{"id":9564,"date":"2011-05-29T10:55:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T14:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9564"},"modified":"2011-11-27T13:04:16","modified_gmt":"2011-11-27T17:04:16","slug":"qotd-the-yale-fraternity-prank-and-the-feminist-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/29\/qotd-the-yale-fraternity-prank-and-the-feminist-response\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Yale fraternity prank and the feminist response"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

That wise precept, \u201cSticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,\u201d has obviously long disappeared among the sisterhood, however. So, too, has the idea of keeping things in perspective. The DKE brothers\u2019 tasteless pledge prank was just that: a tasteless pledge prank. What is the most provocative thing you could say on a college campus today, the thing most likely to outrage the largest and most influential power bloc? \u201cNo means yes.\u201d To inflate this incident into a symbol of anything beyond an unfunny effort at transgression on the part of a trivially small (and marginalized) number of individuals requires a willful blindness to the reality of Yale. (The administration doesn\u2019t even recognize fraternities.) The university constantly sends the message that \u201cno means no,\u201d whether through such formal bodies as its Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, its Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, and a 24-hour sexual-assault hotline or through informal channels such as freshman orientation and public pronouncements. Yale president Rick Levin and Yale College dean Mary Miller condemned what they called the pledges\u2019 \u201cappalling language.\u201d \u201cWe will confront hateful speech,\u201d they stated in a press release, \u201cin no uncertain terms: No member of our community should engage in such demeaning behavior.\u201d Last week, Yale banned DKE from conducting any activities on campus, including use of campus e-mail, for five years on the ground that it had engaged in \u201charassment, coercion or intimidation.\u201d Yale also announced that individual frat members had been disciplined for their speech. If the pledge chant represented official thinking on campus, or was in any way sanctioned by the authorities, obviously there would be cause for concern. Clearly, that is not the case.<\/p>\n

To the civil rights complainants, however, the DKE incident and Yale\u2019s allegedly inadequate response to it \u201cprecludes women from having the same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts,\u201d in the words of signatory Hannah Zeavin. (The signatories also want to gut further Yale\u2019s already ludicrously inadequate due-process protections for those accused of sexual assault or harassment.) Yale has one of the greatest library systems in the world; it showers on students top-notch instruction in almost every intellectual discipline; it lavishes students with healthy food, luxurious athletic facilities, and rich venues for artistic expression. All of these educational resources are available on a scrupulously equal basis to both sexes. But according to the Yale 16 and their supporters, female students simply cannot take full advantage of the peerless collection of early twentieth-century German periodicals at Sterling Library, say, or the DNA sequencing labs on Science Hill, because a few frat boys acted tastelessly. Thus the need to go crying to the feds to protect you from the big, bad Yale patriarchy. Time to bring on the smelling salts and the society doctors peddling cures for vapors and neurasthenia.<\/p>\n

Heather Mac Donald, “Sisterhood and the SEALs: How can women join special forces when they can\u2019t even handle frat-boy pranks?”, City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2011-05-26<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That wise precept, \u201cSticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,\u201d has obviously long disappeared among the sisterhood, however. So, too, has the idea of keeping things in perspective. The DKE brothers\u2019 tasteless pledge prank was just that: a tasteless pledge prank. What is the most provocative thing you could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79,10,41,13],"tags":[198,186,764,43],"class_list":["post-9564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-liberty","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-equalrights","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-university","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2ug","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9564"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12266,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9564\/revisions\/12266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}