"Transgender swimming champion Lia Thomas will be stripped of University of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed to pressure from the Trump administration."

"The university will also issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost out to a transgender competitor following an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The probe found UPenn violated Title IX by 'allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.' 'Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action...' Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement...."

From "Trans UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas will be stripped of her titles after university bends the knee to Trump admin" (NY Post).

"How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student/Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying."

A very strong piece by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker. 

The facts here are very complicated, so I can't summarize it or excerpt enough to enlighten you about this particular case. So let me quote one part near the end that says something more general: 

One of Mackenzie’s professors, Anne Norton, who teaches political science... told me, “I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood.” Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her. Norton wrote a letter to [Amy] Gutmann, Penn’s president, warning that the university had been “made complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse.” Norton says that Gutmann did not respond.

What does "categorically" mean in "We categorically reject Wax’s claims"?

I'm trying to understand this open letter signed by 33 members of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I've been avoiding writing about the op-ed cowritten by Penn lawprof Amy Wax because it aggravates me and I haven't been inclined to get into the details. I mean, I get this far...



... and what the hell? John Wayne in "The Searchers"?!



Is that "reinforc[ing] bourgeois values" — shooting the eyes out of a corpse of someone who believed that without eyes he'd "wander forever in the spirit world"?

That's as far as I get into the op-ed. Maybe I'll get back to it, but right now I just want to react to the open letter, which has one sentence that deals with the substance of what Professor Wax wrote. That sentence is: "We categorically reject Wax’s claims."

What are Wax's claims that they can be categorically rejected? As summarized in the open letter, the claims are:

1. "All cultures are not equal." That's Wax's prose, and I think it's intended to mean: Not all cultures are equal (as opposed to: there is no culture that is equal to any other culture).

2. "[V]arious social problems would be 'significantly reduce[d]' if 'the academics, media, and Hollywood' would stop the 'preening pretense of defending the downtrodden,' because that would lead to 'restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture.'"

3. (Quoting not the co-written op-ed, but Wax speaking in an interview) "'Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans,' because 'Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.'"

I can understand feeling outraged and combative in response to these ideas, but how do you categorically reject them without saying more than "We categorically reject Wax’s claims"? There are no references to studies, no arguments at all. It's just a stark expression of hating these ideas — or fearing them. It feels so insubstantial, as if they're only saying we don't want to talk about this and we want to make you feel the same way. It's not very inspiring to people like me who feel bad about the op-ed and are looking for a way to talk about it. I admit that I don't want to talk about it, but the 33 lawprofs are indignantly proud of their complete refusal to talk about it.

Reasoned discourse is out the window. Expect a future in which everyone leans into the microphone and says "Wrong."

Amanda Hess advises the NYT on how it should have done that big article the "hookup culture" in colleges.

She's got tips like: "Look outside the Ivies." Look outside the Ivies? The NYT is widening the perspective when it looks outside of Harvard. They went to the University of Pennsylvania. Isn't that enough?

Anticipating disruption from Occupy Philadelphia, Eric Cantor cancels his speech on income equality at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that a sophomore said, "Yeah, it’s definitely really ironic." And an English professor said, "I think it’s a shame that a speech at a university should not occur because of some fear that there will be skeptics and critics in the audience."

The word "audience" refers to people listening. Didn't these protesters intend to chant or shout or otherwise wreck the speech? If a university arranges a speaking event for someone who is invited as an honored guest and the event transmogrifies into one in which he will serve as a platform for other people who want to yell out their ideas, then the university should expect him to decline to participate in what has become an alternate event of a sort that he would never have accepted if it had been the original invitation. To portray the erstwhile honored guest as fearful of critics and skeptics is demagoguery.

You can read the speech Cantor would have given here. Excerpt:

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society....

Instead of talking about a fair share or spending time trying to push those at the top down, elected leaders in Washington should be trying to ensure that everyone has a fair shot and the opportunity to earn success up the ladder. The goal shouldn’t be for everyone to meet in the middle of the ladder....

We must ensure that those who abuse the rules are punished. We must ensure that the solution to wealth disparity is wealth mobility. We must give everyone the chance to move up. Stability plus mobility equals agility. In an agile economy and an agile society, people are climbing and succeeding.