swarthmore college

Swarthmore College Sexual Assault Victim Speaks Out

by College Fix Staff on May 7, 2013

From an op-ed published Monday in the Swarthmore Daily Gazette by student Mia Ferguson, who has filed a complaint accusing college officials of under-reporting and mishandling sexual assault claims on campus.

I was sexually assaulted my first year at Swarthmore. With the support of friends, teammates, classmates, RAs, CAs, peer counselors, and staff members, I’ve come to a secure emotional place regarding the experience that allows me to identify as a “survivor”.

The past few days, however, have thrown me into trauma. My assault was not violent. My assailant hasn’t physically retaliated against me (then again, I am strong and so are my friends…). I haven’t been frequently triggered. So, what has horrified me this week? The administrators’ mishandling of my case.

Members of the administration have attempted to push me into darkness. They summon those who are closest to me, those whom I first told about my assault, into “emergency” meetings. When I am summoned to no such meetings, I feel powerless. When they try to get access to my emails, which I understand they are already reading, I feel powerless. When they summon my assailant to a meeting, without informing me, I am powerless. I am unsafe.

When I, however, have the support of members of the student body, members of the faculty, a national network of people fighting these issues, and, primarily, the law, I am not powerless. When I can speak out about my experiences, I am not powerless.

As many of you know, on April 18, Hope Brinn and I submitted a Clery Complaint to the Department of Education regarding Swarthmore’s violations of the Clery Act. From under-reporting and intimidating to under-publicizing crimes on campus, Swarthmore has failed to fulfill this act on many counts. We will soon be submitting our Title IX Complaint to the Office of Civil Rights. The complaint identifies specific cases in which members of the college’s administration have discriminated against, retaliated against, and furthered the trauma of students. If you are interested in gaining an understanding of what exact parts of the Clery Act and Title IX the college has violated, feel free to contact me.

I want this college to show me it doesn’t want to violate my rights; instead, those whom I thought would support me in making Swarthmore more safe, secure, and actively intolerant of sexual assault and rights violations seem to be attempting to damage me.

I can’t tell in whom I should place my trust. There are members of this administration who are in support of what I’m doing. They are inhibited from coming forward because of the system that mandates they stay quiet, or risk their employment. I wonder, however, would you risk your employment to be certain that your friend weren’t shoved against a wall, suffocated, and raped?

Swarthmore Accused of Under Reporting Sexual Assault Crimes

by Danielle Charette - Swarthmore College on April 22, 2013

A group of students at Swarthmore College have filed a formal complaint with the federal government that alleges administrators mishandle and under report sexual assault crimes on campus.

Swarthmore is the latest in a growing list of institutions across the nation to be hit with claims of administrators sweeping various sexual assault crimes under the rug.

The students behind the Swarthmore College complaint allege campus officials have failed to comply with the Clery Act, a 1998 statute that requires all universities receiving federal student loans to disclose criminal behavior that occurs on or near campus.

Concerned that Swarthmore’s administration has not adequately addressed allegations of sexual assault, Mia Ferguson and Hope Brinn, two Swarthmore sophomores, filed the complaint April 18 along with the testimonies of 10 other students. It will be reviewed by the Department of Education in the coming weeks.

In filing their complaint, Ferguson and Brinn consulted with two 2011 graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who spearheaded a similar complaint against their campus, also citing the Clery Act.

Ferguson, Brinn and the other 10 students claim campus officials persistently under report incidents of sexual battery, sexual assault, and rape; and that some victims are harassed and intimidated, among other allegations.

A recent article in The New York Times describes Brinn’s situation, in which a “fellow student repeatedly sexually harassed her and broke into her room in the middle of the night.”

“Ms. Brinn … said that college administrators tried to dissuade her from making a formal complaint, made light of what had happened, said that she was partly to blame, and in their official records, inaccurately described her allegations to make them seem less serious,” the article states.

The students’ formal allegation against Swarthmore arrived just three days after the college’s president, Rebecca Chopp, announced she and the dean of students, Liz Braun, would pursue an external review of Swarthmore’s procedures, policies and sanctions dealing with sexual misconduct.

In an April 15 campus-wide email, Chopp stated: “[W]e have zero tolerance for sexual assault, abuse, and violence on our campus. It is against the law, it is wrong, and we must all continue to reinforce the message that even one such incident is too many on our campus.”

But Brinn told Swarthmore’s Daily Gazette that an external review was “insufficient,” citing more “systemic” issues. Ferguson said she wishes to frame the issue of sexual assault within “a national movement.”

That “movement” seems to have had a domino effect, with Swarthmore women consulting UNC graduates, the UNC women consulting women who have made similar complaints at Amherst, and Amherst women drawing upon the work of advocates at Yale.

In fact, the same day Swarthmore students filed their complaint, similar ones were also lodged by students at Occidental College – who also touched base with college women behind similar allegations across the nation.

The complaint against Swarthmore comes during what Chopp has called the “spring of our discontent.”

The semester has been full of student dissent, including a controversial student chalking campaign against supposed “rape culture,” a failed referendum to remove Greek life from the campus, and scheduled commencement speaker Robert Zolleick’s withdrawal from the ceremony after student attacks on his record.

After weeks of contention, Chopp called for a community meeting, where more than 200 students, faculty and staff gathered. Most of the conversation centered on the administration’s response to sexual assault. The meeting was described as emotional and meaningful. Dean Braun admitted she “was really moved.” Unknown to the administration, the Clery complaint was in the works before the meeting.

President Chopp has said she has not seen the official legal complaint yet, but plans to fully cooperate with the Department of Education’s investigation.

Fix contributor Danielle Charette is a student at Swarthmore College.

IMAGE: Sheba Also/Flickr

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Demonized By Students, Renowned Foreign Policy Expert Cancels Commencement Appearance

by Danielle Charette - Swarthmore College on April 9, 2013

After weeks of intense and sometimes personal attacks on Robert Zoellick and his political reputation by Swarthmore College students, the former president of the World Bank and U.S. trade representative announced he will decline the college’s invitation to give one of its commencement addresses.

Zoellick, who earned his bachelor’s degree with academic honors from Swarthmore in 1975, said in an email to the college’s president that returning to his alma mater for this June’s graduation ceremony – in which he was also slated to receive an honorary degree – was more controversial than it was worth.

Students in recent weeks have called him an architect of the Iraq War, claimed he characterizes Arabs as evil, criticized his stance on free trade, and even called him a war criminal.

Moreover, there were rumors that students would disrupt Zoellick’s graduation speech. Administrators also did little to quell student unrest over his scheduled appearance, nor did they dispute malicious accusations made against his record.

It was all too much for Zoellick.

“I don’t want to disrupt what should be a special day for the graduates, their families, and friends,” Zoellick stated. “Nor do I have an interest in participating in an unnecessarily controversial event.”

Swarthmore President Rebecca Chopp cited students’ protests over Zoellick’s slated appearance as the reason for his cancellation.

“In light of the discussions that have been taking place in the student press over the last week or so, in which the selection of Mr. Zoellick has been the subject of debate, he has informed us that he will neither accept the degree nor participate in the ceremony,” she said in a campuswide email sent Friday.

In the wake of the news, many students on campus Monday and Tuesday said amongst themselves that they are disappointed a vocal and misguided minority ruined an opportunity to hear Zoellick speak, as his views run contrary to much of the day-to-day campus discourse.

Most of the campus controversy had begun with student complaints over Zoellick’s role as an advisor to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Some students also shared concern that Zoellick signed a 1998 letter on behalf of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century in favor of “removing Saddam’s regime from power.”

For that 1998 letter and an article Zoellick wrote titled “A Republican Foreign Policy,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 2000, some students smeared Zoellick in campus publications as a “war criminal,” the “chief architect of the Iraq War,” and a man with a “Manichean” view of world power—claims reiterated on Facebook through a student-initiated forum to reconsider Zoellick’s honorary degree.

But the outspoken protestors may have been in the minority.

In a March 28 editorial in the Phoenix, Swarthmore’s weekly student newspaper, junior Tyler Becker argued that “boiling down Zoellick’s impressive public service career to the Iraq War is not only a gross mischaracterization, it’s factually wrong.”

Sam Sussman, a senior and coeditor of the progressive campus magazine Left of Liberal, also pushed back against Zoellick’s detractors.

Sussman said in an email that “after Mr. Zoellick’s less researched critics rightfully retreated from their incorrect accusation that he was ‘an architect’ of the Iraq War, they turned to the more nebulous — and equally erroneous — claim that he ‘characterizes Arabs as evil.’ ”

In an apparent concession that they had exaggerated facts connecting Zoellick to the Iraq War, student activists pivoted to other critiques of Zoellick’s record, namely his position as former U.S. trade representative and his support of free trade agreements.

Swarthmore senior Will Lawrence, who emerged as one of Zoellick’s most vocal critics last month, cited Zoellick’s affiliation with Goldman Sachs and advocacy for free trade in Latin America as reasons to oppose his honorary degree, for example.

Regardless of factual merit, controversy simmered in the campus newspapers for weeks, while the school’s administration and faculty failed to come to Zoellick’s defense.

Indeed, when students against Zoellick’s pending appearance organized a meeting to discuss his record further, campus administrators even sent Alina Wong, Dean of the Sophomore Class and Director of the Intercultural Center, to mediate the conversation.

By the time the meeting took place, the issue seemed to be quieting down, with only about 20 students in attendance. But by then, the campus was firmly polarized on the issue.

A minority of dissenters continued to frame Zolleick as an unacceptable commencement speaker in campus news media. This vocal minority also failed to quell rumors that they might resort to disrupting Zoellick’s portion of the graduation ceremony, though others suggest that they were only planning to protest Zoellick’s presence before his speech, not during the actual event.

Fix contributor Danielle Charette is a student at Swarthmore College.

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IMAGE: World Bank Photo Collection/Flickr

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Outrageously Dumb Campus Moments of the Month (February)

by Jennifer Kabbany - Associate Editor on March 1, 2013

The College Fix presents a roundup of the top scandals, screw-ups, and stupid decisions involving college campuses. February has been a banner month for bad decisions. Let’s jump right in:

3. HEDONISM 101: A student group at Swarthmore College recently formed, for all intents and purposes, to promote group masturbation. The student organizer of the group says it’s not a “masturbation club,” but adds he wouldn’t stop its members from masturbating in front of each other if they’re comfortable with it.

Let’s be real. The “American Masturbatory Theater Company” is what its title implies. One need look no further than the wording of its fliers, posted across campus, which states its goal is to create “a space for creation, exploration, and understanding of intimacy. … To share ourselves and rejoice in the sharing … to cast our names into the fire, to destroy barriers … to experiment towards a sensation of unmediated intimacy, because it is good and beautiful and worthwhile.” In effect, a call to hedonism.

What’s worse is that this club doesn’t seem to be raising any concerns, if a general lack of mainstream media coverage on the group is any indication. But this shouldn’t be a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge – college students will be college students” situation. It’s morally offensive. Not the masturbation part per se – but the student orgy undertone and whatever-feels-good-do-it mantra is off the charts.

CLICK HERE to read more about the “American Masturbatory Theater Company.”

2. NUTTY PROFESSORS: Two examples emerged this month that exposed how extreme and bizarre professors can be. Remember folks, the following are just two examples caught on film. It’s the only way we are truly able to peek into major college campuses and get a raw and honest glimpse of what is often going on therein.

Exhibit A: An Ohio State professor likens Republicans to apes and advises students that in order for females to achieve gender equality they need to start killing more people. Seriously.

Exhibit B: A science professor at Columbia University began a lecture by stripping into his boxers and eating a banana while rap music played in the background. As the professor sat in the fetal position, two “actors” dressed in ninja costumes walked onstage and placed white stuffed animals – lambs – on stools before the audience. The ninjas blindfolded the lambs, then a ninja impaled one of the stuffed animals with a long sword and banged it against the stool – right as an image of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers on 9/11 started rolling on a large screen behind the performance. It was the start of a long and graphic series of disturbing war images played on screen.

Post a comment to weigh in on who gets top Nutty Professor billing.

1. PORN ON CAMPUS: On Feb. 8, Washington University in St. Louis hosted a panel of porn stars who talked to students about what it’s like to work in the industry, and spoke on their most interesting sexual experiences, among other topics. The event was designed for students interested in pursuing a career in the pornography business, or for those who just wanted to see their favorite porn stars up close and personal.

In mid-February, as part of the University of Chicago’s inaugural “sex week,” the school flew in Axel Braun, the director of more than 400 pornographic films, for a Q-and-A. The school also screened one of his films, “Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody.”

To borrow a phrase, “The Porning of America” is alive and well at college campuses. The sad thing is: pornography is highly insulting and degrading to women; it ruins the sanctity and specialness of sexual intercourse; it desensitizes couples’ intimate experiences; it creates unrealistic expectations; it causes people to seek more and more sexual extremes in the bedroom; it has millions of men and women in an addictive vice grip; it’s filth passed off as normal.

Truly, the list goes on and on. Administrators at Washington University in St. Louis and University of Chicago should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for normalizing and promoting such smut.

Jennifer Kabbany is associate editor of The College Fix.

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IMAGE: Ardens Way of Life/Flickr

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Professor Blames Society for Prison Population

by Danielle Charette - Swarthmore College on February 25, 2013

A well respected UC Santa Barbara sociology professor in a recent lecture blamed nearly everything but personal responsibility for the high crime and incarceration rates that have long plagued black and Latino communities.

“We need to take accountability for what the state and government has done,” said Dr. Victor Rios during his Feb. 21 guest address at Swarthmore College. “Officers are still beating down black and brown kids.”

And U.S. law enforcement is overtly radicalized and “hyper-masculine,” said Rios, a highly regarded sociologist among leftist academic circles. Rios, a self-described former gang member who eventually turned his life around and earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, has won several awards and grants, has been featured in many news reports, and often gives motivational speeches at schools.

Rios’ address at Swathmore was given not only to college students, but visiting school children as well. He told them he finds fault not only with police, but also politicians and the public, for the high amount of black and Latino incarceration rates, saying people’s fear of “radicals like Malcolm X” is a factor. Rios added the school-to-prison pipeline can be linked to the way some Americans label young people.

“It’s not a question of whether black and Latinos are more prone to crime, but how we choose to label them,” he said. “How you label someone determines how you treat them.”

With that, the term “at risk” becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy for inner city youth, he said.

Rios neglected to speak on what role, if any, he believes personal choice, the drug trade, or family lifestyles in high-crime communities has played in those statistics.

And while he focused on the rising number of incarcerations since the 1960s, he did not address Bureau of Justice Statistics stats that the violent crime rate has been on a steady decline since 1973. Rios isn’t a fan of jail, anyway. He said he prefers “restorative justice.”

His 2011 book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, “analyzes how punitive juvenile crime policies and criminalization affect the everyday lives of urban youth,” according to his website.

In his speech, Rios said he aims to couch his goals in language that most people can understand. Conservatives, he noted, are excellent at this: “They don’t say they hate black people; they say that welfare makes people lazy.”

Rios’ talked was dubbed “Consequences of Mass Incarceration of Black and Latino Boys” and sponsored by a plethora of Swarthmore groups and academic departments, including: the Black Cultural Center, Latin American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Dean’s Office, the Provost and President’s Offices, the Queer and Trans Conference, and the Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology, Psychology and Educational Studies departments.

Rios, a former Oakland gang member, has come full circle, he told the audience. In a 1994 PBS Frontline documentary on the high school dropout rate, Rios was personally featured as a dropout and delinquent. The documentary shows footage of him being forcibly detained by two officers in a high school hallway. Now a Ph.D. sociologist and “social justice” advocate, Rios is a dynamic speaker.

In his lecture, he went out of his way to encourage visiting Chester, Pa., school children in the audience, saying: “I look forward to you being in college someday … and maybe even being your professor.”

While Rios’ argument was offered with zeal, others scholars have poked holes in ideas behind his beliefs.

For example, Heather MacDonald, the John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an outspoken advocate for New York City’s so-called “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in January that “the advocacy community sees only racism in the fact that the bulk of trespass and other stops happen in minority neighborhoods.”

“But that racism charge,” noted MacDonald, “ignores the statistical truth that crime, too, is disproportionately concentrated in those neighborhoods.”

Rios did not cite the demographic makeup of the neighborhoods he studies and kept his remarks mostly to abstract complaints about “The System.”

“I’m assuming most of us in here are progressive,” admitted Rios.

Clearly his peers in academia are big fans, based on the number of speeches he gives and accolades he has received.

“Professor Rios’ ambitious research on the factors that contribute to the social marginalization and hypercriminalization of Latino and black men has garnered significant national attention,” stated UCSB’s Verta Taylor, chair of sociology, in a 2012 announcement that Rios was awarded a $300,000 grant to study “how the interactions between gang-associated youth and their parents, school professionals, police, and probation officers affect their identity and criminal behavior. ”

“This new project will provide insight into the important role that parents and other authority figures play in helping young people at risk for gang involvement unshackle themselves from the criminal justice system,” she said. “Rios has a keen commitment to public sociology and is emerging as a leading expert on gang process and gang reduction.”

Fix contributor Danielle Charette is a student at Swarthmore College.

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IMAGE: Side One Cincy/Flickr

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Professor Promotes ‘Queer Christ’ Concept To Students

by Jennifer Kabbany - Associate Editor on February 11, 2013

A recent guest lecture at Swarthmore College by a prominent homosexual seminary professor highlighted a growing argument among the so-called queer community that Jesus was bisexual.

In particular, the Rev. Patrick Cheng, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, told the students that Jesus was a subversive person and God’s way of “queering the world,” so to speak.

Cheng said Christ was “always coming out in the gospels” and that “Christ is God coming out.”

“At its heart, Christianity is queer,” Cheng told the students during the Feb. 7 talk. “It’s not just a matter of being tolerant. Christianity is queer at its core.”

Cheng, author of the 2011 book “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology,” as well as “From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ,” published last year, argues queer theology essentially takes its cues from Jesus, who Cheng described in his speech as the ultimate boundary crosser.

“Queerness is at its heart radical love,” he said.

Cheng, who holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Union Theological Seminary, and also blogs about religion and homosexuality on Huffington Post, emphasized during his speech that feminist and queer theorists such as himself build theology from their own experience.

In fact all of the theology he spoke of in his presentation, according to a student who attended the lecture for The College Fix, seemed to relate directly back to his life as a queer Asian male.

At one point he was asked by an audience member about the role of the Bible. Cheng conceded different types of Christians emphasize scripture, tradition, reason and experience differently, and hinted he values all those things, but said emerging theology prioritizes experience, especially for “marginalized people.”

Cheng’s talk highlights a growing trend among the homosexual community that argues Jesus was bisexual.

In his “Queer Christ” book, Cheng argued there are “seven models” to consider: the Erotic Christ; the Out Christ; the Liberator Christ; the Transgressive Christ; the Self-Loving Christ; the Interconnected Christ; and the Hybrid Christ, according to portions of his book posted on Amazon.

In a March 2011 op-ed on Huffington Post, Cheng noted “Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry also reinforces the notion of Jesus as the embodiment of radical love and boundary-crossing.”

“Jesus Christ is the embodiment of radical love because – in addition to crossing divine and social boundaries – Jesus also crosses sexual boundaries,” Cheng wrote. “This is, Jesus’ life and ministry can be viewed as dissolving the rigid line between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual.’ ”

In his piece, Cheng cites the Rev. Nancy Wilson’s argument that Christ was likely bisexual, quoting from her book “Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus and the Bible” that “the most obvious way to see Jesus as a sexual being is to see him as bisexual in orientation, if not also in his actions.”

In addition to Cheng and Wilson, another prominent theologian to posit this theory includes lesbian Christian author Rev. Kittredge Cherry. She blogged on the Huffington Post last March that “nobody knows for sure whether the historical Jesus was attracted to other men or felt like he was female inside.”

“Some progressive Bible scholars do argue that Jesus had a homosexual relationship,” Cherry notes. “Chicago Theological Seminary professor Theodore Jennings presents the most fully developed explanation in his book ‘The Man Jesus Loved.’ Queer Christ images are emerging now in theology books, at art galleries, on stage, in churches, and across the World Wide Web.”

Jennifer Kabbany is assistant editor of The College Fix.

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IMAGE: Photo Dean/Flickr

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