TBD re the Stanford Case
Posted on February 17th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 75 Comments »
This story of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale and former Stanford undergraduate Ellie Clougherty.
My quick (and only semi-serious) take: You could not ask for a more unstable combination in a girlfriend than someone who once wanted to be a nun, then became a model…two professors which seriously mess with your head.
More to come.
75 Responses
2/17/2015 6:40 am
And two professions which are polar opposites in pretty much every way…
2/17/2015 8:45 am
“The case reveals the complexity of trying to determine the truth in a high-stakes case like this one.”
That’s pure B.S. The truth is very clear that she has no case and has now begun lying. Her mother has kicked up such a fuss that Stanford told the guy not to be on campus, which was stupid. She needs therapy to break free of her mother. It would be much better if she were less beautiful or he were less rich; media attention is the absolute last thing she needs.
Disgraceful conduct, and the lawyers involved should be ashamed to be involved in what is, for them, a repeated shakedown only.
The media is giving her claim more cash value. They should stop.
What a disaster.
2/17/2015 8:46 am
Richard, every time you or a similarly trafficked blog posts about this it’s probably another $5K in her pocket.
2/17/2015 9:19 am
Richard, please give some journalistic perspective on the trend of reporting on flimsy rape allegations. I understand the news appeal of a horrific crime, be it fake (Rolling Stone) or real (Steubenville rape).
But now the NYTimes is providing a platform for jilted lovers like Columbia mattress girl. A generation ago, it was not newsworthy when a woman went to Bill Cosby’s hotel room for drinks and he “took advantage” of her.
2/17/2015 9:20 am
It will be pointed out that I would prefer less attention were paid to actually false claims of rape, and that this is only because I want people to believe they are rare.
This is close to the mark. But I don’t actually care whether they are rare or common, as long as people treat any accuser with respect and weigh her word equally with the word of the accused. The first step should never be a skeptical one; it should always be an act of pure attention. Full investigation then leads where it leads.
2/17/2015 9:25 am
“It was not newsworthy when a woman went to Bill Cosby’s hotel room for drinks and he ‘took advantage’ of her” [by giving her knockout drugs and having sex with her while she was unconscious.
Boy, you said it, Kim. If only we could get back to the true understanding of newsworthiness from those good old days, when men were men and women kept quiet.
2/17/2015 10:10 am
@SE - The “attention” being paid to the false claims of late is generally stemming from the hardships, after effects and alarming treatment of the falsely accused in the current environment.
I think most if not all of the readership here would agree with you that investigation is good and should be done properly - but skepticism is PART of an investigation, and you cannot have a proper and full investigation without skepticism.
2/17/2015 11:32 am
Kim Lee
But now the NYTimes is providing a platform for jilted lovers like Columbia mattress girl.
I don’t see this. The article isn’t generally supportive of the rape accusation. The author is careful never opine directly, but the facts don’t support the accusation.
I see the NYT (somewhat surprisingly) giving a platform to increase transparency about what underlies the “rape culture” accusations in the radicalized campus environment.
The truth: A rich guy used the allure of his lifestyle to attract a young girl who felt used when it was over.
UVA President and campus rape hysteric Teresa Sullivan turns this into a claim the events were “a brutal assault”.
2/17/2015 12:32 pm
This is just a love affair that went bad.
The guy was a nouveau riche Silicon Valley master of the universe and thought that he could get, and deserved, sex on demand. The girl was a climber egged on by her stage mother to marry as high as possible and achieve wealth an social status.
When the relationship failed, the woman sought to come up with a narrative to enable her to get the compensation she was seeking. So she drew on the prevailing Twilight-50 Shades of Gray model to characterize her relationship and her purported victimization.
I am very surprised this is getting any kind of litigation at all.
2/17/2015 12:39 pm
BTW, there is definitely a cultural mindset out there where omnipotent emo guys are dominating women and then the women tame them and absorb their power (again, Twilight / 50 Shades). Comparisons to “Beauty and the Beast” are also in there. Prince Charming (to mix metaphors) is now the CEO of a software company.
This is why the rape culture narrative is insisting that all the rapists are rich trust fund white guys with privilege. Whereas I seriously doubt if that is the case.
2/17/2015 1:33 pm
Anytime lots of money is involved, and especially in combination with big age differences, the relationship has peculiar dynamics that are pretty much confined to those specific kinds of relationships. It’s long been postulated that one of the ways that the wealthy protect themselves from gold-diggers (including male ones) is to try and make sex more of a commercial thing than a romantic thing, thus presumably reducing the chances of losing your heart to someone who goal is really to cause you to lose your money.
Has anyone ever heard of an attractive, intelligent younger woman marrying or even being involved with a much older guy who didn’t have large amounts of money to shower her with jewels, expensive travel, etc… in other words, a younger woman being with a much older guy who is a minimum wage night janitor at McDonald’s?
The extreme age difference isn’t there in this case, but there is that core similarity… he was buying companionship and she was selling it. I’m not making a value judgement about whether that is right or wrong — each to their own taste as the old saying goes — but it hardly seems right to characterize it as a relationship with a mostly romantic basis.
Whether the relationship would have ended up where it is now if it was strictly a romantic one is unknowable, but money does seem to be a factor in the allegations.
As an aside
2/17/2015 1:42 pm
Oops… please disregard my last line.
2/17/2015 8:58 pm
@MT
I would submit that a skeptical mindset is in no way a prerequisite for conducting an investigation. An ideal investigator would be one who is able to analytically examine every conceivable possibility and evaluate the probable accuracy of any given explanatory hypothesis without the influence of any emotions, prejudices, or preconceptions. Obviously however, no such person exists. In actuality of course, we all have some biases and the best we can do is strive to make sure that we are always fighting against them so that they affect our analysis as little as possible. Thus while it would be foolish to deny that a skeptical mindset provides some investigating an unknown quandary (such as additional motivation to find an explanation with a high probability of accuracy), I would propose that possessing an open mindset - rather than a skeptical one - should always be one’s goal when thinking analytically.
2/18/2015 2:47 am
@Marshal @Kim Lee
I think Kim is not talking about Bazelon’s article which is well written and indeed brings many details which are important for the reader to form an own opinion.
I think she refers to Sulkowicz who has been given an ample platform by the NYT for many months, there are three articles on her that first establish her as a brave victim, then as an activist and now an artist (Roberta Smith).
It’s interesting to note that Sulkowicz’s campaign has been managed professionally from the beginning. Since she has faced some criticism in recent weeks, the campaign focused on establishing her as an artist even more, this includes re-writing of her Wikipedia page and so on.
What both cases have in common, however, is that these “victims” both created a whole new personality when they started to make their allegations.
And both are in for the gain: While Sulkowicz is making a career out of this, Clougherty clearly is going for the money.
2/18/2015 11:52 am
I am always struck by the dog that never seems to bark here: the almost complete non-existence of cases that actually and clearly conform to the narrative: a privileged white young man at an elite school (or even just a 4 year college) who, by standard definition, rapes a young woman at that school.
The only case I can remember seeing in a good number of years that conforms to this narrative is the very recent case of the swimmer at Stanford who raped a young woman — in broad daylight as I recall the details. It’s pretty unthinkable that such a case would not be widely reported if it came up, given the desperate need of the Narrators to tell that story. But there’s next to nothing here.
This is all the more remarkable given the numbers involved. Roughly 2.2 million students go to college every year, and many (most?) go to 4 year colleges. Say 1 million go to 4 year colleges. How is it that with such overwhelming numbers, there aren’t any number of clear cases every single year of rapes conforming to the Narrative? Doesn’t that absence suggest that the risk of such a crime is remarkably low? Even if one restricts one’s attention to the Ivy League and similar schools, one is talking about at least 20,000 new students per year. Why have virtually no cases arisen in those settings that clearly confirm the “rape culture” allegation? How can such a “major problem” have so few (perhaps one over, say, the last 10 years?) convincing examples?
2/18/2015 11:59 am
Just to pursue the point a bit more, it’s important to think about what the mattress girl and the Stanford model cases presumably represent: among the most convincing cases of “rape” in elite schools by a privileged white male.
How can these possibly be among the most convincing cases, if the problem is of any real size at all?
2/18/2015 12:09 pm
Pierre
I think she refers to Sulkowicz who has been given an ample platform by the NYT for many months,
Perhaps, I presumed she was tying the NYT article this post references to ES and forming a joint case.
Regardless the takeaway from this particular article is that at least a few definitively within-the-circle feminists are starting to oppose the rape hysteria culture. Even if it’s only because these particular activists recognize these actions will eventually discredit feminist priorities it’s an extremely positive development.
But it’s going to be a long fight. Examples of protester assertions from Ashe Show’s article “Protesting Due Process” are below.
Protesters showed up to his lecture with homemade signs and t-shirts that said “rape is real” (no one is saying it isn’t) and “sex without consent is always rape” (no one is saying otherwise). They stood up when he was about to speak and blocked the audience’s view of Johnson.
“As a member of F*ckRapeCulture, we appreciate you coming to validate our fight against rape apologists such as yourself,” said Claire Chadwick, who helped start the group. “You clearly do not respect women or any survivor of sexual assault.”
People this dishonest (or insane) have to be completely driven from the debate, and the fools (like Teresa Sullivan) who use their lies to push the agenda have to be shamed from any policy impacting positions.
2/18/2015 12:36 pm
Candid_observer, I don’t know what the correct numbers are. But the instances of well-off students being the culprits are exactly the ones that one would expect to be most effectively suppressed from public view. The school cannot comment on them; if there is a guilty finding the student expelled has an interest in hushing it up and trying to start over; and there is money to buy silence all around. Only when the student thinks he has good evidence of innocence (and he may be right) does he start the PR battle that makes the cases visible. Notably Nungesser lacked the money or the spirit to get media-savvy lawyers to do so early on, and as a result his accuser got a big head start on him.
2/18/2015 12:38 pm
To belabor my point more.
The problem is a little like the Fermi Paradox. I gather the great physicist Enrico Fermi was listening to a discussion as to whether extraterrestrial intelligent life existed, and one side the argument was that there was nothing special about the earth, and that there were 70 billion trillion stars out there, and so almost certainly extraterrestrial intelligent life must exist, and in great numbers. But Fermi pointed out an obvious problem with this: why haven’t we heard from any of them?
So here too, the question is, if rape by elite white males is a major problem, why have we so rarely heard about them?
2/18/2015 12:42 pm
SE,
Are you really going to claim that at elite schools, populated nearly by half by the daughters of some very affluent families, those daughters and those families simply can’t put together the resources or resolve to fight for justice when the young woman is raped?
2/18/2015 12:58 pm
It seems like we only hear about affluent, white girl victims. Ideally, the perpetrator is rich and/or famous. You would think that Ivy League campuses are much more dangerous than male prisons, rural Alaska, or minority ghettos.
2/18/2015 1:50 pm
1) Here are the stats re male/female and higher education according to Vox.com:
“Women now make up 59 percent of all college students. In 2011, they earned 62 percent of all associate degrees, 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, and 60 percent of all master’s degrees. They now even earn the majority of doctorates — the last bastion of male domination in higher education” with the source being the National Center for Education Statistics.
Google their headline — “Discrimination against women is a real problem in college admissions” — for the link.
Leaving aside the seemingly contradictory nature of the headline versus the quoted stats, it’s interesting to note that the Editor-in-Chief of Vox.com is Ezra Klein, formerly of the Washington Post,a self-proclaimed very liberal liberal (‘progressive’ even), and the rest of the masthead shares a similar political bent, meaning there appear to be no conservatives on it. Only liberals with an agenda could turn a situation where are ‘victim’-group are vastly over-represented relative to their overall demographic representation in obtaining a coveted, privileged status, into a case of discrimination.
2) Black males from poor backgrounds who get into good schools based on athletic talent are often the perpetrators of these crimes. It’s difficult to assertion with any degree of accuracy what the mix of ‘rich white’ versus ‘poor black’ is without doing a lot of tedious research because the media plays up the ‘rich white’ narrative while downplaying the ‘poor black’ cases. It’s the old NY Times (and other ‘mainstream’ media) playbook… if it’s a Republican who is accused of something bad, their party affiliation is in the headline, multiple times in each of the first few paragraphs, and in ever other paragraph until the end of the story; if it’s a Democrat, it’s lucky if they mention the party affiliation at all, and even then it’s once in the very last paragraph.
For the record, I don’t identify with either party and wouldn’t want to be associated with most of the people in either of them…
2/18/2015 2:20 pm
S.E. If you are asserting that top universities are routinely accepting bribes in order to cover up rapes committed by affluent students, then surely there must be some evidence of this. Because if there wasn’t, then people might conclude that you were just throwing around slanderous allegations.
2/18/2015 2:29 pm
SE -
I think you may have misspoke here, possibly because you were in a hurry to make a comment… at least I hope you did, and I say that with all sincerity in spite of my harsh comments towards you…
“It will be pointed out that I would prefer less attention were paid to actually false claims of rape, and that this is only because I want people to believe they are rare.
This is close to the mark. But I don’t actually care whether they are rare or common, as long as people treat any accuser with respect and weigh her word equally with the word of the accused.”
Because false claims cause individuals with real claims to be subject to unfair treatment, to say nothing of the damage caused to those who are falsely accused, surely you DO care whether false claims are common independent of the issue of treating accusers with respect.
I’m quite willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that this was a mistake, but you might like to make it clear one way or the other what your position actually is.
2/18/2015 2:34 pm
In the Stanford case, both Lonsdale and Clougherty strike me as incredibly naïve and immature.
Lonsdale also seems to be pretty clearly a jerk (who is in denial about being a jerk) — this comes across even in what he told the reporter himself. For one thing, he sought to be a mentor so he could be close to Clougherty, while denying that it was a power position (he calls it a “supercasual thing”). He appears to be an insecure guy who preys on people weaker than himself; his insecurity makes him feel/act like a victim, and he doesn’t/can’t/won’t acknowledge that he’s in a position of power that makes the relationship unequal — even though that may be what drew him to the relationship in the first place.
Clougherty doesn’t come off well either, but for most of the story she seems to act like a confused 19 year old striver with baubles and trips and career help thrown at her in exchange for sex, which, well, she was.
Is rape involved? It’s not obvious. But it’s very clear that this was not an appropriate relationship. Stanford was right to bar him from working with students. But the overwhelming takeaway from the article is that a university is in no position to arbitrate guilt on anything beyond whether the relationship was appropriate — i.e. whether the person acted within the bounds of his/her role on campus. Stanford shouldn’t be deciding if rape occurred; a court should.
2/18/2015 2:55 pm
The power dynamic in a relationship rule is like too many other supposedly hard and fast rules in life — selectively applied. Unfortunately, whether someone in a position of power has that advantage used against them seemingly depends only on whether or not they have the correct politics…
Witness Clinton/Lewinsky… is there any greater power differential than that between the most powerful man in the world (as U.S. presidents are commonly described) and an unpaid intern in his office? But in that case we were told ‘Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here.’
It’s either a rule in all sexual harassment cases where there is that power inequity or it’s a rule in none… or at least should be.
2/18/2015 3:07 pm
~ I think it’s fair to say that Lonsdale manipulated his mentor position to get some hookups. I don’t think it’s right, but back in my teaching days I remember working with some adjuncts who were essentially hired to teach as a kickback for other things they had done and/or contributed. Colleges and universities are businesses, and it is foolish to think that they would operate any differently than any other private sector business, which always opens its doors to the children of wealthy clients and/or donors for summer internships and so on.
~ Further on this, while I don’t think faculty or mentors or anyone else in the administration of a college/university should be mashing students, the fact is, it does happen, and many happy marriages and families have resulted. (Also unhappy ones.) No, not to me personally, but this has to be one of those things where the rules are what they are but there will be a nod and a wink.
~ I still can’t see how anyone can take these accusations of rape seriously, based on what I have heard of this Lonsdale-Clougherty case. But then, I don’t know either of the parties, and it’s not as though I am going to have to pay for it. Someone let me know how much money Clougherty eventually makes off this relationship.
The only person who looks truly bad in this is UVA’s Sullivan, who appears to have grossly distorted the relationship. But maybe that’s because someone spiked the hot chocolate.
2/18/2015 4:56 pm
Interested Observer: “Witness Clinton/Lewinsky… is there any greater power differential than that between the most powerful man in the world (as U.S. presidents are commonly described) and an unpaid intern in his office? But in that case we were told ‘Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here.’”
Huh? Clinton was subjected to a lengthy, multi-million dollar criminal investigation, impeached by the House of Representatives, tried (but acquitted) by the Senate, held in contempt of court by Judge Susan Weber Wright, fined $90,000, had his law license suspended, and was very publicly shamed.
2/18/2015 5:08 pm
I guess I don’t understand when adult women became children. We’re at the point where one can be in a relationship not knowing if one day, their partner will have decided they were raped at some earlier point (of course this will happen when the relationship falls apart).
2/18/2015 5:11 pm
I said (although I should have made clear that I meant by his supporters) “But in that case we were told ‘Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here.’”
I didn’t say that nothing happened to him. And as I’ve made clear on another thread, I thought the only reason to go after him was that he perjured himself, not that he was engaging in extra-curricular activities… that apparently was known by and somewhat okay to Hillary as long as it didn’t become public knowledge… so it’s between him and his maker.
2/18/2015 5:56 pm
Campus feminists are invested in convincing young women that an unpleasant and regrettable sexual encounter is the most horrendous trauma that it is possible for a human being to undergo. I’m not sure the process by which many young women are convinced that they were raped, after the fact, by feminist activists, but i’m certain that it is of a similar nature to the recovered memories therapy that is practised by quack psychotherapists.
Young woman are of course confused and manipulated by the contradictory messages given to them by the feminist movement:
Firstly that sexual adventurism is good, and should be culturally encouraged.
Secondly that a sexual encounter that does not go as planned or as anticipated, where the man exercises a disproportionate amount of power and control during the act, is the most horrendous crime imaginable, and is the inevitable cause of permanent and crippling trauma.
Thirdly that women have no responsibility whatsoever to take measures to protect themselves against an abusive or a potentially abusive partner, even after the abuse has begin, as this would be victim blaming/shaming.
All three of these positions have become unquestioned dogmas within the modern feminist movement, and all three are designed to ensure that young women will be vulnerable to the suggestion that they have been raped at a particular point of emotional crisis.
2/18/2015 8:18 pm
@Anonymous wrote:
“Clougherty … seems to act like a confused 19 year old striver with baubles and trips and career help thrown at her in exchange for sex, which, well, she was.”
In other words, she was striving to be a whore. Lonsdale’s “power” was the threat to stop buying her things.
2/18/2015 10:08 pm
No, she was decidedly not striving to be a whore. That much is clear; she seems to have been striving for opposite things, like social capital. There are lots of things that are difficult to know without knowing these people, but it sure doesn’t sound like she related the sex at all to her striving, at least not at the time.
Lonsdale’s power was that he was both an authority figure (her assigned mentor) and someone who put himself forward as a figure of importance in her career advancement. What makes him a jerk is that he used that power to get close to her, and took advantage of her naïveté.
I don’t think much better of Clougherty, but what can an adult reasonably expect of an undergraduate lover (of either sex)? Sure, she’s immature, just like I was as a student. I expect more of the adult and the mentor. Does that make it fair for her to wrongly accuse him of rape? No. But I can’t tell whether her accusation is true or false, whereas I see lots of evidence that Lonsdale was a jerk to her.
2/19/2015 5:19 am
“Don’t actually care whether people believe they are rare or common”
2/19/2015 7:00 am
@Anon: The formal Stanford mentorship was incidental. Ellie ended the relationship when she tired of trading sexual favors for career access. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
You write that he was a “jerk” and she is “unfair”. No, one of them is a criminal.
2/19/2015 11:00 am
SE -
In your response to me, you’ve added the words “people believe” to your original wording, which suggests two possible reasons, neither of which reflect well on you. (I also wonder if you deliberately didn’t reference my comment to you in the hope that people wouldn’t look it up if they are new to the thread or otherwise missed it.) Here is your original wording:
“But I don’t actually care whether they are rare or common, as long as people treat any accuser with respect and weigh her word equally with the word of the accused.”
If your reply to me is meant to be taken as a ‘clarification,’ it puts the lie to you sanctimoniously professing to be concerned with people treating any accuser with respect… people who believe false claims are numerous often cite the frequency of false claims as the very reason that they don’t give the accuser’s word the same weight that they do to the word of the accused and for their lack of respect towards them… so your ‘clarification’ is sheer and utter sophistry… you don’t really care about the accusers.
If your addition of words is meant to try and deceive people into thinking that I quoted you incorrectly, that kind of fraud doesn’t require any elaboration on my part…
How do you reconcile the second and third comments in this thread, which bear your signature, and which profess your own scorn toward the accuser… how is that showing her respect? And please don’t try and obfuscate by saying you’ve weighed her words equally with those of the accused and found them lacking… you make no reference to any such qualifying loophole in your original and revised wording.
This suggests that you are either trying to clarify and/or being dishonest, but it doesn’t matter… you’ve shown the world what a sheer and utter fraud you are.
1) If you are trying to clarify, how do you reconcile A) that given that false claims contribute to people
2/19/2015 11:04 am
I’m not sure what happened there… please disregard everything after “your original and revised wording.”
2/19/2015 11:22 am
Richard Bradley -
I very much respect you being a free speech absolutist and not banning anyone or censoring any comments, but I don’t understand how you can encourage someone like SE, as you did on your thread about Mattress Girl, when he is such t troll… and an obviously dishonest one at that.
richardbradley
2/10/2024 1:20 pm
“Hang in there, SE. Even when I (passionately) disagree with you, I welcome your comments here—the site wouldn’t be the same without you.”
You are absolutely right about the site not being the same without him… with the exception of one or two other commenters who post the occasional non-serious or deliberately provocative and utterly nonsensical comment, SE is the only obvious troll here… everyone else seems genuinely interested in taking a serious issue seriously.
Because your approval is required before comments with imbedded links are posted, while all other comments go live immediately, I’m wondering if you are trying to prevent people from posting links to sites with malicious software on them… is that the case or is there another reason? I’m under the impression that as a ‘publisher’ of a site, you can’t be sued for what your audience does…
2/19/2015 7:06 pm
IO, it was a clarification. And I stand by my clarified comment.
“people who believe false claims are numerous often cite the frequency of false claims as the very reason that they don’t give the accuser’s word the same weight that they do to the word of the accused and for their lack of respect towards them”
That is exactly the point. In a precisely analogous way, people who believe African-American criminals are numerous often give that as the reason for their suspicion of African-Americans they meet. And people who believe Muslim terrorists are numerous give that as a reason for extra scrutiny for Muslims at the airport. Even if African-American criminals or Muslim terrorists ARE numerous, this is an unacceptable way to behave. Statistics are not a good reason to disrespect ANY individual.
This is America, where we believe in individuality. Individual cases must NEVER NEVER NEVER be evaluated using statistics. This is why true professionalism is found in acts of close attention and the hard work of listening — and then, yes, investigating if there are disputed facts.
“please don’t try and obfuscate by saying you’ve weighed [Clougherty’s] words equally with those of the accused and found them lacking”
I weighed Clougherty word’s equally with those of the accused and everyone else interviewed for the article, and found them lacking.
2/20/2015 9:14 am
SE -
Thanks for the lecture on America… let’s see on how well your behavior comports with your pontifications, using your own posts on this blog (and not just this thread), shall we?
“This is America, where we believe in individuality. Individual cases must NEVER NEVER NEVER be evaluated using statistics.”
Really? Isn’t racially profiling someone, as you have done on the ‘Mattress Girl’ thread, exactly that — using a casual, anecdotal approach to make sweeping generalizations that have no basis in fact? I’d also note that your comment, which I’ll quote immediately below for reference, is exactly the same kind of judgement as one of a whole group of people on the basis of their skin, rather than the content of their character, and without any proof of what you are saying is true, although I’ll concede that because your comment doesn’t explicitly mention race, it isn’t ‘racially profiling’ in the strictest and narrowest definition of the term:
“…unless one believes in the magic power of deterrence when it comes to drunk, affluent and/or high-achieving 20-year-olds.”
Where is the proof — hard, empirical evidence — that
A) most rapists in higher education are drunk (both the ‘Mattress Girl’ thread and this one are directly about sexual assault in higher ed, so logic dictates that your comments on both of these threads must be related to that context to have any coherence)?;
B) most rapists in higher ed are “affluent and/or high-achieving”? The fallacy of your argument is that someone could be neither… someone might, among other things, be from a family with below average income and net worth, be lazy and have poor test scores and still get into an elite school… they might get a ‘legacy’ advantage, someone with the power to do so might have pulled a string on their behalf for a variety of reasons, or they might be an affirmative action beneficiary, which by definition means neither affluent or high-achieving.
So show us the proof SE, that you aren’t a bigot whose bigotry just manifests itself to a group that might or might not include blacks.
Does your prejudice come from jealousy that you didn’t come from an affluent family and from you not being a high-achiever? Because that is what you are… a prejudiced bigot who appears to be anything but a high-achiever based on your posts.
I don’t really expect you to provide any hard proof — that is not your style. Multiple times on the ‘Mattress Girl’ thread you referenced unspecified experts and claimed that other evidence existed, and when pressed repeatedly by multiple commenters to provide links to said experts and other evidence, you repeatedly evaded doing so before finally being forced to admit that you had no such evidence and that you yourself weren’t an expert.
Several people on the ‘Mattress Girl’ thread accused you of being Sabrina Rubin Erdley, which I personally don’t believe you are… if that were the case, it might actually be a compliment of sorts towards you. You claim to be a ‘non non-attorney’ (your formulation) which suggests that you are an attorney without actually calling your self one. If in fact you are one, the biased, sloppy, half-assed, and dishonest way in which you try to make your case makes her and her reporting look like a paragon of both virtue and professionalism. For example (not a complete listing of ‘chapter and verse’):
1) Having to clarify your comment about ‘not caring.’ (I’ll come back to that at the end);
2) Admitting that eighteen months out from the bar exam you weren’t methodical enough;
3) You also admitted to being both imprecise and inaccurate:
” I have clarified the one imprecise thing I said” (which you also qualified as being true only impreciseness on the ‘Mattress Girl’ thread, leaving you the loophole of having been imprecise on other threads without having to acknowledge it)
…and…
“Oh, hey, I just scrolled up a bit and realized I also made a mistake in talking about the defamation standard for nonpublic figures. To be precise, that was inaccurate rather than imprecise.”
Your claiming that you were only imprecise once is both a perfect example of your basic dishonesty and of your being a sloppy, half-doer. All of the major reference dictionaries define imprecise and inaccurate as being synonyms, meaning that any difference in their meaning is semantic and at the margins… if you meant it in any other way than the common, everyday usage and meaning for most people (the words don’t have a material difference in meaning), you should have been more accurate/precise in saying so… to say nothing of being more methodical.
Given the above, how could you possibly call yourself a professional? It’s no wonder you use a ‘nom du plume’… your actions are either an intent to deceive or bordering on incompetence for someone who is alleging to be in the legal profession… hardly a resume-enhancer.
Finally, the issue of people’s perceptions regarding the number of false accusations is in itself incredibly damaging to real victims in that it serves the purposes of those who don’t take the problem we have with rape seriously…
…to say that you ““Don’t actually care whether people believe they are rare or common” clearly makes you one of those who aren’t serious abut the problem of rape. (For the record, it’s unlikely that there is anything that can be done to change the mind of someone who doesn’t want to take the issue seriously — including you — but that doesn’t negate my point.)
2/20/2015 12:44 pm
Policies adopted for the sake of deterrence are adopted based on *statistical* arguments about the effectiveness of deterrence. The existence of some few students at elite colleges with neither money nor achievement has a negligible impact on those statistics.
Other policies, including and especially those governing disciplinary procedures in handling individual cases, have almost nothing to do with statistics. That is why every single case in the Harvard cheating incident related to the gov course was handled on its individual merits, reaching highly disparate outcomes.
There is ample literature on the weakness of deterrent effects as to young people (“invincibles”), those who have never encountered law enforcement, those who are intoxicated, and those motivated in any significant proportion by lust. You might be interested in reading Inferno 5, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the research of Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon, Jeffrey Fagan at Columbia, or any number of publications by the Sentencing Project.
There is no serious dispute that campus sexual assault is overwhelmingly associated with alcohol. Antonia Abbey did a study compiling it. Here is an article finding 74% of assailants are drunk. KOSS, M.P. Hidden rape: Sexual aggression and victimization in a national
sample of students in higher education. In: BURGESS, A.W. (Ed.) Rape and Sexual Assault II, New York: Garland, 1988, pp. 3-25.
You do know about this Google thing, right?
2/20/2015 12:48 pm
There is also a Wikipedia thing you might enjoy.
“In the fields of science, engineering, industry, and statistics, the accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of measurements of a quantity to that quantity’s actual (true) value. The precision of a measurement system, related to reproducibility and repeatability, is the degree to which repeated measurements under unchanged conditions show the same results. Although the two words precision and accuracy can be synonymous in colloquial use, they are deliberately contrasted in the context of the scientific method.
“A measurement system can be accurate but not precise, precise but not accurate, neither, or both. For example, if an experiment contains a systematic error, then increasing the sample size generally increases precision but does not improve accuracy. The result would be a consistent yet inaccurate string of results from the flawed experiment. Eliminating the systematic error improves accuracy but does not change precision.”
My imprecise statement was the statement — derived like everything else from unreliable witnesses who experienced various events from various perspectives — that Sulkowicz spoke to a friend about the alleged assault the day after it allegedly happened. I should have said that she allegedly spoke to a friend about the alleged assault the day after it allegedly happened.
We continue to regret the error.
2/20/2015 12:49 pm
“an affirmative action beneficiary, which by definition means neither affluent or high-achieving.”
See, THAT is racist.
2/20/2015 3:09 pm
SE —
Here you go again… once again refusing to answer in any meaningful and honest manner. A middle school debate team member would know that you are just filibustering.
You haven’t explained why your making provocative negative judgements (affluent, high-achieving) without providing actual data to support your bias is anything other than a form of profiling. Also, what is the source for the data supporting your assertion in your reply that “The existence of some few students at elite colleges with neither money nor achievement has a negligible impact on those statistics”? Or is it something that you just made up like so much of what you present as ‘truth’ seems to be?
While we are on the subject of statistics, do you have a degree in statistics, or are you again pretending to be an expert on something that you are not?
You being inaccurate and imprecise had to do with the use of words, not numbers, You might try quoting Wikipedia’s discourse on statistics to a judge who has accused you of deliberately misrepresenting something that has nothing to do with statistics to him or her… let us know how that works out.
And yes, thank you, I do know all about that Google thing. It’s quite the amazing thing, isn’t it? Do you know how to use it properly? The only reason that I ask is because you seem to be reluctant to provide us with the link to stuff you cite in all too many cases, and I know that you wouldn’t lie to us… the only other reasonable explanation is that you don’t know how to find stuff systematically using Google after you accidentally stumble across these studies that you cite and therefore can’t find them again.
No, my comment about affirmative action is not racist, not that I’m surprised that you would call me one. We have a system where we say the top ‘X’ number of people meeting certain empirical requirements will be given admission, and then we take a percentage of those having qualified under those rules and ‘disqualify’ them in favor of people who didn’t meet the stated requirements but have ‘compelling life stories’ or some such gobbledygook.
If there are certain groups who can’t meet the requirements, we should fix the underlying education system so that they can compete on the merits, and in the interim, we should be honest about having no real standards for those admitted under affirmative action, which is basically due to an education system that consumes ever more tax dollars while at the same time producing ‘graduates’ who fair worse and worse every year in measures of international competitiveness. We know that every group is genetically equal in terms of intelligence, with the differences in the outcomes in opportunities being due to a lack of equal education, and we also know that education is the single best predictor of future economic well-being in life… If we improve the educational system to make it fairer to the currently disadvantaged groups, we would go a long way towards the just society that you profess to want. Lest you say I must be a right-winger who wants to destroy the teachers’ unions, let me state that it’s not the unions responsibility to be looking out for the children… they have a legal responsibility to their members - not the children, as cold-hearted as that may sound. Besides, who in their right mind would join a union that took their union dues and used them against themselves?
One of the reasons the accusation of racism has lost its sting is because of people like you who try and use it as a weapon, pure and simple, and without any basis for doing so. You don’t know anything about me… who I have for friends, and who I give my money and time to. The only thing you know is that I made a factual observation that you don’t like.
Finally, I’m sure this is just an innocent omission on your part, but you didn’t rebut my point that not caring what people believe in terms of the numbers of false accusations is harmful to actual victims and flies in the face of what you are telling us about where your heart is.
Do tell…
2/20/2015 4:02 pm
“we take a percentage of those having qualified under those rules and ‘disqualify’ them in favor of people who didn’t meet the stated requirements” but are nonetheless objectively very high achievers by any rational and unprejudiced standard.
2/20/2015 4:29 pm
Again, where is the hard evidence for your claim of affirmative action recipients ‘objectively very high achievers’? I’m not disputing that it’s plausible… I’m simply asking you to provide proof of your claim so that those of us in the peanut gallery can evaluate the evidence on our own instead of trusting someone we don’t know.
And again, you haven’t disproved my premise… we have simply substituted one group of ‘objectively very high achievers’ (if I accept your premise for the sake of discussion) who didn’t meet the specified stand for another group that did.
Nothing in your response refutes my claim that you are accusing me of being a racist for simply making a factual observation that you don’t like.
2/20/2015 5:25 pm
You said they were “by definition” not high achievers.
I spent fourteen years at top-tier colleges, eight of them as faculty. I’m going with an ipse dixit here:
At good schools the affirmative-action beneficiaries are high achievers.
2/20/2015 7:06 pm
SE -
I’ll accept your personal viewpoint, with the qualification that even though the affirmative action beneficiaries might be considered to be high achievers within their own group, they aren’t in comparison to the ‘real’ high achievers in the group as a whole who got in without special rules, as measured by SATs, etc.
If you find my qualification objectionable, it’s deliberate on my part — it’s precisely how you typically respond… an unnatural parsing of the discussion to present something that in very narrow terms is strictly true, if provocative, but not really a satisfactory response. I’ll elaborate on my problem with affirmative action at the end.
I’d be prepared to accept a lot more of what you say if you would only present it as your own opinion, if that’s what it is, rather than trying to fob off a lot of stuff as if it’s something more than that. Just because it’s personal opinion doesn’t make it wrong or less valid. I might surprise you in that we might actually have similar views on a lot of stuff (although I understand that you might not want to be ‘associated’ with me in the same way that I don’t want to label myself politically because of some of the company it might cast me in with).
Changing the educational system is a long-term undertaking. We have to start with grade one (or even kindergarten) and go up a year each successive year… it does no good to start at a higher level because in today’s world children are almost helplessly left behind if they don’t have the complete foundation that the previous year is supposed to provide.
An alternative ‘solution’ would be to change the standards so that everyone has a fair and equal chance. Unfortunately, that would almost certainly entail lowering the standards, which we shouldn’t do… we have demanding standards for a good reason, and if we make the educational system more uniformly good, the ‘need’ for affirmative action will go away — every group that is given the right help will end up being more or less ‘properly’ represented as every other group… that is to say, outcomes will be uniform relative to population across all groups.
Another problem with affirmative action that is rarely mentioned is that in some fields, like the law, it sets up the recipients for almost certain failure. I think it was the California Bar Association that did a study quite a few years ago that highlighted the problem, and the results had nothing to do with the beneficiaries per se - the results were the product of a flawed system. (They tried to suppress the study when they saw what they had, but somehow it leaked.)
Basically, if you are going to attend a top tier law school (Michigan, Harvard, Yale, etc.), you have to be truly qualified. Affirmative action beneficiaries usually aren’t (again, through no fault of their own), which means they must work much harder to get any sort of good grades. Then they are often hired by white shoe law firms to buff up the firms’ prestige, rather than hired for their skill set. Someone who goes into the system as the best of the best and comes out at the top of their class has to work sixty, seventy hours a week to make partner, and for someone who isn’t in that position, they have pretty much zero hope of making partner because they can’t work the number of hours required to do what they have to do to get there. They have been sold a bill of goods, and they know it… plenty of people will say we tried to help them but we didn’t really… we tried to salve our consciousnesses with some bogus make believe. A lot of people who profess to believe in affirmative action wouldn’t let a beneficiary anywhere near them if it came to representing them in a case with significant stakes.
The study evidently showed that those who were AA beneficiaries in these situations almost always ended up leaving the law, often at great personal cost, while those who got into schools on their won merit usually had satisfying and successful careers to the same degree as ‘whites did.
So the lesson is clear… fix the system - don’t try and mask the problems with it. Everyone in society will be much better off for it.
On a somewhat related topic, this will seem outrageous, but the problem isn’t white cops shooting blacks… the problem is that blacks aren’t really given an opportunity to have a shot at anything, again in large part because of the educational system, and they know it. If we could invert the situation
perfectly, we’d have a minority white underclass with a history of despicable treatment at the hands of a black majority, and black cops shooting whites. Anytime you have a situation like we have where a racial group is prevented from having even a chance at a reasonable life, you are likely to have that group being greatly over-represented in the crime blotter relative to their numbers in the general population.
‘Everyone’ says that whenever some young black tries to short-circuit (drop out of) the higher ed system and go directly to the major leagues of any sport, he is making a terrible mistake… what happens if he fails? — he won’t have an education to fall back on. I take a contrary view… his life won’t be be any worse than it would have been if he ‘graduated’ college without having really gotten an education (as is the case with many athletes of all races), so to me it is a smart money bet.
Your turn…
2/20/2015 11:47 pm
IO,
To say that beneficiaries of affirmative action by definition are not high achieving, you have to be talking about their pre-collegiate career. Otherwise, it would certainly be a racist statement. But I don’t think you meant it in the racist way. SE is talking about the people he know DURING college, when, whatever the motive behind their admission, many did become high achieving.
(As an aside, you both have a way of completely misunderstanding what the other is trying to say. It often seems willful.)
Anyway, from my own experience at the Cambridge, MA outlet of the Ivy club in the mid-to-late 80’s, I tend to agree with SE on this. The beneficiaries of affirmative action were able to fit in academically in my experience. Or rather, I couldn’t tell you who was the beneficiary of affirmative action. There was no pool of failing students who I could identify as likely affirmative action beneficiaries. I don’t know how coterminous the Aff-Act and Af. Am groups were, but there were plenty of African American students who did well.
On the other hand, the athletic department definitely pulled through some applicants (Canadian hockey players were the beneficiaries I was most aware of) who weren’t up to the standards. Occasionally you’d hear a question in section that was jaw-dropping.
Oddly, no one ever gets mad about elite institutions letting so many idiotic athletes in.
2/21/2015 1:42 pm
Have many people seen this story?
“A male student at an unnamed college in Oregon was investigated for sexual assault. But even after he had cleared his name, he was still prohibited from having contact with a female student—denying him access to his classes, residence, and job—because he merely resembled the man who had committed rape.”
[Google: “soave reason male student banned from campus” to get the article with the quote]
Am I the only one who finds this story, as related originally by a Harvard Law professor, a little hard to believe? Doesn’t it seem like too perfect a story — and a too perfectly outrageous example of PC running amok?
Of course, if it’s anything like the truth, God help us.
2/21/2015 3:12 pm
Ryan -
My problem with affirmative action is twofold: 1) it’s in fact reverse discrimination in the name of eliminating discrimination; and 2) it has very limited if any benefits while at the same time having highly negative side effects to blacks (and other beneficiary groups, although blacks bear the brunt of the backlash). How can the backlash against affirmative action by so many people and the immediate suspicion that any black is a beneficiary and thus didn’t earn their spot possibly help in the effort to treat blacks (and everyone else) fairly? Remember, my position is that we could fix the problem honestly, but we don’t for a variety of reasons, none of them good.
I’ve already explained why affirmative action is reverse discrimination in another comment, so I won’t elaborate further here…
‘The term ‘high-achieving’ is an issue here, both in the literal sense (this blog thread) and for the real-world application, so I’ll deal with that first. In the real world, as it applies to affirmative action (‘AA’ - I need to write a macro for this term/phrase and others if I’m going to keep commenting here!) it is some arbitrary, well defined standard. Any deviation on this blog from the common usage should be noted, as should any deviation from the existing very definition itself. In the case of ‘AA,’ test scores and other similar result-oriented data are the only real quantitative part of the overall standard, with all all other things — athletics, community involvement, etc. — being more qualitative and thus harder, if not impossible to measure in any scientific way. (How do you compare ‘X’ number of hours working in a seniors’ residence to ‘y’ number of hours working with the homeless? Even if the hours are equal, is one a greater benefit to the community than the other and thus more worthy?)
As such, I think that you validate my statement when you say “you have to be talking about their pre-collegiate career” and “Oddly, no one ever gets mad about elite institutions letting so many idiotic athletes in.” It is precisely the inability to meet the stated standard based on their pre-collegiate days that provides the excuse for ‘AA.’ As for the beneficiaries collegiate performance, how do we really know that they are being graded equally rigorously as are the non-beneficiaries when so much of the grading outside of the hard sciences is qualitative rather than quantitative, and more so given the overall ~98% leftist bent of the professors, with their avowed support for ‘AA’?
College athletics are a problem all of their own. How does a college president make a head football coach ride herd on some badly behaving guys when the coach’s winning record over many years directly contributes to people wanting to enroll in and donate to the school, and when the coach makes at least an order of magnitude more money than the president does?
The fact that so many blacks are such great athletes strikes me as a perverse manifestation of Darwin’s evolution of the fittest, rather than genetics per se. They know from early on that the educational system is biased against them and so drop out (even if it is not formally and takes the form of cutting class or being truant.) They don’t have much else to do so they play informal sports, making due with whatever equipment that they have. By the time they get to college age, they have put in more than the commonly cited 10,000 hours of effort that it takes to be good at something…
To your point about SE and me…
I try not to deliberately misconstrue someone’s position, and if I do, I’ll flag it myself, as I did above.
I also get that it can be very difficult to respond to every point of criticism, so you have to pick and choose… that very fact lend itself to being ingenuous if you choose to do so.
I can’t speak for SE, but here are a couple of examples of him appearing to be intentionally dishonest (I’ve made some of these points before):
~ He writes a screed comparing Cathy Young to David Brooks, who he disparages, and when I call that bad behavior, he accuses me of being a fan of David Brooks. Setting aside that he had no evidence for that, it makes no logical sense, and especially so given that I was commenting on their relative civility towards each other and not on the merits of what they were saying.
- He suggests that ‘imprecise’ and ‘inaccurate’ have different meanings in the context of words, and when it’s pointed out that they are synonymous, he gives their meaning in the context of numbers, where they can and do have different meanings.
- He keeps referring to mysterious experts and studies to support his claims, but he never voluntarily provides a reference to them; on rare occasions a commenter will force him to admit those experts and studies don’t actually exist.
- He outright misrepresents things. On another thread he kept saying he was involved in many, many cases involving alleged sexual mistreatment. Ignoring the obvious questions associated with that statement, it turns out that the actual number is around a dozen… there is no way that you can say twelve is many, many in any context.
But enough of that. Perhaps all we need are some rules of engagement:
- Be honest and state its your personal opinion when it is; don’t misrepresent it as something else. We could make it even simpler by saying you don’t have to flag it as personal opinion… just don’t represent it as being something else.
- Don’t redefine common usage or definitions without making it clear that you are doing so.
- If you can’t make your case, don’t take cheap shots at people, especially in comments to third parties. That way you don’t look like such a troll.
I’ve made clear before that I’m more interested in the ‘back story’ than I am in whatever the subject nominally is, but what I didn’t mention is that I’m as interested in how people reason and form decisions. To use ‘SE’ as an example, while he might say something that I vehemently disagree with, his thought process might actually cause me to alter my thinking more in his direction… I don’t discount something just because it’s personal opinion as standard operating procedure.
Finally, SE offends me because of his assumption that his views are morally superior to anyone who disagrees with him, and more so given that he has no way of knowing what they believe in a moral sense… ‘Exhibit A’ is his shouting something to the effect that ‘we are trying to have a society here.’ That is a non sequitur, and prima facie evidence that he engages his heart without engaging his brain… just because someone has a different opinion from you about how to get to a goal does mean that they have a different goal…
2/21/2015 4:30 pm
candid_observer -
Children are different in their thinking in two ways, both of which bear mentioning here…
The first is that they haven’t been socialized to think certain things… blacks are lazy, all men are predators, etc… That is why they have such a great talent for saying ‘inappropriate’ things that mortify their parents. To a neighbor, who is truly a cantankerous individual, they might ask “Why are you always so cranky?’… while their parents blush in embarrassment, and even though it’s true, we ‘aren’t supposed’ to say things like that.
The second is that children treat any problem as new and without discounting any possible solutions, while adults already have an impression in their minds of what the solution could and even should be. As an example, an adult who gets a new toy (a piece of electronic gear?) already thinks they know how it should turn on… they try that and when it doesn’t work, they try it over and over again as if that is the way that it should turn on and it must therefore be broken even though it’s brand new and just out of the box, and even though there are other obvious things that they could try. A child in the same situation thinks ‘that didn’t work’ or ‘that’s not it’ and moves on to trying something else immediately.
I mention all of this because of your observation “Doesn’t it seem like too perfect a story — and a too perfectly outrageous example of PC running amok?” It might well be, meaning it’s bogus in whole or in part, or it might not be,… so we need to actually investigate with an open mind rather than dismissing it too easily because of our prejudices (which everyone has, ranging from total agreement to absolutely opposing ones.) I do agree with you both that it does seem a little too pat, even if past experience shows that stranger things have happened, and about our situation in life if it turns out to be true…
For what it’s worth, I am not inclined towards conspiracy theories (and yes, I know that I’m behaving in a typically ‘adult way’ after extolling the virtues of thinking like a child above.) I don’t know if you recall the case of DSK allegedly raping the hotel maid, but he claimed he was set up, which I tended to discount. Some magazine writer investigated and came up with facts and a scenario that I found very plausible, causing me to rethink my position. In the aftermath of all that I’ve learned about DSK, I don’t know what really happened, but I do know that he isn’t likely the sort of person I’d want to call a friend.
2/22/2015 3:30 am
IO,
In your dozens of paragraphs of response, you don’t seem to have been able to see my core point — in my actual experience as a Harvard undergrad, I found that black students fit in. I didn’t need to check their grades to see if their professors had some weird curve. I talked to classmates.
There were people who were clearly not high-achievers, clearly did not fit in. These people in my experience were white hockey players (though there were also many very bright hockey players who did fit in.)
Your bluster about affirmative action at elite schools suggests to me that you simply don’t know anyone in the category.
2/22/2015 10:07 am
Anonymous -
(Before addressing your point, let me emphasize one point: school grades are not an accurate measure of intelligence, although they are often used as a proxy for it — I am not claiming that blacks are less intelligent.)
“— in my actual experience as a Harvard undergrad, I found that black students fit in. I didn’t need to check their grades to see if their professors had some weird curve. I talked to classmates.”
I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe that you have ever stated your position in those words or even that clearly before. How would I be expected to know it?
Now that I do know it, I can evaluate it for what it is… your position is based on purely anecdotal evidence with a sample size of one and is a position where you are using flawed logic to come to the conclusion that you wanted to come to (a conclusion that you seem likely hold to even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)
From top to bottom:
- One person’s limited (non-comprehensive) four year’s of observing something at one particular institution that may or may not be representative of most institutions is supposed to be an accurate, quantitative measure of something? Are you serious? Is that what they taught you at Harvard?
- How would you know who was ‘AA’ and who wasn’t (not all blacks are) if they didn’t volunteer that information and you didn’t ask? If your experience turned out to be mostly with non-‘AA’ students who got in on merit (there are blacks who do, but not nearly enough who are able to because of the educational system), your point validates mine; if your experience included mostly ‘AA’ beneficiaries you have provided zero proof beyond a warm and fuzzy feeling in support of your claim, and your claim is directly opposed to the numerous news articles over the years that I mentioned (which I admit are not any more science-based than your claim.)
- ‘What the hell does ‘fit in’ have to do with anything? We aren’t talking about being socially accepted, we are talking about a subset of the larger population (‘AA’ beneficiaries) being properly represented and evenly distributed in terms of grade point averages versus the whole student body, and without any preferential treatment, for which you have provided no proof that they did. If you meant ‘fit in’ in another sense, you should have stated it explicitly, although your post certainly seems to imply that that is your intent.
- Even if you could have checked their grades, how would you know if their professors had some weird curve? You would need to check their work as well, and know what the original assignments and stated requirements were… In fact, you would need to check all of those things for everybody to have any sort of valid assessment of the grading results.
- Saying that you didn’t need to check to see if their professors had some weird curve because you talked to their classmates is akin to saying you know what goes on at UVA because you talked to Sabrina Rubin Erdley.
- I’ve already made clear my belief about the problems of athletics within higher ed, which seems to mirror your point. You unintentionally reinforce my point with your chosen ‘white hockey players’. Of the major sports — baseball, basketball, football and hockey in this country (soccer isn’t there yet) — blacks are by far the least represented in hockey, which coincidentally, is the only one of those sports that requires some sort of actual facility in addition to equipment — you can’t even practice skating outside during the winter in most parts of the country, making hockey less of a choice for blacks… if they had equal access, it’s a safe bet that they would be as dominant in hockey as they are in the other sports.
- You are absolutely right about not knowing anyone in the category (‘AA’) at an elite school, or any other school for that matter, not that my ‘bluster’ was meant to single out elite schools. I simply wouldn’t be so rude as to ask anyone if they were ‘AA,’ and those beneficiaries can be forgiven for not volunteering the information. I did however go to a very good school, even an elite one, so in one sense my experience isn’t really from yours.
2/22/2015 10:25 am
Anonymous -
Perhaps you can enlighten us as to how someone who wasn’t a high-achiever pre-college in scholastic terms and is admitted to an elite school only under ‘AA’ suddenly becomes able to be academically high-achieving at a level that is more demanding, to say nothing of doing so at an elite school where the competition is presumably stiffer?
2/22/2015 10:54 am
Anonymous (Ryan?) -
I went back an reread your original post, and I see that you do refer to ‘fitting in’ in the academic sense, and which I missed, so my apologies on that. I still take issue with your conclusion, but I was wrong to suggest that you were changing the terms of reference.
Let’s look at a real-life example.
Michelle Obama, by her own admission double-dipped on ‘AA,’ first at Princeton and then at Harvard Law School. If she ‘fit in’ so well, why did she need ‘AA’ help in getting accepted to HLS? The most logical reason would appear to be that she wasn’t high-achieving post pre-collegiate…
2/22/2015 11:25 am
Yeah, Ryan, who are you going to believe, an Interested Observer citing unidentified nonscientific news articles, or your lying eyes and ears over four years of your life?
I only had fourteen years’ experience at probably nonrepresentative elite colleges, grading probably nonrepresentative students’ nonrepresentative papers for eight of them and supervising the academic progress of a randomly selected but nonetheless probably somehow *totally unrepresentative* fifteenth of the student body for three years. My opinion is, like yours, Ryan, also CLEARLY unfounded in empirical reality, and emerges purely from ideology.
But look on the bright side: at least we’re not racists. And at least I can reassure myself that I got better grades in college than the insanely high-achieving attorney and community leader Michelle Obama (famous not only for riding the bus an hour each way to a magnet high school, where she was the salutatorian, but also for focusing her professional development on service to the less fortunate, and certain kinds of activism, rather than credentials for their own sake, and nonetheless landing a job in IP law at Sidley Austin) — she was only cum laude, while I was summa.
2/22/2015 1:25 pm
SE -
The difference between you and me is that I readily admit that I formed my opinion in part from what I was told by various media outlets including the self-styled ‘Paper of Record,” while you keep referring to phantom experts and studies. For the record I’ve always had a healthy skepticism of what they reported, long before the likes of SRE and Brian Williams.
I wasn’t making any comment about Ms. Obama beyond stating that she has said she was ‘AA’ at both places, and asking why she needed it at HLS if she was high-achieving at Princeton. You haven’t answered my question. A ten year old would see that there is an obvious dichotomy there.
If you are really the hotshot ‘non non-attorney’ that you seem to think you are, you would know that a Federal Court in California has found that mere access to education isn’t enough… it has to be access to a uniformly level quality of education, otherwise the children (mostly black/Hispanic) are being deprived of their constitutional rights, and it is precisely this discrepancy in access to a quality education in public schools that is the underlying cause for ‘AA’ and its remedial attempts to fix the problem.
I wouldn’t pat myself on the back too hard about not being a racist if I was you… the soft bigotry of low expectations (of blacks), which your defense of ‘AA’ manifests, marks you as one… otherwise you would care more about fixing the system so that there was no need for ‘AA.’
2/22/2015 1:49 pm
I am glad to hear about the California case. Please give a cite of some kind. I hope it is not summarily reversed in light of the almost precisely contrary holding in San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 US 1 (1973) (if memory serves).
2/22/2015 2:04 pm
SE graduated summa cum laude?
We’re scrod.
(Excuse my Bostonian.)
2/22/2015 4:59 pm
SE -
My mistake - it was a California Superior Court, Judge Rolf M. Treu - Vergara v. California. You asked me if I knew about the Google thing… you should be able to find the details yourself, especially since all court records are public documents by default unless specifically sealed, and because you allege that you are ‘non non-attorney’… unless of course you aren’t really one. I throw that in because it’s difficult to believe that anyone with a record of sloppiness such as yours could ever have graduated, never mind summa cum laude. No wonder Harvard gets such a bad rap.
By the way, we’re still waiting for an explanation from you as to how affirmative action, which ‘benefits’ only a relatively few blacks and other minorities relative to their overall numbers, is better than fixing the system so that all blacks and other minorities are benefited… you racist.
2/22/2015 7:25 pm
Ah, yes, good — there is lots online about Vergara. It is good news. It follows in the footsteps of “Serrano II” (1976), a California state-law case which held that the holding of “Serrano I” about similar equal-protection principles in education was not disturbed by the Rodriguez US Supreme Court case that I cited above. Both Serrano and Vergara (pending appeal) are now good law even though they clash with the rule laid down by the Rodriguez court in 1973 (which I learned about in con law of course oh almost three years ago now).
This coexistence of conflicting rulings is possible because Vergara does not interpret the United States Constitution. It interprets only the California Constitution. It has no effect outside of California and (unfortunately) poses no threat to the bad national rule of Rodriguez.
Notice that I’m not excoriating you for using the word “constitutional,” which in ordinary usage applies to the US Constitution, when referring to the rights vindicated in a case that refers only to the California Constitution.
By the way, there’s no way I’d be as much fun as I am now if I had gone to Harvard for COLLEGE.
2/22/2015 7:27 pm
“No wonder Harvard gets such a bad rap [academically].”
Huh?
2/22/2015 7:51 pm
SE -
I’ll respond in kind, which is to say, without malice…
It might have an effect outside California independent of federal law… I believe similar suits have been filed in NY and possibly other states with similar state constitutions as California.
So, a legal question for you… is there any way for this to jump the fence into federal jurisdiction, or is this destined to stay in state court?
Extra points for catching me on the usage of ‘constitutional’… it’s one of those cases where I think I might legitimately quibble because of the fairly common dual use, but I’l plead to being imprecise, but not inaccurate.
2/22/2015 8:05 pm
“imprecise, but not inaccurate”
That’s exactly correct.
There is no hope that a federal judge could use this ruling to try to go up against the US Supreme Court. State law doesn’t help interpret the US Constitution. But there is always hope that a good-faith federal argument could create a workaround that could generate a ruling (either way) to create a vehicle for the Supreme Court to overrule itself. This would be futile unless one could anticipate that several of the Republican baddies would be replaced in the next few years.
As you say, the California ruling could be persuasive authority in other states to the extent that the relevant state-constitution clauses read similarly and judges feel like helping poor people. Most judges perceive this as the job of the legislature.
None of what I just said is probably news to you.
2/22/2015 8:21 pm
SE -
But what happens if the ruling stands in the CA appellate system… could it then jump to the federal system, where it would likely be overturned. I’m under the impression — perhaps wrongly — that only issues that pertain to the U.S. constitution can make the jump… this one would seem to qualify as the CA constitution would seem to be in conflict with the U.S. one on this issue (at least to a non-attorney like me.)
While you are providing free legal advice, would you mind telling me if there is any practical difference between a lawyer and an attorney? I know in the U.K. there is a difference between barristers and solicitors…
Surely you don’t think Antonin Scalia is a baddie… he and Justice Ginsburg spend so much time together off of the bench that I’m surprised no one has started any rumors… of course at their age, anything they did would likely not be very physical…
2/22/2015 8:52 pm
There is no conflict in different interpretation of the two constitutions, even if the words are the same. So the US Supreme Court would have no business getting involved. It gets involved only if there is a conflict in laws, and preempts the state law with the federal law. E.g., Torcaso v. Watkins. There may be other ways not occurring to me. Sometimes a state’s action is alleged to interfere with constitutional due process, which allows a garden-variety case to “make the jump” from the state supreme court to the US one. Also if some other US constitutional right is implicated (Hollingsworth). This is bog standard Fourteenth Amendment.
No one can argue that California’s decision to extend extra equality conflicts with the US Constitution. It’s a tax issue, which is clearly not a “taking.” It’s really a state policy decision about budgets, even if it comes from judges rather than the legislature.
So I don’t see any way it can make the jump to the US Supreme Court.
2/22/2015 8:53 pm
All five of the Republicans are baddies, but Roberts has a core of decency in that he believes in being a JUDGE rather than an imposer of preferences. But stay tuned a couple months, he may have a heel turn.
2/23/2015 1:44 pm
absolutely riveting conversation
2/23/2015 2:00 pm
Thanks Harold.
2/23/2015 3:27 pm
SE -
“By the way, there’s no way I’d be as much fun as I am now…”
Aren’t you being rather immodest?
At the risk of stirring the muck, I’d say that you are much more ‘fun’ when you aren’t being an inflammatory putz seemingly just for the sake of it.
I hope that this observation does mean ‘here we go again…’
I’m interested in your comment about the Chief Justice. I’m wondering if you feel that way because of how he ruled in upholding ObamaCare… saying that even though Congress was at pains to say the mandate and penalty wasn’t a tax, it really was and so within Congress’ mandate.
My quarrel, quite apart from that, is how he went beyond that and at the same time said there were limits on the Commerce Clause (thereby outraging Justice Ginsburg.) My understanding is that the tradition is once they find a reason to rule one way, justices aren’t supposed to issue opinions on other things. If Chief Justice Roberts has indeed set a precedent of sorts by doing that, he has directly contributed to a breakdown in the working of the Court in that he will have no cause for complaint if another Justice does something similar and of which he disapproves.
I’d say Harry Reid in unilaterally changing the rules of filibusters of presidential appointments has done exactly the same thing… if Mitch McConnell decides to do the same thing in support of say the Keystone Pipeline, the Dems will have no kick.
Note that I’m not taking sides on the particular issues, only the process.
Finally I’d point out that Justice Thomas, whatever anyone thinks about what he did or didn’t do to Anita Hill, has often taken a lot of incoming flak from conservatives when they think he sided with the liberals on the bench, and even worse, issued an opinion that they though was outright ‘liberal.’ His response is always the same — that the Constitution isn’t his to screw around with — it belongs to the people — and that his decisions and opinions don’t necessarily reflect what he wishes the Constitution says, only what he thinks it does say.
Be gentle… I’m working from memory (old memory both in terms of certain events and the age of my physical memory) and I’m a ‘non lawyer’ (to have a bit of fun at a certain unnamed individual’s expense.)
2/23/2015 3:43 pm
Richard -
Where is your ‘More to come’?
2/23/2015 3:56 pm
SE -
Oops…. ‘doesn’t mean’
2/24/2015 10:14 am
I read the NYT article which was very balanced. I also accessed some of the evidence available online at Joe Lonsdale Statement. The first thing that seems obvious is the initial introduction was boldly initiated by Ellie and that took place in New York about a year before the mentoring arrangement. (The mentoring arrangement almost seems like it was an afterthought between two people/friends who knew each other). Joe seems to be a nerdy guy with facial tics who hit it big in Silicon Valley despite a lack of social skills. Ellie seems to be a person suffering from mental illness, OCD, anxiety an eating disorder and religious scrupulosity. I think she entered into this relationship with the full support, encouragement and oversight of her mother Anne. I think there was a reasonable “expectation” of sex from Joe’s end. He was probably passionate and pressured her but I don’t think a rape occurred. I think Ellie “gave in” to his expectations and went along with it for a time, all the while texting her friend that sex is “hugely overrated” and writing Joe kooky and rambling e-mails. At the demise of the relationship she felt used, discarded and as though she compromised her ideals. I think in 25 years this young woman may look back and realize that she was victimized by her mother who insinuated herself into every facet of the relationship (to the alarm of the Lonsdale family). Mom also wrote outrageous e-mails to Joe way overstepping her boundaries - analyzing and comparing the relationship to “game theory”. If I ever did a thing like that my college aged daughter would kill me.
3/1/2024 9:35 pm
“You could not ask for a more unstable combination in a girlfriend than someone who once wanted to be a nun, then became a model…”
Good grief! Based on inside information (my wife attended a Roman Catholic school) most young Catholic girls want to become nuns at some point during their pre-teen and early teen years, just as most public school girls wish to become teachers at some time. Clougherty might or might not be unstable, but this apparent dichotomy proves nothing at all.