Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘colleges and universities’

Yes, feds need to rethink campus sexual misconduct policies

A series of tweets I did about Thursday’s major announcement on Title IX policy from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:

I went on to explain that it all starts with the Department of Education’s OCR (Office for Civil Rights) 2011 Dear Colleague letter, and the further guidance that followed, which I wrote up here.

That’s a quote by Yoffe from a California Law Review article by Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen previously noted in this space here and here.

The courageous Harvard Law professors who called for a rethink of the Obama-era policy — Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Nancy Gertner — were profiled in a recent issue of The Crimson and in earlier coverage in this space here and here.

More coverage of DeVos’s speech and initiative, in which she pledged to use appropriate notice-and-comment methods rather than Dear Colleague guidance to introduce changes (“The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over”): Christina Hoff Sommers/Chronicle of Higher Education, Benjamin Wermund/Politico, Jeannie Suk Gersen/New Yorker, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr./WSJ and cases going against universities, Johnson/City Journal, Bret Stephens/NYT (“no campus administrator was going to risk his federal funds for the sake of holding dear the innocence of students accused of rape”), Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Hans Bader/CEI, Scott Greenfield and more (no basis in law to begin with), Robby Soave/Reason and more.

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A tale of research permission

“Scott Alexander” recounts with much humor an episode in which, observing an apparent weakness in the way patients are screened for bipolar disorder, he suggested that the effectiveness of the screen be put to a study as his hospital. That meant human subjects research, which meant submitting the idea to an institutional review board, which meant a sustained encounter with the federally prescribed regulatory apparatus that empowers IRBs. [Slate Star Codex] Our earlier coverage of IRBs is here, and Philip Hamburger has a much more formal and sustained critique, with footnotes, in this 2007 Northwestern University Law Review paper (“they require the licensing of speech and the press [when directed toward] the pursuit of scientific knowledge.”) See also Zachary Schrag, “You Can’t Ask That,” Washington Monthly, 2014 and, on the recent changes in regulation, Kate Murphy/New York Times and Richard A. Shweder and Richard E. Nisbett, Chronicle of Higher Education.

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From the comments: better safe than sued

Sunday’s ADA-and-the-web post prompted some useful reader discussion. Commenter Jim Collins told this story:

A while back I went to community college. I was recovering from an injury and in a vocational rehabilitation program. Part of the program was working for the college. We had a grant for computer workstations. At that time there was a shortage of computers at the college. We had a large room assigned to us and we were to cram in as many workstations as we could. When I submitted my layout I had 60 workstations in the room. I was asked how many were wheelchair accessible? I said “The front twenty.” I was told that all of the workstations had to be wheelchair accessible because the college didn’t want to have the chance of a lawsuit. In the end we could only fit 40 workstations. We lost 20 workstations. The part that got me was that the room we were assigned was on the second floor of a building. The building was grandfathered in and didn’t have wheelchair access. Another thing was that in the history of the college the most students that they ever had in wheelchairs was five.

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Campus climate roundup

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A note on college-degree credentialism in the workplace

From “Walker” in the comments at the Slate Star Codex blog (“Scott Alexander”), which had been discussing the overemphasis on college degrees as a prerequisite for mid- to upper-level management jobs that some persons without degrees could perform very well:

I am a mid-level engineering manager for a very large aerospace company. Their rationale for requiring degrees is clear and I suspect it is shared by many companies. They prefer to hire all of the skilled employees as “exempt”, meaning not subject to fair labor standards laws and not eligible for overtime. The state and federal labor overseers require that the company have well-defined rules for distinguishing exempt from non-exempt and the company uses a degree as one of the primary criteria. The HR folks will absolutely not allow deviations from this policy because it would jeopardize the entire company job category structure. I can cite examples and details if anyone is interested but this is a really clear policy across every place I have worked.

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Campus speech wars: the law school advantage

By demanding that students “imaginatively and sympathetically reconstruct the best argument on the other side,” a good legal education can help inoculate you against blinkered self-righteousness, which may be one reason why relatively few of the recent campus shout-downs and brawls have taken place at law schools. [Heather Gerken (dean, YLS), Time] And don’t miss John McWhorter on the essential theatricality of campus silencing, allyship, and privilege-shaming [via Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic]

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Higher education roundup

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Campus climate roundup

  • This seems an important point: requiring students to engage in social justice work impinges on their moral independence [Julie Lawton, DePaul Law]
  • 7 minutes of madness: astounding Michael Moynihan video on the Evergreen State blowup [Vice News, language]
  • Classics in ruins [Sandra Kotta/Quillette, parts one, two]
  • “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race” [Coyote]
  • Claim: college violated Title IX by not doing more to stop anonymous off-campus social media posts [T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post on suit against University of Mary Washington]
  • Historical figure almost wholly forgotten except as name on building. Worth exhuming just to manifest our disdain? [Charles Reichmann, San Francisco Chronicle on Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley] More: Online shaming mobs from both sides of the political spectrum now going after provocative academics [Heterodox Academy]

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Campus climate roundup

  • This is big: Betsy DeVos appoints First Amendment advocate Adam Kissel as Deputy Assistant Secretary for higher ed programs [Inside Higher Ed]
  • “He is currently exploring restorative justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective.” [East Bay Times, Berkeleyside on wayward former Diablo Valley College faculty member]
  • “Oxford apologizes for saying that avoiding eye contact is racism, but not because the claim is mad.” [“Fabius Maximus” on BBC report]
  • “…the Michigan Political Union has since had to avoid other debate topics for fear of similar shout-downs.” [National Review]
  • Advice for academics: “Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted.” [Jon Haidt, Peter Berkowitz on Duke Divinity case]
  • Things began to spin awry at Evergreen State College with plan to require “equity justification” for every faculty hire [Bret Weinstein, WSJ; Inside Higher Ed; Seattle Times editorial]

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Grad student to sue over portrayal in Laura Kipnis book

Laura Kipnis, who wrote a widely read article on the problems with the Title IX accusation process on campus and then herself had to fend off a Title IX complaint based on having written the article, is now being sued by the same Northwestern University graduate student who pursued the earlier Title IX complaints. The woman says she was portrayed under a pseudonym in Kipnis’s new book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes To Campus and was unfairly characterized as, among other things, “litigious.” [Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, Robby Soave, earlier on Kipnis]

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