Stockpiling Psycho: A Look At Callisto

Increasingly, it's obvious that Title IX means of combating sexual assault (and harassment) amount to a sort of jobs program for the otherwise unemployable, a point made most recently by Reason's Robby Soave in the context of Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis' tangle with that bureaucracy, something I wrote about earlier. The "man behind the curtain" is the huge army of mandarins needed to implement it:

The Title IX inquisition must be a cash-cow for the people tasked with handling such broad and outlandish claims. Northwestern flew a team of a lawyers out to meet with Kipnis; these men would have interviewed anyone she deemed relevant to her case. Their colleagues would have initiated retaliation investigations against anyone she accused (this calls to mind recent Game of Thrones episodes, in which characters levelling accusations against each other merely manage to get absolutely everyone, accusers and accused, confined to dungeon cells). Is it any wonder that tuition prices are skyrocketing so that universities can continue to pay all these Title IX lawyers, bureaucrats, and coordinators?

 Earlier this year, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights asked for a 31% funding increase to deal with a huge and expected uptick in case load, of dubious (and likely self-serving) origins, amounting to an additional 200 attorneys and investigators. But such paycheck beneficiaries are by no means the end, something I discovered when I learned that the University of San Francisco is going to be the first school to use Callisto, an Orwellian system for stockpiling reports of sexual assault. Their description of the software's operation should give pause to anyone interested in justice — as opposite nursing retroactive vendettas:

1. Fill out an account of an incident online

Visit your school-specific Callisto website, record what happened in an online form, and get advice on what evidence to collect and save.

2. Save the report

Securely save the record, timestamped when it was stored, and decide later if you want to take any action.

3. Report now or later

Learn about your school-specific reporting options and directly submit your record to your chosen authority. Or you can opt into automatically reporting if someone else reports the same assailant.

The justifications for this stockpiling of timed-release "gotcha" charges we learn later:

Why survivors don’t report:

• Not knowing how to label their experience
• Considering their assault not “serious enough” to report
• Not wanting to get the assailant into trouble, especially if the assailant is a significant other, friend, teammate, or a family member
• Fearing retaliation from peers or the assilant for reporting
• Feeling like the assault was partially his or her fault
• Not knowing where or how to report
• Feeling that they do not have sufficient evidence
• Not wanting to go through the trauma of reliving the assault again, especially if they worry that they will not be believed 

Secret charges that can be unleashed at some future point (without investigation in the interim) sounds remarkably like an enabling tool for false accusers, in the same exact way that Ellen Pao warehoused her multitudinous grievances at Kleiner Perkins. And as with the expanding Title IX bureaucracy within the DoE, Callisto comes with an enormous board of directors, 25 by my count. That number includes Yale Law student Alexandra Broadsky, who penned a genuinely awful piece in Feministing about her totalitarian vision of "fair process" a while back. Callisto the software represents everything Title IX has become: parasitic, secretive, biased, expansionist for the bureaucracy it services, and paranoid. It is no surprise that Sexual Health Innovations, the misnamed 501(c)3 organization behind Callisto, spent 20% of their 2013 budget on lobbying; they have a lot of institutions to pitch yet.

"Feminism Devouring Itself": Laura Kipnis' Bizarre Title IX Case

File under "When You've Lost Jezebel" Dep't, Laura Kipnis describes her Title IX persecution for a piece she wrote in February about instructors being forbidden to date students, borne of a "feminism hijacked by melodrama". The subsequent reaction ended up in the hands of the Title IX coordinator; after much back-and-forth, and no indication whatsoever of what the "charges" were she faced:

Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term "kangaroo court" came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.

What I very much wanted to know, though there was apparently no way of finding it out, was whether this was the first instance of Title IX charges filed over a publication. Was this a test case? From my vantage point, it seemed to pit a federally mandated program against my constitutional rights, though I admit my understanding of those rights was vague.

Kipnis notes that, "a Title IX charge can now be brought against a professor over a tweet. Also that my tweets were apparently being monitored." It's hard to look at this and think it is anything other than an administrative structure engineered to pursue witch hunts, i.e. it has no value other than as a sort of jobs program for a certain class of otherwise unemployables.

Oh, it gets better; during her examination by the telephone sanitizers:

My Midwestern Torquemadas were perfectly pleasant at our on-campus meeting — they’d indeed flown to town to meet in person — so pleasant that I relaxed and became overvoluble, stupidly gratified by their interest and attentions. There I was, expounding on my views about power and feminism; soon I was delivering a mini-seminar on the work of Michel Foucault. Later, replaying the two-and-a-half-hour session in my mind, I thought, "You chump," realizing that I’d probably dug a hundred new holes for myself.

Well, yes. You expected otherwise?

Dan Pallotta, Con Artist

For some reason, the subject of Dan Pallotta came up again on Twitter. You may have seen his very popular TED talk, or read his remarks on the subject of charity at Huffington Post, which largely echo his TED talk. The bottom line seems to be that Pallotta thinks charities should be more like corporate America in their drive, pay for employees (particularly executives), and willingness to expand. That is to say, he represents virtually everything I have railed against when it comes to large charities, converting vices into virtues by mere rhetorical dodges. As Charity Navigator executives Ken Berger and Robert M. Penna wrote (also in HuffPo),

No one can dispute the fact that Dan Pallotta is a good pitch man, is certainly effective at selling himself, and can convey his message quite convincingly. We believe his message has gained tremendous popularity for one simple reason -- he ultimately is arguing that charities should be held to virtually no accountability standards. Yes, we know Dan says people should look at results rather than overhead; but if you look under the hood for details, there is little in his argument on exactly how to go about measuring those results. For example, he speaks of vague notions such as "Charity is in the business of inspiration, so it is particularly problematic for charity that the value of inspiration is not measured;" and "it is not a matter so much of what we must do as what we must stop doing," yet at the same time he implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- justifies doing away with most clear standards of accountability. Unfortunately, it is evident that this is music to the ears of many leaders in the charitable sector. Indeed, many of them seem drawn to the notion that if they follow the Pied Piper of Zero Accountability, they can basically do whatever they want and get paid millions while waving the flag of Pallotta's books and TEDTalk.

Jennifer Amanda Jones in Nonprofit Quarterly penned a point-by-point takedown of Pallotta's arguments a couple years ago, from which I excerpt her last and strongest point:

Pallotta’s argument: The percentage of an organization’s total budget spent on overhead is not a good measure of effectiveness.

Buchanan’s response: Buchanan agrees that overhead expenses are not necessarily a good measure of overall effectiveness. But, at the same time, argues that overhead is an important measure to pay attention to. “Donors have a legitimate interest in understanding what proportion of their dollars ends up in the hands of for-profit fundraising professionals. A recent, widely discussed investigative report by The Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) identifies “America’s Worst Charities” on the basis of the proportion of funds raised that were paid to for-profit solicitors. (Topping the list is the “Kid’s Wish Network” which raised nearly $128 million over the past 10 years—$110 million of which went straight to the solicitors they hired to raise money!)”

Pallotta demands donors close their eyes to potential problems, should cease to care about who is helped and how many, and his airy assertions about "inspiration" will make up for it all. That's hardly comforting. If he wants charity to be run more like business, he also needs to recognize that businesses are obliged to satisfy their customers or fail; with charities, no equivalent feedback loop exists in the absence of oversight.

Administrivia: Comment Moderation Mostly Off

Due to the apparent lack of comments around here and the difficulty of dealing with them, I'm going to allow comments on new posts (anything less than two weeks old) without moderation. Enjoy.

On Privilege

Because it keeps coming up, and I have wanted to write a brief something on this topic, a meditation on the concept of "privilege". As commonly used in feminist and racial contexts, e.g. Peggy McIntosh's tiresome "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" or John Scalzi's dumb, tendentious, and insulting essay, "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is", "privilege" is an unearned benefit derived from birth status, e.g. the condition of being male, or white. In my experience, "privilege" is really two things, one trivially (in the sense of inarguably) true, and the other demonstrably false:

1. That certain people have it easier in the world than others as a consequence of birth.
2. That all subsequent success such people have are in fact directly derived from those advantages.

 I came across a clickbait-headlined cartoon recently that promised to "forever change the way you look at privilege", but in fact was a pretty standard review of how "privilege" is alleged to work. A couple remarks before diving in:

 

Does there exist, anywhere in this nation, a school district that confesses they are anything but terribly underfunded? I have yet to hear of it. And yet. Pushing on:

Here we go: item 2, FTW! All success can be ascribed to birth status, in some large measure. Q.E.D.

Except where that's wrong. Ultimately, privilege is a motte-and-bailey tactic as described by Nicholas Shackel in his paper, "The Vacuity Of Postmodernist Methodology" (PDF). A motte-and-bailey is a kind of bait-and-switch: the first part is easily defensible (birth can confer unearned advantages), but the second, radical part (all success thereafter is also due to unearned advantages) is not. By shifting definitions, and refusing to look at failures as well as success, we see that "privilege", animated by jealousy, is a toy philosophical theory that has almost no explanatory power.

I encountered (what might well be) a good example of this latter at Medium a number of weeks back in Umar Haque's essay, "The Asshole Factory". The only thing of importance for my purposes here is the first two sentences:

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Let that sink in for a bit: this person has two graduate degrees, and is obliged to work retail? It's entirely reasonable to infer a couple things here:

1. Her parents have considerable money to put her through multiple postgraduate programs.
2. She has never previously had to give much thought to how she was going to make a living.

Yet, despite these advantages, she's ... working retail for a crummy employer who spies on her every second of her work day, comparing her performance against her daily sales quota in real time, etc. In privilege theory, none of this should have happened, and she should have ridden off into the sunset with a big bag of money. Or something. Now, I'll grant you I don't know if Mara is white, or even real, but that story is one that's getting repeated time and again because of the painfully false belief that college is necessary for everyone. Being white doesn't get you out of college debt. "Privilege" doesn't address failure and hardship; as a theory for how society works, it deserves only ridicule.

Update: Just came across David Greenberg's "What In The World Is 'Privilege'?" at The College Conservative, which addresses the matter from its Marxist origins.

"Defective On Every Known Scale": Harvard's Janet Halley's Call To Arms

A truly worthy piece in The Harvard Crimson about law prof Janet Halley, and her efforts to install due process in campus sexual assault cases:

...[S]he started to engage with her views on feminism critically and “regard feminism as an alternative, not as a religion,” and she would go on to explore this concept in her scholarship.

Halley described her beliefs in a recent phone interview succinctly: “I'm a leftist, and I'm a crit, but that means for me, hetereosexual men are just as important as lesbian feminists, and I don't care about one identity group more than another. I sympathize with the justice aspirations of all kinds of people,” Halley said.

In September, Halley wrote a critical analysis of Harvard’s new framework, arguing that it was “defective on every known scale of equal procedural treatment of the parties and due process.” Halley sent her analysis to the entire Law School faculty and directly to some of Harvard’s top central administrators—University President Drew G. Faust, University General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83, and University Title IX Officer Mia Karvonides—to begin a dialogue with Massachusetts Hall that would later involve the rest of the Law School faculty.

Halley and 27 other Harvard Law professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe after attempts to make changes internally went nowhere.  Harvard's response was to make carve-outs in Title IX adjudication, but it appears that these will only apply to Harvard Law and not the rest of the university. She takes an obviously controversial stance, as evidenced by a brickbat returned by former Harvard Law students, who felt "pretty betrayed by our former professors". "Dear Colleague" was only an opening volley.

John Scalzi's Big Record Book Deal

Vox Day, one of the instigators of the #SadPuppies culture wars thingy, passes along the news that John Scalzi has a new and quite remunerative book deal.

John Scalzi, a best-selling author of science fiction, has signed a $3.4 million, 10-year deal with the publisher Tor Books that will cover his next 13 books.

Mr. Scalzi’s works include a series known as the “Old Man’s War” and the more recent “Redshirts,” a Hugo-award-winning sendup of the luckless lives of nonfeatured characters on shows like the original “Star Trek.” Three of his works are being developed for television, including “Redshirts” and “Lock In,” a science-inflected medical thriller that evokes Michael Crichton. Mr. Scalzi’s hyper-caffeinated Internet presence through his blog, Whatever, has made him an online celebrity as well.

Mr. Scalzi approached Tor Books, his longtime publisher, with proposals for 10 adult novels and three young adult novels over 10 years. Some of the books will extend the popular “Old Man’s War” series, building on an existing audience, and one will be a sequel to “Lock In.” Mr. Scalzi said he hoped books like “Lock In” could draw more readers toward science fiction, since many, he said, are still “gun-shy” about the genre.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the executive editor for Tor, said the decision was an easy one.

Ignoring Day's complaints about the nature of how Scalzi got the deal (coff professional jealousy coff), what interests me is how much this looks like a traditional record deal before the rise of the Internet as a sales and distribution force. Historically, such deals have been terrible for the artist, because they chain the creator to a single publisher and distributor; if the creator gets über-successful, the deal can look horrible in a hurry (c.f. Prince). Essentially, there are two bets going on simultaneously, both halves of which look dubious to me:

1. From Tor's perspective, that Scalzi will continue or improve upon his current popularity.
2. From Scalzi's perspective, that he will need the services of a publisher and distributor. Also, that his star isn't on the ascendant.

It's interesting that this is even being done. It seems almost certain one or both parties will regret it, but why?