Similar to Ferguson, MO I guess… an international story fundamentally built on a lie.
Banality only becomes serious art when you make a few million from it:
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-mark-rothkos-no.-10-sells-for-82-million-in-ny-2015-5
Circus act? How offensive.
I tend to agree with Momofthreeboys. I believe Emma took it too far with the performance art, but I also believe she should have followed up with a civil lawsuit, if her side of the story was true. As for the failed criminal case, no way that District Attorney Cy Vance would have abandoned it if there had been solid evidence or even good circumstantial evidence. His record is fairly firm on prosecutions for sex crimes.
Take this out of this particular scenario - if I have a grudge / complaint against someone, to what extent can I slander them publicly, and would carrying a mattress accusing them of rape fit the legal definition of harassment?
I mean, I can’t walk around with a sign saying “Joe Schmoe is a rapist”. Or can I?
^^ You can in come cases. Many walk around saying “Dr. X is a murderer” because he performs abortions. The is not, in a legal way, murder but the petitions are allowed. Every Saturday morning. In the subdivision across the street from my house. With pictures and bullhorns and shouting.
If you call someone a rapist, you should have some facts supporting it.
What about that whackadoodle who bought a house from coralbrook and then protested with a sign in front of one of her new projects with incorrect accusations?
Well, the person posting the signs can be sued by the accused for lots of things like harassment, slander, loss of income from disturbance. Doesn’t mean either side will win.
No one seems to bother the people who do the talk show circuit and freely use the word “murderer” after a verdict in a sensationalized case comes down which exonerates the accused. Is it slander to use the word “murderer” to describe a police officer that has just been found not guilty or the grand jury has chosen not to indict? I don’t think we censor people here in the U.S. when it comes to protesting or disagreeing with the findings of our judicial system. I have read that this is the one area where Germany does censor.
I guess the question is should those same rules apply on a college campus?
I am not sure what that censoring would look like.
- We shouldn’t make speech illegal.
- But, we should allow for recourse in the courts.
More importantly, the press/news needs to step up and push back on the nonsense - they can show the protest with people shouting “murderer” (your example) but it should present the truth and the context - “these protesters don’t seem to understand our legal system because they are wrong in labeling the person as a murderer”.
But they won’t because they are either too lazy or too invested in a different narrative. Heck, when Eric Holder says that the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” narrative was wrong and we have to understand how that took hold, the press needs to wake up and do their jobs.
the job of the press is to get clicks, readers, and ad revenue. Nothing more.
And then of course there is always the U.S. Constitution that comes into play.
The issue is the interpretation of Title IX that requires that schools act to prevent students from being harassed because of race, orientation, gender, etc. In that context, whether Emma could buy the house next to Paul’s and hang a big sign that says my neighbor is a rapist is not really the right question. Either Title IX requires schools to act affirmatively in these types of scenarios or it doesn’t, in which case a lot of the “free speech zones”, trigger warnings and banning certain campus groups that “promote hate” become more problematic.
But I am unclear on how to effectively apply Title IX’s “gender based discrimination” to what is at the end of the day a “protest” against a finding in a Title IX hearing. I am not sure that Title IX was intended to cover this sort of thing. And quite honestly the way the Title IX cause of action is laid out in Paul’s complaint does not exactly clarify things. How does this sentence (and yes it is one run-on sentence) support that he was discriminated against based upon his “gender?”:
Is he saying that she would not have carried her mattress around if her assailant had been a woman? Is he saying that Columbia would have treated the matter differently and intervened if he was female? Is he saying they have in fact intervened on behalf of females in the past? There is a disconnect here for me and perhaps it is because I have not personally handled Title IX cases, but I am just not “getting” this cause of action.
I think he fails to tie Columbia’s actions or lack thereof to his “gender.”
The straightest line is that Columbia gave her course credit for what he casts as harassment. Also, she apparently broke several rules/policies to his alleged detriment without sanction by Columbia. I doubt seriously that the argument that her actions were not gender based will go anywhere, if they are made, because a finding that such were the case would gut the statute.
Thanks for the clarification. But I am thinking that it is not Emma’s actions but Columbia’s actions or failure to act that have to constitute “gender based” discrimination. Basically that Columbia handled the situation the way they did because he was male.
@HarvestMoon1, think about conventional sexual harassment cases. Suppose a professor is sexually harassing his students. That’s gender-based discrimination by the professor, not the university, but by Title IX the university has a duty to stop it. If indeed the court decides that Sulkowicz’s performance art project was gender-based discrimination, then the university would have had a duty to stop it.
While I agree generally with the above, the two interesting questions are 1) was Emma’s conduct harassment based on gender, and 2)is Title IX broad enough to impose a duty to affirmatively act to stop the harassing behavior? That said, the court could eventually duck the issue of the breadth of TitleIX and say that professor’s involvement made it direct harassment, or that the school’s failure to discipline her for the alleged violations was discriminatory in se (on its own)
Does the university have a legal duty to stop all harassment? Suppose a student was being bullied for being fat-- would the university have a legal duty to stop that?
How can something be discriminatory in se? Doesn’t discrimination, by definition, have to be discriminatory on the basis of some characteristic of the person discriminated against?
Discriminatory in se meaning that the act itself, giving course credit, whatever, rather than the failure to stop the alleged harassment is the objectionable act. I think a court could say “We are not addressing the issue of whether Columbia has a duty to create a safe environment because the act here, providing course credit for this project, allowing her to violate the rules against confidentiality in an effort to hound this guy from campus, etc establish that not only did Columbia fail to act to protect Paul, but it actively participated in the harassing behavior.”
And, yes the interesting question is how far does a university have to go to affirmatively prohibit harassment. I find it hard to believe that the actions taken here will not be found to be gender based, for all the obvious reasons. I am also compelled to add that several people on this thread appeared to think that calling Lena Dunham a “Big Fat Liar” was harassing because it was some type of code for body shaming. So again, the question would be if calling someone fat when directed at a woman is harassing, is anyone willing to say out loud that the exact same actions directed at a man is ok? That is what I find interesting.