Advocacy and Politics

I rarely admire the work of Naomi Wolf, but I found a three-year-old article of hers which I’d like to recommend.

It’s a candid description of an experience which she had during college - one that was inappropriately foisted on her by someone who should have known better. It surely evokes a flinch of recognition from anyone who’s experienced the same. But that’s not why I think it should be read - it should be read because it gives an irrefutable depiction of what happens when college administrations rely on hiding indiscretions behind closed doors, on silencing accusers rather than disciplining offenders.

Wolf takes the time, as I could never do, to systematically speak to the young women who are hurt by her alma mater’s lack of candor. And she, unlike Yale, rises to the occasion and refuses to discard pragmatism for ideology. In her last paragraph, she remarks,

The saddest part? If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her. I would not direct her to her faculty adviser, the grievance committee, or her dean.

I wish that someone had been so honest with me when I was an undergraduate! Instead, I found out the hard way that complaints were unwelcome (and hard evidence moreso).

At least I can take comfort in the fact that mine was a different sort of complaint, not one of sexual harassment - my career might never have recovered otherwise.

For quite some time now I’ve been promising myself that when all is said and done, I’ll write a letter to my alma mater detailing exactly what they’re doing wrong. The reason I make this promise is that I can’t imagine a better faculty anywhere, and I think that they deserve to have their dedication to their students fully appreciated. The reason I keep putting it off is that my uni has a complement of truly terrible administrators, and that with these particular people it goes without saying that if they are in any position to punish me for my remarks, they will. They’ll have less power to do so once I’ve started my new job, and even less once I’ve started a graduate program, so I’m planning to send the letter after one or the other of those events.

What I originally planned to say in this letter was that there’s a huge gulf between our faculty and our administration, and that the faculty should demand more of a say in the selection of administrators so that they can get a few who are basically honest and who care about students.

Then I found out (not the hard way, thank gdb) about the Involuntary Medical Withdrawal provision in our rules, and I went ballistic. So that had to go in the letter too.

Then I stumbled across one of the ways we cheat to bring up our U.S. News & World Report ranking, and of course that had to be written about.

Now I’m discovering just how insidious the graduation and commencement requirements are, and I’m adding to my letter again.

The letter is now eight pages long. It will never be sent in this form. I might as well just chop it up by subject and send it to the school paper as a sequence of letters to the editor - at least then SOMEONE would read it. As it is, I strongly suspect that whoever screens the president’s mail will open it up, take a look and say, “Looks like someone suggests we change things around here!” Then she’ll toss it in the garbage (recycling’s too good for complaints), largish donations be damned.

I’m looking for a nice rental. In particular, I’m looking for something with all appliances, central air, a generous pet policy, and three private rooms (one as my sleeping room, one as my office/guest room, and one as my studio).

Unfortunately, these are exactly the homes that prospective landlords don’t want to rent to single people.

You’d think I’d be welcome - I have a high salary and good credit history. But certain ads outright specify “no single people, please.” (And far more specify “seeking a stable couple for 6 month lease,” or “couples and families only.”) Why? I’m not sure, really. I posted a question about it and got back a snarky response about how single people throw wild parties all the time and don’t clean their homes.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. If I were a landlord and justified not renting to single mothers with a claim that “children wreck everything,” or “babies scream all the time,” I would be vulnerable to liability under Washington state law, which prohibits housing discrimination based on “familial… or marital status.”

But the consensus among fair housing lawyers is that these protections only apply to positive familial or marital status - that is, only discriminating against someone because they *are* married or *do* have children is prohibited. Discriminating against someone because they are *not* married or do *not* have children is permissible, and singles have no legal recourse against it.

This opens up a fascinating can of worms. What if a woman, man or couple is infertile? They could make a convincing legal argument that this is a disability. And people with disabilities are protected under fair housing law. So a landlord couldn’t legally discriminate against them if he knew they were infertile - but to get legal protection, they would have to disclose their medical history to him. This can serve the landlord as a primitive form of medical screening. The very unhealthy or the otherwise disabled are more likely to be infertile than others, and in this interpretation they must either give up on the unit (with no recourse) or disclose their poor health (inviting further discrimination).

How does this policy extend to the other protected categories under FFHA, such as race? If I turned down a nice black family of renters because “black people are scary - other tenants would be uncomfortable,” I hope that HUD would come down on me hard. What if a landlord turns me down because “white people aren’t friendly - they make bad neighbors”? Is that just tough cookies for me? What about Latinos - are they protected or not? Asians? Native Americans?

Banning positive status discrimination while allowing negative status discrimination is a way for the government to say that one group is better, or more deserving, than the other. This in turn causes exactly the kind of social stigma and discontent that the FFHA was designed to prevent. Once more, political correctness wins - and equality loses.