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Citing Inclusion and Equality, Yale Agrees to Pony Up for Student Sex-Change Procedures

by College Fix Staff on April 28, 2013

Citing such lofty notions as inclusion and equality, Yale University has agreed to pony up for students’ sex change procedures.

“While Yale was not among the first schools to repeal its coverage exclusion, we hope that this represents a commitment to catch up to our peers in terms of offering transgender students an equitable student life and health care experience,” Gabriel Murchison, a member of the Resource Alliance for Gender Equity, told The Yale Daily News.

The school already offers the coverage for employees, and the student coverage for such procedures launches Aug. 1.

So now Yale joins Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and Penn, which offer such surgeries on their health plans already.

Ivy League priorities at their finest, folks.

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Duke Health Insurance To Cover Sex-Change Operations

by College Fix Staff on April 23, 2013

Duke University has become the latest in a long and growing parade of institutions that will cover sex-change operations on student health insurance plans.

“Sexual reassignment surgery for transgendered students will be covered in students’ health care plans, effective this Fall,” the Duke Chronicle recently reported.

Yale University is also considering such a measure for students (it already ponies up for faculty and staff). Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and Penn offer such surgeries on their health plans already.

And the domino effect continues.

Already Duke University’s decision has prompted the UNC-system to consider the same, the Daily Tar Heel reported Monday.

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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Did Princeton Hide a Damaging Rape Survey?

by Nathan Harden - Fix Editor on April 2, 2013

Our friends at Jezebel.com don’t always have a lot to say that we agree with here at the Fix, but we saw a story this week that caught our attention. Jezebel’s Katie Baker writes about a sexual assault survey at Princeton University that could have you shaking your head in disbelief:

One in six female Princeton undergraduates said they experienced “non-consensual vaginal penetration” during their time at the University, according to an unpublished survey from 2008 — as in five years ago — that was recently leaked to The Daily Princetonian. The numbers suggest that rates of sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus may be significantly higher than the rates at which they are actually reported or adjudicated.

Baker accuses Princeton of trying to hide the embarrassing results of the survey. This sort of sweep-it-under-the-rug mentality wouldn’t be without precedent. The College Fix reported last week that a Department of Education spokesperson said that Yale, Princeton’s Ivy League peer institution, had under-reported cases of sexual assault “for a very long time.” Universities, in general, don’t go out of their way to publicize campus sex crimes.

It’s obvious why elite universities would be less-than-thrilled about the prospect of publishing just how common sexual assault is on their campuses. Take the Princeton survey, for example: A young woman having a 15% chance of being raped during her four years at a university isn’t the sort of thing that makes for an appealing recruitment statistic.

The Princetonian provides more details on the previously unpublished report, which was originally conducted in 2008, but was just now leaked to the student paper:

According to the survey, more than 28 percent of female undergraduate students reported that they were touched in a sexual manner or had their clothes removed without consent. About 12 percent said they were forced to receive or perform oral sex, and an additional 14 percent were said they were victims of attempted forced oral sex. Another 6.2 percent of female undergraduate respondents said they experienced attempted non-consensual vaginal penetration.

Of the 809 female undergraduates who filled out the undergraduate female survey, more than 120 answered affirmatively to the statement, “A man put his penis into my vagina, or someone inserted fingers or objects without my consent.”

Truly disturbing. Lost in these statistics is the often damaging role that alcohol abuse plays in cases of sexual assault. Being drunk is never an excuse for assault of any kind, but it does impair judgement and lower inhibitions–it’s a contributing factor. And the line between “drunk sex” and “date rape” is often at the point where an alcohol-fueled, consensual make-out session or hook-up goes suddenly beyond the lines of consent.

Very often, campus rape is not a case of a an attack by a stranger, it’s an attack by an acquaintance–an attack by someone familiar. This adds a unique layer of trauma for the young woman who is attacked because they may find themselves still going to class with the guy afterward, still encountering him in the halls. Sadly, I hear about this kind of thing all the time.

One would think that an elite university would be a relatively safe place for a young woman to be. I don’t know why Princeton officials chose not to publish the results of their 2008 survey. But if the Princeton survey is even remotely accurate, it ought to make us disgusted with the state of sexual mores in our society. It’s infuriating that so much sexual assault occurs on our campuses–most of it unpunished.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of SEX & GOD AT YALE: porn, political correctness, and a good education gone bad.

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(Image by RobGallop/Flickr)

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Yale Acknowledges ‘Historic’ Levels of Sexual Misconduct

by Nathan Harden - Fix Editor on March 29, 2013

Yale University has made headlines in recent years for hosting numerous controversial sex-themed events in the classroom, most notably showing hard-core pornography to students that depicted fantasy rape and sadism as part of the infamous “Sex Week” at Yale.

Worse yet, the university became the target of a federal investigation for its harmful sexual climate. At the conclusion of the investigation last year, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education’s office for Civil Rights said that Yale had under-reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault “for a very long time,” and failed to keep adequate records of incidents of sexual misconduct.

This week the Daily Telegraph reports that sexual misconduct is worse than ever at Yale:

Yale is fighting to stamp out sexual assaults on campus after a rise to ‘historic’ levels, university officials said.

The Ivy League school in Connecticut, where tuition costs around $50,000-a-year, came under federal investigation in 2011 after 15 students filed a complaint alleging that the university is a ‘hostile sexual environment’ and failed to deal with incidents of sexual harassment.

Their evidence included a video of alleged Yale fraternity pledges holding a sign that reads ‘We love Yale sluts’ and chanting ‘No Means Yes’ on campus.

According to a Yale committee, in the second half of 2011, 14 sexual assaults were reported which includes rape and unwanted touching. Some 13 attacks were reported last year.

A separate federal report showed that in 2011 there were 37 sexual assaults at Yale - a rise from 21 attacks the year before.

However these statistics may not reflect reality as rapes and sexual assault are typically crimes that are under-reported.

Yale officials, while publicly expressing concern about cases of real-world sexual violence on campus, nevertheless insist that porn films that include glamorized portrayals of sexual violence and rape are allowable in the classroom under their definition of “academic freedom.”

Fantasy rape is “academic freedom?” you might ask. In fact, those are the very words the Yale Dean’s office used to explain to me why it allowed hard-core sexual violence to be screened in the classroom, as I first reported in my book Sex & God at Yale (p.209), published last summer.

In this way, Yale officials seem to confuse “academic freedom” with having no academic standards whatsoever. What, after all, could be more indicative of the lack of academic standards than showing violent porn in the classroom in the context of ‘how-to’ style sex education, meant to education students on how they might conduct their own sex lives?

Until Yale officials begin to take responsibility for the heinous values they are sponsoring by hosting such events in the classroom– events which resulted in many Yale students, including myself, witnessing the abuse and flagrant humiliation of women in the context of sex education–their purported effort to combat sexual misconduct on campus will remain, in my eyes, as unimpressive as it has been thus far ineffective.

Bottom line: The toxic sexual culture at Yale is exacerbated by the negligent attitude of the university officials charged with its leadership. It is the responsibility of students, parents, and alumni–as well as the U.S. taxpayers who subsidize Yale’s programs through a myriad of grants and subsidized student loans–to hold those officials accountable.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix.

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Gender-Neutral Housing Increases Risk of Sexual Assault

by Alec Torres - Yale University on March 28, 2013

Gender-neutral housing, which allows male and female students to room together on campus, is the latest liberal trend in higher-ed. Yale has been a pioneer in this progressive cause, along with other Ivy League schools, first allowing gender-neutral housing for seniors in 2010 and then juniors in 2012.

This week a student at Yale wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News in favor of the expansion of gender-neutral housing to sophomores. Currently, only seniors and juniors have the ability to share dorm rooms with members of the opposite sex, but since the Yale administration evidently has no problem with the idea of gender-neutral housing in principle, there is little doubt that this privilege will be extended to the sophomore class in a matter of time.

The argument usually runs that to separate students in housing based on gender is arbitrary and particularly unfair to those of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community.

Little needs to be said of Yale’s widely-publicized amoral sexual culture (one need only read the titles of Sex Week events or look up Yale’s record of sexual misconduct), however I have yet to see a single proponent of gender-neutral housing properly address the negative implications of the opposite sex living together and have seen even fewer conservatives voicing serious objections.

Though the usual focus is on the effect housing policy has on LGBT students, for the sake of argument let’s look past the clamor of the LGBT community for new privileges because such a decision would undoubtedly affect many heterosexuals as well.

By allowing members of the opposite sex to live together we allow both homosexuals and heterosexuals of the opposite sex to share the same living space. Is there no worry over possible sexual harassment or rape when a young college male, brimming with hormones, and often drunk, also shares the same intimate living quarters with a girl who bathes, changes, and sleeps in the same small area?

We recognize that men are most often the perpetrators in cases of rape because there are physical differences between men and women, like a male’s size, strength and aggression. On the other hand, these gender-based physical differences don’t exist amongst homosexuals, which is a primary reason why cases of male-male or female-female rape are much, much less common.

In gender-neutral housing there is nothing at all to hinder—neither inconvenience nor space—unwanted sexual advances among those living together.

If this is not reason enough to be wary of opposite-sex living arrangements in colleges we should nonetheless act cautiously considering the gravity of this next attempt to limit the distinctions between men and women. Gender-neutral housing is not simply a question of free choice and arbitrary limitation, but has larger implications for sexual culture and individual development that should not be ignored. These living arrangements may be voluntary, yet rarely is it a good idea to give impulsive youth complete and utter freedom, particularly in something so potentially dangerous as the intimate relations between men and women.

It is only too obvious that putting young men and women into the same quarters, many times with the added influence of alcohol, is a recipe for disaster.

Despite these dangers, the crusade to institute gender-neutral housing will undoubtedly march on. Liberals at Yale and on other universities are convinced that there is no difference between the sexes and therefore any distinction between them is harmful. They will not stop until they break down every barrier of separation between men and women so that neither social mores nor physical boundaries can limit the passions and desires of any individual.

If Yale approves gender-neutral housing for sophomores, university officials yet again make it abundantly clear that they care more for political causes than student safety.

Fix contributor Alec Torres is a senior at Yale University.

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(Editor’s note: This article has been modified from its original published version.)

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