North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill” has experienced a bit of a backup. The new law, which bars transgender people from using the restroom and locker-room facilities that match their chosen gender expression at colleges and other educational institutions in the state, has yet to take effect. Yet last week, Gov. Pat McCrory had already responded to widespread condemnation of the law by issuing an executive order through which he sought to clarify its particulars, and its intent.
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In the Toilet
North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill” has experienced a bit of a backup. The new law, which bars transgender people from using the restroom and locker-room facilities that match their chosen gender expression at colleges and other educational institutions in the state, has yet to take effect. Yet last week, Gov. Pat McCrory had already responded to widespread condemnation of the law by issuing an executive order through which he sought to clarify its particulars, and its intent.
Mr. McCrory’s order didn’t change the fundamental point of the law, or its effect. Legislators in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, and South Carolina have since introduced their own bills, and in Mississippi similar legislation has been enacted. The reaction to the North Carolina law does indicate, however, that, unlike many past state legislative changes in how colleges operate, there may be substantial pushback.
Last month Mr. McCrory, a Republican, signed House Bill 2, which requires people to use the multiple-occupancy restrooms and locker rooms that match the biological gender found on their birth certificates. A transgender person who identifies as a woman, for example, would have to use the men’s room. The law would also force colleges to label all multiple-occupancy bathroom and locker-room facilities as for men or women only. (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for one, currently has gender-nonspecific restrooms on its campus.)
Policy makers in North Carolina may have expected the ensuing outrage from the LGBT community and civil-rights activists, and from many faculty members, employees, and students in the state higher-education system, who have condemned the law as backward and discriminatory. They may even have anticipated lawsuits like the one filed by a student, an employee, and a faculty member in the state system. But the outrage quickly went national. The Obama administration began examining whether North Carolina could lose federal money, given worries about how the law might infringe on equal rights. PayPal and Deutsche Bank canceled proposed expansions in the state because of the law, costing the state future jobs and revenue. When Bruce Springsteen, everyman poet of America’s blue-collar hopes and dreams, cancels a performance in your state, you have gained the nation’s attention.
The North Carolina law remains on the books, but several dozen corporations informed policy makers in Tennessee that if a similar bathroom bill under consideration by its State Senate became law, it would draw their disapproval.
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This is not the first time in recent years that state legislators have stirred controversy by inserting themselves into the operations of higher education, and it probably won’t be the last. While the North Carolina bill has emboldened policy makers elsewhere to introduce their own legislation, the scope and vehemence of the opposition, and its willingness to hit North Carolina in the wallet, must give some of them pause. This particular social and legal battle is clearly far from over.
Nonetheless, the North Carolina law remains a substantial setback for the leaders, administrators, faculty members, and students who have spent decades building inclusion on campuses for transgender people. The expressions of support must be heartening, but perhaps not enough to counteract the continuing daily worries for many about fundamental needs like feeling accepted and being at ease when going to the bathroom.
Berkeley’s Woes
The University of California at Berkeley is, by reputation, a university unlike any other. In the past week, however, the august flagship has found itself waking up to the kind of headlines that have beset many of its peers in recent years.
The controversy over several cases of alleged sexual harassment at Berkeley and how the institution handled them, which has drawn student protests (above), resurfaced last week when Yann Hufnagel cited a “toxic environment” at the university among the reasons he was ending his appeal to be reinstated as an assistant basketball coach. Mr. Hufnagel was dismissed last month in the wake of allegations that he had sexually harassed a reporter. The announcement that he was dropping his appeal coincided with the announcement that he had been hired as an assistant coach at the University of Nevada at Reno.
The California flagship also announced that it planned to eliminate 500 staff positions over the next two years in an attempt to help balance its budget. The positions would amount to a 6-percent reduction in the work force, and would save the university about $50 million, according to Nicholas B. Dirks, the chancellor. Faculty positions would not be part of the cuts.
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Sit-Ins, Again
Speaking of Berkeley, the heady spirit of the 1960s’ protest movements has re-emerged recently in the form of student sit-ins on several campuses. But this is a new century, and such protests sometimes meet with varied, and unpredictable, results.
A weeklong sit-in at Duke University ended without incident. Fewer than a dozen students had occupied the central administration building to demand the firing of Tallman Trask III, the executive vice president, and two other officials. Mr. Trask has been accused of hitting a campus parking attendant with his Porsche, and attacking her with racial slurs during the incident. The protesters also demanded that the university raise its minimum wage. Duke did not acquiesce to any of the students’ demands, and the protesters vowed to continue their fight.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the campus police arrested 15 students during the second day of their sit-in occupation of the main administration building. The protesters were demanding that the university divest its holdings in fossil-fuel companies. Meanwhile, four Harvard students were arrested for occupying the Boston Federal Reserve to protest the university’s investment in fossil fuels.
Just to Get a Rep
And speaking of protests, remember the incident in 2011 when a police officer at the University of California at Davis pepper-sprayed a group of seated student protesters? Apparently the university would prefer that you not remember it, and so it paid a public-relations firm $175,000 to minimize references to the incident on the Internet.
As The Sacramento Bee reported last week, the administration on the Davis campus contracted in 2013 with Nevins and Associates, a Maryland firm, to improve the university’s “brand and reputation” by lessening the chances that an online search for information about it would display results about the notorious pepper-spray incident. The firm proposed to do that by ensuring that the preponderance of negative search hits for the university and its chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, would be “diluted by a surge of content with positive sentiment and off-topic subject matter through the strategic use of search tags, titles, and descriptions,” according to a copy of the agreement obtained by the Bee. Under Ms. Katehi, the university’s annual spending on strategic communications has nearly doubled, from under $3 million to about $5.5 million.
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Gaming search results is common in the corporate world, but some California legislators questioned spending public money on a reputation massage when resources are so tight. Dana Topousis, a spokeswoman, told the Bee that the university was trying to ensure that it was being “fairly portrayed.”