The Lurking Dangers of College Rape Tribunals

There’s been a lot of buzz on college campuses lately about defining “sexual consent.” Consent was previously just thought to be the agreement between both parties to perform sexual acts, but many colleges, such as Stanford and Princeton, have declared that intoxicated students lose their ability to give consent. That’s right; unlike the real world, a student under the influence can’t give valid consent to sex. The majority of sexual assault cases occur after a party, where both the accuser and the accused had been drinking. Who, then, is at fault? Rape tribunals held by the college point towards the accused, who can be suspended or expelled from the college without substantial proof.

The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights released a “Dear Colleague Letter” to colleges and universities discussing how student-to-student sexual harassment should be handled. According to the DCL, schools may deal with sexual harassment in various ways, but the case must be judged by the preponderance of evidence standard of review. The preponderance of evidence standard is the lowest standard for legal review– It requires only the the case presents just enough evidence to make it seem like the accuser’s claim is more likely than not true. Basically, if a claimant presents a viable accusation and the defendant can’t provide concrete evidence proving it false, the claimant would win the case. Should a student accuse another student of sexual harassment, the defendant is probably going to be expelled (which leaves a permanent mark on college transcripts) solely based on how difficult a claim of harassment is to disprove.

The DCL, released in 2011, also discusses how the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 define “Sexual harassment of students, which includes sexual violence, [as] a form of sex discrimination.” Since sex discrimination is generally interpreted as discrimination of a woman because of her gender, this definition of sex discrimination seems strangely heteronormative: It assumes that a man is harassing a woman, not a man harassing another man, a woman harassing another woman, or even a woman harassing a man. Statistics of rape and assault by gender also reveal a peculiar discrepancy; in a poll done by the Pentagon, half the self-reported victims of sexual harassment were male, yet RAINN reports that in 2003, 9 out of 10 victims of rape were female. Are men not reporting sexual harassment, or are they losing their lawsuits? Government and college policies towards sexual harassment seem to be generally biased against males.

While the statistics may be slightly skewed, the gender gap for sexual harassment is very real. 1 out of 6 women has been the subject of attempted or completed life during her lifetime, though the number stands at 1 out of 33 for men. Girls ages 16-19 are four times as likely to be victims of rape, which means that college sexual harassment is a very real threat. Rape is a very serious crime, and deserves to be punished for accordingly. However, college rape tribunals are an ill-fitting way to review such a serious matter. If the accused is found guilty, his or her life is permanently changed; he or she may face suspension or expulsion, being marked as a sex harasser on college transcripts, and legal repercussions.  The verdict of the rape tribunal can carry tremendous weight, but the panel often consists of faculty members that have little to no legal experience. College rape and sexual harassment must be taken seriously and dealt with,  but the low standard of evidence and inexperienced panel makes rape tribunals a poor way to do so.

Reader Response: Interpreting Meursault’s Philosophy

People who say that the world doesn’t revolve around you are wrong. My world does revolve around me, because I am the only constant in my life. Many people do not realize that the only factor in their existence that is guaranteed is that they will exist during the course of it, but I am not one of those people. And neither is Meursault, the main character of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Camus presents a provocative stance on philosophy by portraying Meursault’s life from an existentialist standpoint. Similarities between Meursault and I’s outlooks on life caused me to identify with him for much of the book.

Meursault’s demeanor towards the world is entirely indifferent, which often leads to to the assumption that he doesn’t care about those close to him. However, Meursault’s statement that he “wanted to see Maman right away” upon arriving at the old peoples’ home reflects his tender feelings for his mother (4). His use of “Maman” instead of “Mother” carries an interesting connotation, as the former roughly translates to “Mama,” which suggests a childlike bond. Likewise, his desire to to see his mother carries a sense of urgency that implies that he may still have been in denial of her death. Throughout the novel, he refers to things that his mother used to say–Mamanisms, if you will. These little references, such as “Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about” (113), suggest that he cares about her more deeply than he lets on, and that she has made a major impact on his life. Like Meursault, I frequently conceal my attachment to the people around me. I sometimes view affection to be a weakness, as opening up to people can leave you vulnerable. Meursault claims no emotion; I try to avoid emotion altogether. However,  those who are close to me heavily influence my thoughts and actions. Meursault and I are alike in that respect, because we both hide our devotion to those around us.

I have never experienced the death of a loved one. However, I have experienced the death of those who are not as close to me, and their deaths have little or no effect on my life. I’ve realized that there are more than seven billion people in the world, and the death of someone that I hadn’t really bonded with has very little impact on my existence. This view is rather looked down upon in contemporary society because we’re taught to think that everyone’s life has meaning. I just don’t think that’s true. One person’s life doesn’t have to hold any meaning to every other person in the world. Meursault takes an even more extreme stance on this idea: Anyone who is no longer actively part of his day-to-day life loses their significance. After being condemned to the death sentence, he thinks on his relationship with Marie and reflects, “Remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead” (115). Since he knows he won’t be able to be with her again, he feels he has nothing to keep them together, so he separates her from his mind. Though I’m not emotionally capable of detaching myself from loved ones in the way that he does, I do sometimes remove myself from acquaintances in that way.

I initially thought I shared a lot of common ground with Meursault, but as the book progressed, some major differences became apparent. I was disdainful of his nonchalant behavior towards major life decisions, and I questioned why he behaved in such a way. When Marie brought up marriage, he replied that “It didn’t make any difference” and that they could get married if she wanted to (32). I can’t understand why he said that, because marriage is a determinant of happiness. I relate to his apathy towards others, but I regard happiness as a major factor in my decisions, and I just can’t comprehend why he would care so little about his own satisfaction. He showed the same indifference towards his own trial, focusing more on the details of his surroundings than on the details of the trial itself, and I found myself growing frustrated that he wouldn’t pay more attention to such a crucial moment in his life.

Meursault and I ended up diverging on philosophical paths. I remained an existentialist, while he slowly turned into a nihilist. After the murder, he began losing the things that gave his life value. His imprisonment made him lose Marie and his enjoyment of the everyday, and his trial made him lose his hope for freedom. After his talk with the chaplain, he embraced the idea that the world “now and forever meant nothing to [him]” (122). His life was essentially meaningless.This hopelessness contrasts heavily with my own views, because I’m at a point in my life where I’m finding more and more to live for. While I was reading the novel I tried to pinpoint what it was that gave my life meaning. Was it friends? Social status? Religion? For a long time, the answer to that question has been good grades, but I now think the answer is my happiness. When Meursault stopped seeking happiness, I stopped relating to him.

I took a largely philosophical interpretation of The Stranger because it helped further some of the philosophical thoughts I’ve been having lately. I have been questioning the meaning of my existence and the role of religion in my life and what motivates me, and I connect to how Meursault indirectly or directly addressed those ideas. Though I find his nihilistic perspective bleak and grim, Meursault’s philosophy was a fascinating way to further my own ideals.

 

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Random House, Inc. (1988): Print.

Patterns of Rhythm: What I Said

Some poems rely on repeated line structure to add to the meaning, but Norman Stock’s “What I Said” (page 1000) is not one of them. Written in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “What I Said” carries an irregular rhythm to emphasize the tumultuous emotions felt during the time. The feet of the poem are largely iambs, but they frequently alternate to anapests. These rising meters, created primarily of monosyllabic words, create an almost hysteric tone. The lines of “What I Said” cannot be easily measured, as the number of feet per line increases throughout the poem. Stock begins the poem with a trimeter, but the lines become so big as to even become nonameters. Likewise, he alternates between feminine and masculine endings: “went home| and cried| and,” for example, is feminine, while “and how| can we| expect| to go| on aft|er this” is masculine. Both the irregular line lengths and the variation of endings serve to further the hysteric tone of the poem, while also creating a bumbling, ranting voice.

Line 10’s iambic monometer “we live” is very interesting, as it blends into line 9 when read aloud but distinctly stands out to the reading eye. Every line but the last one in “What I Said” is a run-on line when read aloud, but line 10 contains caesuras that make it seem like it could be an end-stopped line. In the last line, line 13, the last foot is a spondee designed to sharply contrast the rest of the poem. The entire poem seems babbling and upset, but “we kill them” is resolute. It seems to me that line 10 and 13 were emphasized so they could be compared to each other; how will “we live” is the question, and “we kill them” is the answer.

Sounds: “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls”

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” sound is crucial in understanding the meaning of the poem. Longfellow uses an array of auditory techniques to emphasize meaning and stress actions. He creates assonance by repeating the “a” vowel (Along the sea-sands damp and brown / The traveller hastens towards the town) , which gives the poem a sense of continuity. Longfellow chooses short, simple words such as “damp”, “calls”, and “stomps”, which give the poem a euphonious and almost chant-like sound when read aloud. In fact, only two words, “traveller” and “nevermore”, have more than two syllables in the poem, creating a foreboding change of tone when they both appear in the last three lines of the poem. The line “And the tide rises, the tide falls” that is repeated four times in the poem mimics the action that it describes; as it is spoken, “rises” is often given an increase in pitch, which “falls” generally receives a lower pitch.

“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” displays an interesting rhyme scheme; in each stanza, the end rhyme of the first, second, and fifth lines is different than the end rhyme of the third and fourth line (A, A, B, B, A). Wordsworth uses only masculine rhyme, and the first, second, and fifth line of every stanza share the same rhyme: -all. The rhyme scheme sets the tone for the poem, as the repetitive sounds broken by the different rhymes of the third and fourth lines imitate the rising and falling of the tide.

Symbol, Allegory, and Irony: “The Chimney Sweeper”

William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” (page 946) embraces symbolism and irony in order to convey the poem’s theme. The poem focuses on lives of chimney sweepers; it implies the boys work long, laborious hours in poor conditions, but are promised just, glorious conditions in the afterlife. The line “And my father sold me while yet my tongue could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” Is an example of verbal irony; while the narrator means to say that he was too young to pronounce the word “sweep”, the reader may interpret the meaning of the line to be that the narrator was so young when he dealt with his mother’s death that he could barely comprehend sadness. Tom Dacre’s hair serves as a conventional symbol; his head is described as “curled like a lamb’s back.” The lamb is typically associated with innocence and purity; the shaving of his head seems to symbolize the loss of these things due to the hard labor of chimney sweeping.

Tom’s dream is supposed to be a glimpse into the afterlife of the chimney sweepers; the coffins of black are a conventional symbol for death, and the black ties back to chimney soot. It’s very possible the phrase was chosen because a chimney, from the inside, is dark and constricting, much as a coffin is. The poem itself has a symbolic meaning: The chimney sweepers symbolize life and its toils, while the soot symbolizes sin. This is why the poem emphasizes black and soot against white and cleanliness (“in soot I sleep”, “soot cannot spoil your white hair”, “coffins of black”, “bright key”, “shine in the sun”, “naked and white”, “rose in the dark”). Blake uses the conventional symbolism of white to stand for heavenly purity. It seems that the Angel in the poem is cosmic irony; though the afterlife is supposed to be joyful, that doesn’t improve the sweepers’ current lives in any physical way.

Figures of Speech: “The Joy of Cooking”

Without figurative language, Elaine Magarrell’s “The Joy of Cooking” (pages 919-920) would have little to no meaning. Figures of speech allow her to capture strong emotions and insert a double meaning, while also making her poem amusing. “My sister’s tongue” and “my brother’s heart” are both synecdoche; though the subjects of the poem are the narrator’s brother and sister, using one part of them to signify their whole allows the author to easily characterize the subjects and highlight their dominant characteristics. The synecdoche “my sister’s tongue” carries the implication that the narrator’s sister’s most notable characteristic is her words; the mention of “tongue” when describing speech is generally negative, so the sister must make sharp, nagging, or obnoxious comments. “My brother’s heart” is a synecdoche that relates to the brother’s emotions, love empathy, or lack thereof. Having “tongue” replace “words” and “heart” replace “emotions” appears to be metonymy, as well, but since I’ve only just been introduced to synecdoche and metonymy I’m not very good at discerning which is which.

Regardless of what figure of speech they fall under, the “sister’s tongue” and “brother’s heart” being cooked are the extended, controlling metaphors of the poem. Though the narrator is not literally cooking her siblings’ organs, the metaphor that is produced is essential to the poem’s meaning. The author likens the taming of harsh words to the cooking of a tongue. The actions of scrubbing and skinning it and removing all the unpleasant parts (as if one is trimming meat) symbolize the removal of unpleasant comments and sharp remarks from the sister’s speech. I see it as a pun; the narrator takes the unrefined tongue and turns it into something tasteful (a description that applies to both a cut of meat and the styling of conversation). Magarrell writes “Next time perhaps a creole sauce or mold of aspic?” I looked up aspic, and it’s a gelatin used to preserve meats and keep them from spoiling; so the narrator is suggesting that the new, refined tongue will have to be kept from becoming distasteful again. 

Magarrell employs similar figurative techniques when describing the brother’s heart, except this time the metaphor relates to his apathy. She writes, “Although beef heart serves six, my brother’s barely feeds two,” which is a clever synecdoche (I believe) to show that the brother’s love (as depicted by the heart) is barely enough to satisfy. Though I didn’t initially pick up on it, “slow cooked” is a witty implied metaphor and also a pun; when something is slow cooked, it becomes tender, which can have an obvious meaning for both the brother’s apathy and the meat as a dish. 

Images: “The Blue Bowl”

Though only a hundred and one words, Jane Kenyon’s poem The Blue Bowl (page 890) encapsulates many images. Kenyon paints pictures through her choices of nouns and adjectives, and she commonly uses similes to further a visual. In line 1 she compares the narrator’s action of burial to that of primitives; though she uses no descriptors here, the noun “primitive” evokes the image of a caveman, making the narrator’s actions seem simplistic and primal. In stanza two, she moves on to use classic descriptors, such as “long red fur”, “white feathers”, and “long, not to say aquiline, nose.” This vivid, direct description is found nowhere else in the poem, which conveys the idea that to the narrator, the cat itself was more important than the events that happened during its burial and the days after its death. 

“They fell with a hiss” on line 5 provides an auditory image in the poem; the phrase captures the sound of scraping sand, while also connecting it to the sound cats make. When I read this line I interpreted it as they were trying to bury the cat alive and it was hissing at them, but the next line, “and a thud on his side,” eliminated that idea. “Thud” is a descriptive term that generally carries a negative connotation, as a reader typically ties the word to the sound of a dull blow, and not anything that would be happening to a living creature. I took this line to be representative of the cat’s state; it’s commonly known that (live) cats always land on their feet, but a dead cat wouldn’t have such an opportunity, and would land heavily on its side. 

The absence of description in the line “We worked, ate, stared, and slept” also manages to provide an image, though this time one of action. Kenyon’s phrasing shows that the narrator and his or her companions carried on with daily tasks and actions, but there was nothing to make an event description-worthy. Whether is be from absence of the cat or sorrow over the cat’s death, they operate monotonously, showing how drab the next few days after the cat’s death seemed to be.

Word Choice, Word Order, and Tone: Discussing “The Larynx”

In her poem The Larynx (found on page 862), Alice Jones creates an interesting contrast between the scientific and the literary. She incorporates an array of anatomical jargon, such as epiglottic flap, bronchial fork, and lungs, and cartilage. For those who are at least mildly acquainted with basic anatomy, this jargon provides a vivid mental image of the lower respiratory system. Jones uses middle diction; she doesn’t use obscure words, but still inserts elegant, appropriate terms. Her anatomical jargon and middle diction seem to cater to educated people, especially those of medical profession, by using words and descriptions that they can easily understand.

As the poem progresses, the diction changes from scientific to descriptive. Jones uses scientific terms to describe the epiglottis, lungs, bronchi, and alveoli, which provides an informal tone, even though she does use verbs that personify the various organs. But as Jones begins to describe the larynx, which is the focus of the poem, she switches to literary devices such as similes that allow her to convey a descriptive, appreciative tone. The terms in the first half of the poem rely heavily on denotations, while the second half begins to rely on connotations to convey the wonder of how the larynx is able to create sound. This allows Jones to contrast how the forcing of air from the lungs is mainly scientific, while the creation of sound and song by the movements of air in the larynx is practically magical.

The Larynx is written as one run-on sentence, though it does use appropriate grammar and punctuation. This syntactical structure, when read aloud, causes the reader to draw attention to his own breathing patterns as they try to space out places to take breaths. The wondrous tone about being able to create sounds given off at the conclusion of the poem makes the reader reflect back on his verbal reading of it, and may cause him to appreciate that the poem he was reading aloud describes how he is able to speak it. 

This is a blog!