Category Archive 'Inadvertent Comedy'
29 Apr 2017

Yale Snowflakes Confront Administration With Symbolic Hunger Strike

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The Free Beacon explains to the confused that a “Symbolic Hunger Strike” is a Hunger Strike in which the activist striker is allowed to take time out of Hunger Striking and get a bite to eat while a replacement striker fills in for him on the hunger line.

A group of Yale University graduate students announced Tuesday evening that they would be undertaking a hunger strike to pressure the administration into granting them better union benefits. The strike is taking place in front of University President Peter Salovey’s home.

“Yale wants to make us wait and wait and wait … until we give up and go away,” the eight members of the graduate student union Local 33 announced. “We have committed ourselves to waiting without eating.”

Yale doctoral students currently earn a stipend $30,000 a year, receive free health care, and have their $40,000 tuition paid in full, according to Yale News. The university administration said in a statement that they understood the students concerns, but “strongly [urge] that students not put their health at risk or encourage others to do so.”

As it turns out, the hunger strike might not put anyone’s health in peril. According to a pamphlet posted on Twitter by a former Yale student, the hunger strike is “symbolic” and protesters can leave and get food when they can no longer go on.

RTWT

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UPDATE:

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

08 Feb 2016

University of Oregon Bernie Sanders Voters

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This is why we should have kept the property qualification for voting.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

04 Dec 2014

Sexual Misconduct Witch Hunt Recently Concluded at Yale Without a Hanging

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HeSaidSheSaid

Last year, a Yale student couple broke up during Spring Break. A few days later, the girl texted her former boyfriend, informing him she was drunk, inviting him to her room, and telling him: “Don’t let me try to seduce you though, because that is a distinct possibility.”

Sex ensued (of course). And, over a year later, upon returning to Yale after taking a year off, the young lady filed a complaint with the University accusing her former boyfriend of rape. He had taken advantage, she said, of her being drunk, and seeing him around campus made her “want to cry or vomit.”

Representatives of all sorts of new University bureaucracies, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct (UWC), the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center (SHARE), the Title IX coordinator, sprang into action and worked on the matter for months.

After initiating formal procedures and supplying the complainant with her former boyfriend’s class schedule (so that she could avoid seeing him and therefore crying or throwing up), an independent fact-finder was hired. The two parties were interviewed four times along with some witnesses to the young lady’s drinking on the night in question. Statements were exchanged. All the majesty of Yale marched up to the top of the hill and then down again, and a 3-and-1/2 hour hearing was finally conducted, with all the technical facilities and formality of a Nuremburg war crimes trial.

As the result of the hearing, a faculty panel voted and wrote a report, concluding (reasonably enough) that “the preponderance of the evidence” proved that the male student had not violated university policy by taking advantage of the young lady while she was incapacitated. They then formally advised the two young people to avoid one another.

It appears that, in the end, it all came out alright, since the panel’s report was confirmed by the Dean of Yale College, and the complainant decided to forgo appealing the decision.

Original Yale Daily News story of November 7.

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Ruth Marcus, at the Washington Post, thought that this incident should alarm everyone.

This seems the just outcome, but one that, given the low “preponderance of evidence” standard of proof and Yale’s stringent consent rules, could have gone the other way.

And at what a traumatic cost. To a young woman who sincerely believes she has been raped but seems, at least from afar, to have been pushed by the prevailing culture into viewing a bad choice as a quasi-criminal event. To a young man who lived under the shadow of accusation and expulsion.

This is a cautionary tale about a still-evolving, still-uneasy balance in dealing with sexual assault on campus. The Yale episode demonstrates: Parents of boys should be every bit as nervous as parents of girls about what can happen to the not-quite-adults they send off to college.

Hat tip to Maggie Gallagher.

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