Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
Well after reading the wiki, I wouldn’t call it that:
I think due process is one of the fundamental principles of our society, be for it murder, rape or petty theft.
This reminds me of a reddit post from a while ago. Dude is going to a university in the US. He’s randomly contacted by campus police to let him know that a student has taken out a restraining order on him. He’s a graduate student, and the student who took out the restraining order is from one of his classes that’s typically for undergrads. Other than sharing that class, he doesn’t know the student. Never even spoken to them. He’s on a student visa, if he’s expelled, he’ll likely be deported. He’s not allowed to speak to the student and campus police won’t even tell him why the restraining order is in place.
After doing some investigation on his own, he finds out the student is dating one of his roommates, who he also doesn’t know very well. The roommate is stalking the student, and another roommate is helping the stalker.
The student who took out the restraining order had seen him with the stalker at some point and, because the class they share is typically for undergrads, assumed he only took the class to keep an eye on the student for the stalker.
He was able to go to his graduate advisor about it and luckily it all got cleared up, the student withdrew the restraining order. But his whole academic career was nearly derailed because a random person was able to take out a restraining order on him with zero direct evidence, and there was no established means by which he could defend himself.
That’s why you shouldn’t let university staff do police work or become Dredd (judge, jury & executioner). Professionals have trained for years to get this stuff right but “campus police” thinks they can do it without any proper training or investigation.
“Campus Police” are regular police (for all that’s worth), not rent-a-cops. Their jurisdiction is University and University-related policing. Think of the University as being its own city.
I teach nights at a university and UPD is pretty great. The city cops are very much out to get people, whereas the UPD has a very light touch. They’ll bust a party with a bunch of 19yo Kids drinking too much and getting loud, and tell them to keep it down and stay safe, while offering to call a non-police volunteer to drive anyone home for free.
Parking Services (not part of UPD) can get go suck on a tailpipe though. Fuck those guys.
That’s good to hear. Maybe I shouldn’t have shat on the campus police but rather the campus staff making the decision to expel without going through the proper process.
They are given due process, including access to lawyers, evidence, and witnesses. They’re even allowed to take the case to court. All public universities are required to offer full due process when expelling students.
Private universities are not required to do so because they’re not run by the government.
That’s in contradiction to what the Wikipedia page shows.
So many of them do not. Why does not being run by the government exempt schools from applying basic human rights?
Your question is a little hyperbolic since what your talking about is title IX specifically, not “human rights” in general.
You can read about title IX exemptions here.
I’m not talking about human rights in general, I’m talking about those specific basic human rights.
How are they being denied basic human rights?
Title IX is very specific and the organization you refer to, FACE, specifically states their goal in relation to title IX.
I can’t tell if your arguing in bad faith or you don’t understand title IX compared to other laws that would apply.
I was talking about the organisation in the first comment, but then the discussion went to public and private universities in general, which I then replied to.
And the basic human right is the due process I mentioned before.
You don’t have to jump to accusations “bad faith” because you and I are misunderstanding one another. Let’s try to keep Lemmy normal and not spiral into a Reddit argument.
I’m not misunderstanding you. I think your struggling to follow your own conversation.
You brought up FACE, an organization concerned with Title IX enforcement specifically.
The other user explained they are given due process (under Title IX) and explained (poorly) that private colleges are not bound by the same rules if they don’t take government funding, expressed as government run.
Then you shifted it to some conversation about basic human rights and questioned what not being government run has to do with.
Which is why I shared the federal government page outlining Title IX exemptions.
Due process is covered under the 5th and 14th amendments, not Title IX.
Remember this:
Where you cited a Wikipedia article about an organization concerned with Title IX to justify your claim they’re not given “due process”.
It’s either bad faith or stupidity. Either way, I’m done engaging with it.
Ahhh so it is a Reddit argument you’re looking for. I can’t help you, but I will correct some errors:
Please read the comment above mine.
And I replied to that with pointing that out as a problem.
My initial comment:
vs.
Potato potato.
That’s your interpretation of it. And considering the upvote / downvote ratios in your screen shot I assume more people agree with me than with you.
Not from my side anyway. Good luck and goodbye.
An anonymous poster posts a story in Reddit…
Due process protects you from the government. You don’t get due process when you get kicked out of a private business or university for misbehaving. They can kick you out for no reason at all.
If you misbehave, sure, but this is not misbehaving. This is a crime. One that hasn’t been proven to have happened at all.
That is a major issue. Kicking someone out of university is a life-changing punishment, and should not be taken so lightly when someone may be innocent. There should be rules about that and I don’t think this should be normalized.
Getting fired is life changing yet we accept that we could be fired at any time for no reason here in the US. Protections against getting arbitrarily kicked out of a private university would require legislation. Right now that’s a risk you assume when you go to a private institution versus a public one.
That is also a problem. But getting kicked out of university for supposed rape when you’re innocent is a life sentence. No decent job will ever hire you.
The fact that this shit happens all the time doesn’t mean you have to normalise it. It’s not normal.
Actually it’s a pre requisite for being a politician or clergy member.
Earns you a golden toilet even
What do you think having to drop out of University because of the trauma of being raped does to a person?
So two wrongs make a right? This person had their life horribly disrupted for reason A so an unrelated person should have their life horribly disrupted for reason B?
People should not be subject to arbitrary harm from others and we should be against all forms of it, whether that’s sexual assault, economic coercion or lack of due process.
When universities hide evidence, don’t report to authorities, and otherwise dodge investigating rape accusations, then people aren’t going to trust when they exonerate these men.
This is on the system that protects these rapists.
Due process is also a system that can make things like racism, sexism, nepotism harder. Also outside of universities people often feel like the legal system protects offenders, but it in a well functioning system it also protects them. After all, without due process, rape victims themselves can also be expelled by universities.
And when a legal system doesn’t work, it needs fixing. People fought hard for legal protections to put in place in the first place.
I don’t know about this case, if that is true then its terrible and he should have been arrested, convicted and thrown out of the university. But the larger point stands, denying some people of due process because others are harmed in other ways is not something to strive for.
Obviously being raped is worse. I’m not trying to start a competition or shouting match here.
My point is solely and entirely about the basic human right of due process: anyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, no matter the gender or crime. That doesn’t mean don’t believe the accuser, but it means really take the charges seriously, investigate the crime to the best of your system’s abilities and if after all that there is insufficient evidence, there should be no conviction. Not by the justice system or the university. If he is guilty, as with any other crime, the system has failed. But until there is some major breakthrough, this is the best system we have.
As a more general point: the US is already falling into a society of lawlessness. Now you don’t have to go all Michelle Obama “When they go low, we go high” but at least don’t play their hand by inciting more lawlessness. I really don’t think you will win that war…
No, innocent until proven guilty is only the bar for the government to lock you up in a cage. It’s impossible for anyone to live their life using that standard.
Not when universities have the ability to hide evidence and obfuscate real investigations in order to protect these men. Which they have done time and time again.
This is not the best system we have. We can’t even get the police to process rape kits.
Then fight for a better system, like I said, but don’t incite lawlessness or start an argument with the one person advocating for due process.
Then maybe Cornell shouldn’t have impeded a real investigation here.
I don’t see a Cornell in this story. Do you mean the university? (I honestly don’t know, not from the US)
If that’s the case: absolutely, the university should not have a say in what is a matter of the law.
Cornell is currently in the news for covering up a gang rape two years ago. It’s come out they withheld evidence from the DA and the police and DA never investigated properly.
Columbia has similar skeletons in their closet.
I didn’t know about that, but I don’t know why it has any relevance to my comment: I’m advocating for due process and you pose an obstruction of that very due process as somehow contradictory to my statement.
You have no idea the conversations you’re actually having in here then.
I have an idea about the Wikipedia page I read. That is what I replied to. I also have an opinion about due process, which I am very well aware of.
You tried to pull some other case into it that I wasn’t even talking about and now you try to accuse me of having no idea about the entire discussion before that?
Are you deliberately trying to make yourself look like a fool? You really couldn’t do a better job if you tried.