In the Affirmative
Last week Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed a law that requires the state’s public and private colleges to adopt policies spelling out what constitutes consent between (or among) people having sex, and setting guidelines for sexual-assault investigations. According to the legislation, “it is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. … Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” Failing to adopt the policies could cost a college its student financial-aid money from the state.
No other state has so embraced the expectation that college administrators prescribe detailed rules for campus encounters. But a number of colleges have adopted policies and programs aimed at preventing assaults by codifying consent. The University of Wisconsin’s policy, for instance, requires “overt words or actions that clearly communicate an individual’s desire to engage in sexual activities.” Yale’s expects “positive, unambiguous, and voluntary agreement to engage in specific sexual activity throughout a sexual encounter.”
The California law also requires colleges to adopt “comprehensive prevention and outreach programs” that include, among other practical ideas, awareness campaigns and bystander-intervention strategies.
Smashed
Sometimes cultures do change—and in surprising ways. Last week University of Michigan students joined ESPN announcers in rebuking the Michigan football coach, Brady Hoke, for keeping a quarterback in the previous Saturday’s game after a Minnesota player’s helmet-to-helmet hit left the quarterback stumbling around the field. The university’s athletic director, David Brandon, later confirmed that the quarterback, Shane Morris, had suffered a concussion.
A Monday column in The Michigan Daily reflected fans’ outrage, saying it was “a direct violation of the NCAA concussion policy” to let the quarterback remain in the game, and calling on the university to fire the coach. “If Brady Hoke cares about his players and taking his 115 boys and turning them into men, as he so often preaches,” the paper’s four football writers said, “then the first lesson he should be teaching is that no win on the gridiron is more important than their health.”
That same evening an online petition appeared that called for the athletic director’s dismissal as well, saying the football program had “become a black eye for the University of Michigan.” The university’s president, Mark S. Schlissel, subsequently issued an apology and ordered a review of player-safety procedures.
Whether that will satisfy students and fans remains to be seen, but the incident seems like a cultural milestone nonetheless. Dan Hooker, a former associate director of sports medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said: “Five years ago, the quarterback would have been hit and people would have said, ‘Whoa. He really got smashed,’ and celebrated it as a great hit for the other team. Fortunately, we have swung the pendulum of concern from celebrating to saying: ‘Oh, did you see that? That quarterback was stunned. That’s illegal.’ "
Quickly, Now
The University of Chicago said it would make a series of changes aimed at enrolling more lower-income students. … The U.S. Department of Education awarded $75-million in grants to 24 colleges that proposed ways of improving access and learning while keeping costs down. Among the winners was Southern New Hampshire University, which wants to expand a competency-based learning program for part-time students. … Corinthian Colleges Inc. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Department of Justice is investigating “allegations related to student attendance and grade record manipulation, graduate job-placement-rate inflation, and non-Title IV funding source misrepresentations.” The company is cooperating, it said.
Open Letter
Last week Denise Ho, an assistant professor in the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, published a heartfelt letter to the students whose rallies set off huge pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. She said she was afraid they would be disillusioned if they did not succeed, but was inspired by how much they had accomplished:
I went to the teach-in and saw your mini-university and watched you streaming between the simultaneous lectures. You had come of your own accord. You were taking assiduous notes. You broke into groups and talked about the meaning of direct action, of civil disobedience, of protest. You wrote to tell me how the boycott made you understand society more deeply, and I smiled when you confessed that it was so far a superficial understanding, that you would have to read more books to combine theory with practice. What teacher would not be filled with joy to watch his students seize learning so independently, so concretely, and with such passion?
Annals of Parody
The College Republican National Committee has a new 16-state ad campaign that parodies a reality-TV show in which women choose wedding dresses. In the Florida ad, for instance, the bride prefers a dress called the Rick Scott (“He has new ideas that don’t break your budget”), while her dowdy mother urges her to pick the dress named for Governor Scott’s Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Christ (“It’s expensive and a little outdated, but I know best”). It’s hard to imagine such ads changing anyone’s mind, but then it’s also hard to understand how a show called Say Yes to the Dress became enough of a hit to merit parodying.
Parlor Grand
This Friday a just-restored Steinway Model A once owned by George Gershwin will get a workout at the University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium. A concert in the 1933 piano’s honor will include Gershwin’s original 1924 jazz orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue and selections from his opera, Porgy and Bess, parts of which he is thought to have composed on the instrument. Gershwin died in 1937, at age 38.
The piano, which Steinway refers to as a “parlor grand,” remained in a family apartment in New York until last year, when Marc Gershwin, a nephew of the composer, donated it to the university. It has since had a thorough overhaul. The cracked soundboard was replaced, along with the original ivory keys and the hammer action.
But if so much of the instrument is new, why keep the rest? Robert Grijalva, the assistant professor of piano technology who oversaw the restoration, wrote in a blog post: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the case of the piano is the real soul of the piano, not the soundboard. It is the case or rim of the piano that provides the indelible mark of its vintage and its core sound. … I have never heard a 1920s vintage Steinway piano with a new soundboard that didn’t still sound like a 1920s vintage Steinway piano.” Now you know.—Lawrence Biemiller
