THIS SEEMS MORE LIKE A JOB-PROTECTION PLOY: Clinical Profs Demand That ABA Require All Law Students Take 15 Credits of Experiential Courses and 1 Clinic or Externship. I think clinical courses are great — we have a lot of them at Tennessee — but this smacks of self-dealing. At any rate, clinical courses are expensive. Say what you will about Professor Kingsfield, but having him lecture to a class of a couple of hundred first years was cheap. As law schools come under increasing cost pressure, Kingsfield is probably looking better. Which, I suspect, is the reason for this effort.
Archive for 2013
July 3, 2013
HOW CHEAP CREDIT has driven up college costs.
INFOGRAPHIC: The Student Loan Bubble.
J.J. GOULD: Here’s One Example Of What Free Media Can Do In Afghanistan. “When we had a radio program initially in 2003, we had male and female DJs discussing a whole host of issues . . . and the backlash was extraordinary. As a matter of fact we even contemplated getting rid of the female DJs. But we persisted — and in a very short space of time it became a sort of acceptable format for radio, and most of our listeners accepted the reality that a man and a woman could be together in a studio. Again, it wasn’t by design but a byproduct of doing the sorts of things that we do.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Publisher’s Bankruptcy Filing Comes as Market for Print Textbooks Shrinks.
Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.
Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.
It’s a cool story.
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About Intimate Grooming.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Michael Rank: Greek Gods and Goddesses Gone Wild: Bad Behavior and Divine Excess From Zeus’s Philandering to Dionysus’s Benders. $2.99 on Kindle.
SCIENCE: People With A Lot Of Self-Control Are Happier. Funny, because for the past 50 years or so we’ve been casting self-control as the enemy of happiness.
IN THE MAIL: From Thomas Wictor, Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist.
#WARONMEN: Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them.
The older authority figure wins the trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual.
It is a classic predatory tactic known as “grooming,” and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the country’s juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way. The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over the day-to-day lives of their charges.
What was a genuine shock to many was the finding that in the vast majority of instances, it was female staff members who were targeting and exploiting the male teens in their custody.
It’s a shock because modern views of gender are based on fantasy. More:
Drawing on their sample, Justice Department researchers estimate that 1,390 juveniles in the facilities they examined have experienced sex abuse at the hands of the staff supervising them, a rate of nearly 8 percent. Twenty percent who said they were victimized by staff said it happened on more than 10 occasions. Nine out of 10 victims were males abused by female staff.
Expect minimal outrage from the usually-outraged.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Not only does shock at the idea of women abusing boys reveal a gender bias against men, I think it points out another potential factor in the War on men Dr. Helen writes so eloquently about.
As the father of 5 sons, the oldest of whom are big, strong, and well-spoken (we home school), I noticed something starting a few years ago-
Liberal women fear my sons. Not disapprove of, fear.
And it isn’t the size or the strength, it is the confidence.
Is part of the War on Men a fear of, well, grown men? Is there actually an increase in grown women preying on boys sexually because these women fear adult men?
Call it “Androphobia.” Helen talks about this a bit in her book, and there is some evidence for the fear, if not for its motivation toward abuse. Related item here. “When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.”
Ever since Susan Browmiller and Catharine MacKinnon spread the idea that all men are rapists, women’s “liberation” seems to have produced an awful lot of pearl-clutching types. And it certainly doesn’t seem a big stretch to imagine that someone pathologically afraid of adult males might instead pursue underage boys over whom she possesses great power.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Michael Chaplin emails: “If only these prison guards were allowed to marry, not required to be celibate like Catholic priests. Then the boys wouldn’t fall prey to this institutionalized sexual abuse. Oh, they are allowed to marry? I guess being celibate has nothing to do with it, then.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 55.
NICK GILLESPIE: Our Stupid Abortion Debate.
PEW: Obama less ‘honest,’ more ‘incompetent’ than Bush. Sounds about right.
GEORGE W. BUSH IN AFRICA. “Bush is popular in Africa for his anti-AIDS initiative; more, no doubt, than for his personal efforts to improve the lives of poor Africans. Still, the unfolding disaster of the Obama administration reminds us that, while to be a good president it is not enough to be a good man, it definitely helps.”
JAMES TARANTO: Is This Column Legitimate?
Uh-oh, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, best known for likening American servicemen to Nazis, is looking to limit your First Amendment rights, if not ours. “Everyone, regardless of the mode of expression, has a constitutionally protected right to free speech,” he writes. So far so good. “But when it comes to freedom of the press, I believe we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive.”
That goes against the America’s entire constitutional tradition. In Lovell v. Griffin (1938), Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court: “The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.” . . .
Further, a government that grants privileges also has the power to take them away. A shield law would make those designated as “legitimate journalists” beholden to powerful politicians–especially when, as today, most journalists are ideologically sympathetic to the party in power. The Durbin shield proposal looks less like real protection than a protection racket.
Well, Durbin is from Illinois. More here.
Note that, as Eugene Volokh and I have both pointed out, the Constitution’s term “freedom of the press” means “freedom to publish,” not “freedom for the institutional Press.” But Durbin’s a partisan ignoramus, so he can’t be expected to know this sort of thing. I mean, he’s only a Senator, and there’s no IQ test for that job. . . .
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Politico: Lois Lerner’s price for testimony: Immunity.