Emily Yoffe is a Slate contributor who has written the magazine’s Dear Prudence advice column since 2006. She also writes for Slate about culture, health, politics, and science. Emily’s writing  has appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the New York Times, O  the Oprah Magazine, and The Washington Post. She is the author of the book What the Dog Did: Tales from a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. She was a National Magazine Award finalist this year for her Slate story, “The College Rape Overcorrection.” She was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She is a graduate of Wellesley College.

Valley News Article

Published on the Valley News (http://www.vnews.com)

Editorial: At Dartmouth, Talking About Sexual Assault

Wednesday, October 14, 2015
(Published in print: Wednesday, October 14, 2015)

Writer Emily Yoffe, best known for her “Dear Prudence” advice column in Slate, was on the Dartmouth campus the other day to offer guidance on a difficult subject — sexual assault at colleges and universities. The information wasn’t what some wanted to hear.

Victims of sexual assault and their advocates, including a group of placard-carrying students who staged a pointed but respectful protest during Yoffe’s remarks last Thursday, reject her argument that policies adopted by colleges to protect victims have gone too far.

The argument started last December, when Slate published Yoffe’s 12,000-word article, “The Campus Rape Overcorrection.” The headline was unfortunate, in that Yoffe does not deny that sexual assault is a serious problem too long dismissed by colleges and universities. She asserts, however, that higher education institutions, under federal pressure to prevent sexual violence and punish offenders, often abrogate the civil rights of those accused of sexual assault, denying them justice.

Moreover, Yoffe dares to challenge common assumptions, including that rape is alarmingly prevalent on U.S. campuses. She also wonders whether policies requiring women to consent to every step of a sexual encounter, like the one adopted by Dartmouth, were formulated by people who’ve ever had sex.

These are fighting words to feminists and others who regard the “affirmative consent” standard — “yes means yes” — as empowering, a safeguard against unwanted sexual advances.

Whatever your perspective on sexual politics, Yoffe makes some valid points. First, she is skeptical of the methodology behind surveys that suggest sexual assault is an “epidemic” on U.S. campuses. For example, an oft-cited survey commissioned in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Justice, and the basis of President Obama’s campaign to protect students against sexual violence, concluded that sexual assault affects as many as one in four undergraduates. But in a footnote the authors of that survey acknowledge making assumptions that increase the presumed risk. They warn that the one-in-four figure is merely “suggestive.” Other surveys are based on small sample sizes, which distort the numbers.

Sexual assault figures collected by colleges to comply with the federal Clery Act, which requires institutions to annually report crime data, suggest that the rate of sexual assault is lower than 25 percent. Reported assaults represent about 0.03 percent of the total 12 million female college student population, according to Clery data. Even accounting for the fact that sexual assault is a disturbingly underreported crime, it’s hard to square the Clery numbers with the one-in-four figure.

Statistics commonly cited by the media imply that “American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war,” Yoffe writes.

Second, the debate over what to do about “sexual assault” is muddled by the fact that the term can in some contexts mean anything from forcible rape to unwanted touching. This is not to dismiss any aspect of sexual harassment or violence against women. It’s to suggest that the problem itself isn’t adequately defined, and that some data on sexual assault reflect blurred distinctions.

It’s too bad that Yoffe has been accused of insensitivity, of attacking victims and women generally. We commend Yoffe for challenging the facts and standing up for the rights of the accused. That doesn’t take away from the seriousness of sexual assault, which colleges and universities must continue to combat forcefully but fairly.

Source URL:http://www.vnews.com/opinion/19006586-95/talking-aboutsexual-assault

Despite having taught a course about Great Books — a series of books widely considered to represent the pinnacle of Western literature — for four years, Harvard University English professor Louis Menand said this canon of literature should not be the hallmark of a liberal education. In the annual William Jewett Tucker lecture and latest installment of the “Leading Voices in Higher Education” strategic planning speaker series, held Thursday afternoon in Filene Auditorium, Menand answered the title question of his speech — “Are the Great Books the Moral Heart of Liberal Education?” — with a decisive “no.”

Menand, the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history and a contributor to The New Yorker, examined the structure of higher education by telling the stories of curriculum creation and progression at Columbia University, the University of Chicago and Harvard.

General education requirements at Harvard originally included a Great Books course in order to give students a common ground for discussion, he said.

“In the Harvard model, Great Books are not read because they articulate timeless truths,” Menand said. “Great Books are read because they have been read.”

Harvard later forfeited the Great Books requirement as the concept of academic majors became more clearly defined, though Menand said “belief in knowledge for its own sake does survive,” despite changes in curricula over the years.

Menand also discussed the history of “Contemporary Civilization” and “Literature Humanities,” mandatory Great Books courses at Columbia. They were originally developed by professors to teach students a collective culture and became part of the college’s core curriculum in 1947, he said.

Dartmouth English professor Aden Evens said that the popularity of the lecture — which drew an audience of approximately 200 guests — may have been influenced by Menand’s own star power.

“He represents a certain ultimate possible achievement for academic workers,” Evens said. “He’s at the top of the humanities among professors all over North America.”

Evens said he was interested in Menand’s opinions on higher education in light of Dartmouth’s own curriculum restructuring, as well as in potential changes to the understanding of a liberal arts eduction.

“With Dartmouth undertaking a wholesale reevaluation of their institutional goals for the medium-to-long term, my understanding is that his lecture was part of this reevaluation,” Evens said. “That process is extremely important to me. I worry that Dartmouth is heading in a direction that’s not the one I want it to.”

Parth Kaul ’14 attended the lecture at the recommendation of government professor James Murphy, who teaches Great Books in his theory-based classes. Kaul said he left the lecture with some unanswered questions.

“It would have been really nice if he could have broken down the way the D-Plan follows into the entire philosophy of the system controlling the fate of the students,” Kaul said.

Enfield, N.H. resident Jeffrey Hinman ’68 said he also left the lecture unsure of certain issues.

“I’d never really known what all the Great Books were, and he still didn’t answer that question,” Hinman said.

In response to a question from an audience member, Menand said he continues to teach a course on Great Books despite the fact that they are not essential to a liberal education because students “just love the stuff, and they love to talk about it.” Murphy said Menand’s answer to this question was the highlight of the hour-long lecture.

“At the end, he did give the most powerful defense of the Great Books,” he said. “Everything else he said with skepticism and contempt about the Great Books faded into insignificance. The deeper truth is that what people do is more revealing than what they say.”

by Kira Witkin
Published on Friday, February 17,2012
The Dartmouth

By James Murphy, Guest Columnist

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011

A Dartmouth professor recently told a colleague: “Everything I teach my undergrads will be obsolete in 10 years.” He attempted to introduce his undergraduate students to the frontiers of research in his own special field and those frontiers are constantly moving. No doubt we are all tempted to teach our own research fields and try to introduce our students to the issues and questions that we find so exciting. And there is no doubt that our students often enjoy feeling like participants in creating new knowledge.

But research in the psychology of expertise reveals that we professors possess an immense reservoir of factual knowledge and tacit intuition that is almost totally absent in even our best undergraduates. Hence, our students may enjoy the feeling of working at the cutting edge of research, but that feeling is largely illusory. If undergraduates could create new knowledge, then there would be no intellectual justification for graduate education. What our undergraduates need is to develop that broad and deep reservoir of relatively permanent knowledge that will underwrite whatever expertise they choose to later acquire.

Of course, some of our senior majors and honors students can benefit from exposure to scholarly research. But we Dartmouth professors are increasingly teaching our narrow fields of expertise even to our first-year students, as I discovered by participating in a study of our first-year writing program. Studies show that students tend unconsciously to emulate the prose style of what they read, meaning that the last thing we want our writing students to read are scholarly and scientific articles!

Unfortunately, the most up-to-date education is always the fastest out of date. Most of our students want their expensive college educations to have a shelf life of more than 10 years. The old proverb turns out to be true to the psychology of expertise: “Teach the oldest things to the youngest people.” Undergraduate students should focus their learning on foundational theories and texts so that they can acquire the deep reservoir of knowledge that we professors possess. But because our own foundational knowledge is invisible to us, it becomes invisible to our students as well.

My friends who teach at large research universities often say to me, “It must be nice to teach in a department with no graduate students. Your undergrads must get a great education.” But lately I have been saying to them, “It must be great to be able to teach your own field of expertise to graduate students, so that you can give your undergraduates the foundational knowledge they need.” For example, several of the universities best known for their world-class graduate schools — Yale University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago — are also the schools that have most carefully protected the integrity of undergraduate education through Directed Studies at Yale and the core curricula at Columbia and Chicago. When I point to these examples, my friends at those schools say, “Yes, those are great programs, but we are having trouble staffing them because undergraduate teaching is such a low priority here.”

A great college should have some highly specialized, transient or boutique courses that reflect the ever-changing interests of our faculty. But only some. As things stand, the ideals and aims of graduate training are increasingly colonizing our undergraduate curriculum. Cutting-edge research can be exciting, but the path to “new” knowledge runs through “old” knowledge. The job of a great college is to give students the enduring foundation of basic theory and classic texts, so that they can develop the judgment, understanding and intuition that they will later use for discovery and innovation.