New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Tensions rise at Yale over sex abuse
Column threatens to expose misconduct
NEW HAVEN — Sexual misconduct, and increased scrutiny of male students’ behavior, has brought an atmosphere of tension to the campus of Yale University and other colleges.
The heightened concern about bad behavior among men on a path to power and prestige, highly visible during the hearings on Yale graduate Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, still permeates the atmosphere on campus, most visibly in recent opinion columns in the Yale Daily News.
But so is worry that vigilance aimed at white male students — who make up the vast majority of those accused of sexual misconduct and who still are more likely to end up in positions of power in the country — is being taken too far, that the vigilant are acting more like vigilantes. The split is largely, though not totally, along the liberalconservative political divide.
“That tension is everywhere,” said
Katharine Baker, a law professor at the ChicagoKent College of Law who has written about sexual misconduct on college campuses. “I think it’s incredibly common on all sorts of college campuses, not just Yale. … The frustration around the Kavanaugh hearings still lingers.”
One column in the Yale Daily News gained nationwide attention, which focused especially on the line, “I’m watching you, white boy.” In the Feb. 7 column, titled “Evil is Banal,” staff columnist Isis Davis-Marks expressed her concerns that “a white boy with shiny brown hair and a saccharine smile that conceals his great ambitions” will rise to prominence and power despite having made “a racist remark” or engaging in inappropriate behavior while at Yale.
“And, when I’m watching him smile that smile, I’ll think that I could have stopped it,” wrote DavisMarks, a senior. Her point is that “whisper networks” aren’t sufficient to stop the behavior. “I think that we need to continue to call our classmates out, but it’s still not enough. After all, it wasn’t enough to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation,” she wrote.
And her concerns go beyond those who commit sexual misconduct, for which there is a formal process of reporting and sanctioning. They include those whose values she fears endanger America and the world, citing decisions made during the Iraq War by former President George H.W. Bush (a Yale alumnus) and former Vice President Dick Cheney (who attended but didn’t graduate from Yale).
“The core of this problem has to do with our values,” Davis-Marks wrote. “The problem isn’t just the Yale administration; it’s Yale students. We allow things to skate by. We forget. We say, ‘No, he couldn’t have done that,’ or, ‘But he’s so nice.’ No questions are asked when our friends accept job offers from companies that manufacture weapons or contribute to gentrification in cities. We merely smile at them and wave as we walk across our residential college courtyards and do nothing. Thirty years later, we kick ourselves when it’s too late.”
So her solution is to collect the evidence as it happens. She ends her column with “I’m watching you, white boy,” but it’s followed with, “And this time, I’m taking the screenshot.”
In an email, DavisMarks declined to comment about the issues her column raised or about how it was portrayed in numerous publications. “I’m sorry, but I think that the whole thing got out of hand, and I’m not too sure if I want to talk to the media right now. I hope you’ll understand,” she wrote.
“I think what she’s concerned about is that individual incidents of sexual misconduct are incredibly hard to prove,” Baker said. Often there are no witnesses and evidence is circumstantial.
“It can be very frustrating if you feel part of a group that is never able to prove their case in court,” Baker said. In March 2018, Yale student Saifullah Khan was acquitted in Superior Court of sexually assaulting another student, although he was suspended and expelled in November, based on findings of the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct.
Baker compared female victims to African Americans who “for centuries and centuries … didn’t bother to bring charges of police misconduct.” The emergence of videos in police cars and on officers’ uniforms has aided black victims of police misconduct, she said.
“To me what the woman was saying was, ‘OK, I’m going to be a dashcam video,’” Baker said. “Why is that so very scary? She says she is going to create a reliable record of what happened. It’s disquieting to some people. … If it’s really scary to someone that she’s going to remember, then that’s a problem.”
‘A completely different person’
Yale Law School students staged a sit-in during hearings on the nomination of Kavanaugh (Yale ’87, Yale Law ’90) to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, after Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school and of exposing himself to fellow Yale student Deborah Ramirez. Kavanaugh denied both accusations.
“I think it’s particularly frustrating to people who feel like in Kavanaugh’s situation … the person he portrayed himself was as a completely different person,” Baker said. “Kavanaugh said in several different remarks … ‘What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep and what happened at Yale Law School should stay at Yale Law School.”
Davis-Marks’ op-ed referred to another column as an example of how to break the cycle. That one, written by senior Anna Blech and published Jan. 17, sarcastically welcomed back to campus a student who had been suspended for two semesters.
The student, identified by the Yale Daily News as Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi, had dropped a lawsuit he filed against Yale over his suspension for the spring and fall 2018 semesters.
The federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 18, named “John Doe” as plaintiff, but the student newspaper identified him in several stories because he referred to himself as “a conservative columnist” for the Daily News in his complaint and because “two people with knowledge of the case confirmed that Tenreiro-Braschi is the plaintiff,” according to the Daily News.
One of “John Does” attorneys, Susan Kaplan of New York, a civil litigator who specializes in discrimination cases, would not comment about the disposition of the lawsuit and would not confirm or deny whether Tenreiro-Braschi was the plaintiff.
In her column, Blech said the sexual misconduct committee had found Tenreiro-Braschi “had engaged in three counts of groping and one count of ‘creating a hostile academic environment’ against two female students.” The incidents allegedly occurred during a trip to Paris in June 2016, at a club party and on a chartered bus to the Yale-Harvard football game on Nov. 18, 2016, when Tenreiro-Braschi “allegedly got super drunk, stumbled over to a couple of women and grabbed their breasts and buttocks while whispering ‘I want to ---- you’ in their ears,” Blech wrote.
In a Feb. 15 editorial, the Yale Daily News said that the column by Davis-Marks, “the News’ only black columnist,” had ignited anonymous phone calls to the paper and to Davis-Marks. “While some have met the column with open dialogue, messages with images of lynched black women, racialized and gendered slurs, as well as calls to inflict physical violence on Davis-Marks, have drowned out that discourse,” the paper’s editorial board wrote.
The editorial said the Yale Daily News doesn’t endorse its columnists’ views but condemns violent threats. “We believe that elements of Davis Marks’ column provided an important point of conversation for our campus community,” the editorial stated. “Its subject matter deals with a topic of serious concern to many at Yale: the extent to which we should hold our classmates accountable for casual misconduct — misconduct that feels innocuous enough today, but, with time, takes on a darker significance.”
In an email to the Register, Editor-in-Chief Britton O’Daly explained the context of a column such as Davis-Marks’: “The scandals surrounding big figures in the news like Brett Kavanaugh or the political leadership of Virginia — scandals that frequently date back to the experiences of those men in college — are bound to resonate with people in college right now,” he wrote.
O’Daly was referring to scandals of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who admitted, then denied, that he had appeared in a medical school yearbook photo of men in blackface and a Ku Klux Klan costume, and sexual assault accusations against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.
“Like we said in our editorial, a lot of Yale students are wondering to what extent they should hold their classmates accountable for misbehavior,” O’Daly wrote. “Ms. Davis-Marks’ column grapples with this question. And it’s our hope as a newspaper that we can sponsor more dialogue and more viewpoints within the Yale community that address this topic.”
‘Yale Made Me Racist’
The columns by Blech and Davis-Marks didn’t sit well with 2017 Yale graduate Karl Notturno, a Mount Vernon Fellow at the Center for American Greatness in Washington, D.C., which he said is conservative but more in line with Trump’s ideas than those of traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. or Barry Goldwater. His Feb. 12 column on the center’s website was titled, “Yale Made Me Racist.”
Notturno wrote that life for a conservative at Yale “just keeps getting worse.” He is now co-director of A Soldier’s Home, a nonprofit based in Utah that, starting with a $700 budget, has helped 500,000 veterans buy homes. He’s also writing a musical. And he’s still a Trump supporter.
Notturno’s column criticizes what he says is Davis-Marks’ “blatant racism” and “just terrible advice for combatting what Davis-Marks must perceive as a culture of white racism, male sexual misconduct, and general malevolence.” His view of Davis Marks’ call to expose bad behavior is that she would welcome “more character assassinations in the pages of the Yale Daily News,” such as Blech’s column.
In his column and in a telephone interview, Notturno questioned O’Daly’s editorial judgment. In the interview, he said Blech’s goal was “getting all the most salacious details from a lawsuit and hoping that the reader will not notice the word ‘alleged’ there. What does it add to the conversation besides just adding to the vitriol? There didn’t seem a point to the article.”
He compared the Yale Daily News to the National Enquirer and said the paper runs op-eds “that seem honestly quite hateful to me.”
Another critic of the Yale Daily News’ decision to run the column was its former managing editor, Tyler Foggatt, class of 2017, the only black woman to have served as an editor on the paper. In a letter to the editor, Foggatt said the column, “in its attempts to condemn racism and sexism on the Yale campus, slips into casual racism and sexism itself.”
Foggatt asked “why this op-ed was published in the first place. When evaluating whether an op-ed is fit for publication, there are a few questions worth thinking about: What is the point of the op-ed? What is the writer trying to say, and what does the writer want people to do once they’ve finished reading?”
Foggatt continued, “Her column outlines a frightening vision of the world. It’s a world in which the point of social justice isn’t to balance the scales; it’s to mete out punishment. In this world, it makes perfect sense to screenshot other people’s text messages, or to write screeds in a student newspaper alienating every white male student who’s ever attended Yale.”
O’Daly declined to comment on the editorial board’s decision-making process.
Susan Kaplan, one of two attorneys hired to replace Tenreiro-Braschi’s first lawyer, also said she thought Davis-Marks was taking “a prosecutorial stance” in seeking out bad behavior in order to expose someone later in life.
“I don’t think anyone wants to die on that hill, where you’re vigilantly scouring the internet or (watching) your neighbor for bad behavior … not to mitigate the damage so much or to … try to maintain a civilized purpose.” Kaplan said the “MeToo,” “campus rape” and “Title IX” movements “are the movements that are putting men under scrutiny to the extent that they are under scrutiny.”
Title IX, dating from 1972, bars discrimination in education on the basis of sex in any institution receiving federal money. Originally used mostly to bring equality to female athletes, it has since become the law that colleges and universities rely on to address sexual misconduct.
That use grew more prevalent as the result of a 2011 memo from the U.S. Department of Education, which resulted in Yale and other universities setting up formal routes to file complaints. Known as the “Dear Colleague” letter, it states, “If a school knows or reasonably should know about student-on-student harassment that creates a hostile environment, Title IX requires the school to take immediate action to eliminate the harassment, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects.”
The standard by which school officials are to judge a complaint is by a “preponderance of the evidence,” which Kaplan called “50-50 plus a feather or 51-49.”
On Nov. 16, 2018, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos proposed new guidance that would allow schools to raise the standard for finding a plaintiff at fault to “clear and convincing evidence,” which would make it more difficult to prove claims.
Kaplan said “most of my cases in court are preponderance of the evidence,” but that people have ex-
pressed concern that “in the hands of inexperienced jurists,” such as the dean of athletics, “you need a pretty refined sense of evidence.” In a case that amounts to “he said/she said, it’s hard to get to clear and convincing” evidence, she said.
Tenreiro-Braschi based his lawsuit in part on Title IX, claiming reverse discrimination by the two women who brought complaints against him, which the complaint describes as friends. “As a result of Defendants’ discriminatory and unlawful conduct, Plaintiff has been denied the opportunity to continue with his Yale University education, participation in Yale University’s prestigious Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, and employment with a well-known highly respected Wall Street Investment Banking Firm for the summer of 2018,” his complaint states.
Tenreiro-Braschi contended the way Yale implements its sexual misconduct policies, led by its Title IX coordinator, Dr. Stephanie Spangler, deputy provost for health affairs and academic integrity, are biased toward female complainants. His lawsuit states, “it is apparent that Yale views all women who simply make complaints of alleged sexual misconduct, as ‘victims.’ This attitude and policy implementation clearly leads to gender bias against males.”
Kaplan said seeing all men as potential perpetrators of sexual assault creates an unhealthy sexual atmosphere in society. “No one is defending bad behavior,” she said. However, she asked, “Do you have a right to privacy in your community? … Do I have a right to not show up on someone’s vigilante journal list? … Even if we seem to be more prosecutorial than on the defense side at the moment, we have to be fair.”
“Are standards of conduct well defined and being addressed?” she asked. “You are never redeemed. You are never forgiven. You are never allowed back into the community.” Calling the mindset “medieval,” Kaplan said, “There’s no gradation. It’s all awful, it’s all the worst thing in the world and they’ll be condemned to the end of time.”
Referring to TenreiroBraschi, Baker of the Chicago-Kent College of Law said, “You can have a disagreement about whether the Yale community should be forgiving of this guy and whether he paid his dues and came back, but it’s a legitimate discussion to have. … It is a complete fallacy to think that somebody that has not been criminally charged did not do the act alleged.”
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 20 to 25 percent of college women and 15 percent of college men are forced into sexual acts and 90 percent of sexual assault victims on campus do not report the crime.
Rich Hanley, a professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, said the Yale Daily News columns are examples of “a moment we’re living in where people are asking for transparency. … There doesn’t seem to be any boundaries anymore about what we discuss, how we discuss it and who we discuss it with.
“Because of our technology, we all have the capacity to put people under surveillance … and then spread those unguarded moments through social media,” Hanley said. But he warned against misinterpretation. “Video can be edited; images can be cropped,” he said.
“We do want predators to be brought to the bar of justice, but we want to do it in a way where people’s rights will be protected,” Hanley said. “You want that to be reported to police. You want to collect evidence of that.”
A liberal agenda
In his lawsuit, TenreiroBraschi appeared to try to connect the accusations made against him with his conservative political views.
“The Harvard-Yale bus trip on November 18, 2016, had been one week after the presidential election with Donald Trump’s victory,” his complaint states. He then quotes the Yale Daily News of Nov. 10: “Yale administrators and faculty members flooded student inboxes with messages of support and consolation during a potentially difficult time for many. In an email to undergraduates Wednesday afternoon, (Yale College Dean Jonathan) Holloway called on students to come together in what he called ‘a very difficult period on campus.’ ”
Holloway is now provost of Northwestern University.
The suit goes on to say, “John Doe expressed to the hearing panel his social isolation on campus for his conservative political views and what he perceived to be rejection by the students on the bus trip. One panel member began a line of questioning about whether John Doe’s political beliefs were an underlying issue to the complainants’ reports.”
At that point, according to the complaint, the hearing was briefly suspended and, when it resumed, “The discussion regarding the political climate at Yale had been abruptly discontinued and not pursued again during the hearing.”
Karl Notturno said he can see a connection between political ideology and the movement to hold men to account for any perceived misdeeds. “It seems accusations are being used as a tool in some cases,” he said.
“I think a lot of these people think in their heart of hearts that males are bad to some degree and aggressive males act with impunity and do so purposely.” He said the accusers are also concerned with the culture at fraternities where, they believe, “the guys are acting as complete pigs every night.”
Three women recently filed a class-action lawsuit against Yale and nine fraternities, trying to force the frats to admit women, in response to reports of sexual assault and other misconduct. One fraternity where women have reported being sexually assaulted, Delta Kappa Epsilon, was banned from campus for five years and has sold its Lake Place chapter houses.
The three students also say women are being shut out of the social and economic benefits offered by all-male fraternities, including access to vast alumni networks that can help land coveted jobs. While there are sororities, their power and influence pales in comparison with fraternities, the lawsuit says.
“If you think that the idea of masculinity embodies some proclivity for sexual assault … then you’re probably more liberal than not. That would be my intuition,” Notturno said. “The idea of hating on masculinity or the idea of hating on gender roles seems to be more of a liberal thing than a conservative thing.”
Notturno understands feeling marginalized at Yale, though he said he didn’t let it bother him as an undergrad. “I always did feel like you were on guard,” he said. “If you were going to say something that was your belief in class, you’d have to work five times as hard to say it because you’d have to defend it.”
Meanwhile, liberal students were allowed to state a position without backing it up if “it conformed to whatever ideology that the professor had,” he said. He said he believed the email consoling students after Trump’s victory wouldn’t have gone out if Hillary Clinton had won.
Notturno said a classmate he thought was a friend called him a racist and swore at him for his support of Trump, who he thinks is “doing a pretty good job.” “Someone said, ‘You must be the smartest Trump supporter out there,’ ” Notturno said. “The reason you never heard of them is because they’re a lot smarter than me. They keep their mouths shut.” He estimated that 10 percent of Yale’s student body is conservative.
Notturno called the “culture of fear really prevalent” among conservatives at Yale. “The fear very rarely was of actual danger or anything. You would get ostracized, you would not have friends, you would lose friends” or job opportunities.
As an example of liberal pressure at Yale, Notturno pointed to the debate and yearlong protests by the Yale and Greater New Haven communities over Calhoun College, which resulted in its being renamed for mathematician and computer scientist Grace Hopper in February 2017. The controversy over Calhoun, a former vice president of the United States and avowed racist who graduated from Yale in 1804, had simmered for decades, flaring up at various times.
Notturno said he spoke to an African-American alumnus “from the ’70s, when the whole Calhoun thing happened, who told me, ‘I liked living in Calhoun College. What more of a middle finger could you have than that?”
Notturno said he is “happy that Yale was as liberally biased as it was. … the academic rigor that was thrown out the window for everyone else suddenly came crashing down on me and that was great. Being an outsider in an environment like that makes you very strong. … I didn’t go to Yale just to spend four years to feel comfortable.”