: Dickens and the Victorians, Eliot and Joyce, Austen, Shakespeare: the Bible (always the Bible) Virgil, Homer, Augustine, Luther, Calvin/ Educate yourself. The University will not do it for you.
For without knowledge the people believe the pretty lies, and wander, deluded, into disaster upon disaster.