New Dominion Podcast | COMMENTARY: 'All Rise' | ANALYSIS: UMW’s Troubled Student Conduct System
New Dominion Podcast | COMMENTARY: 'All Rise' | ANALYSIS: UMW’s Troubled Student Conduct System
Monday August 21, 2023
New Dominion Podcast: Leigh Anne Van Doren
Leigh Anne Van Doren is the publisher and the owner of Fredericksburg Parent and Family, who shares her thoughts about moms as an underserved community, the importance of pre-K development, and how the Dolly Parton Imagination Library is putting great books into tiny hands. Plus plenty of discussion about the new FXBG Advance.
You can also listen at Spotify.
COMMENTARY: ‘All Rise’
by Martin Davis
FOUNDER AND EDITOR
In recent years, the cry for “nonpartisan” news has reached a fever pitch.
Yet to careful observers of media, there is little to admire in nonpartisan journalism, especially in the face of people, groups, and politicians who argue fair and balanced news tells “both sides” impartially to advance positions that are both immoral and dehumanizing.
Those who would doubt this analysis should benefit from spending three hours at the Kennedy Center watching the current production of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” This refashioning of Harper Lee’s timeless tale breathes life into the truths Lee explored about racism, and more importantly, what happens when we turn our backs on humanity in the name of evenhandedness.
Set in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama, the play follows the trajectory of Lee’s storyline, but in a reordered fashioned. The tinkering with the story’s order draws attendees in and commands their attention. The focus required soon rewards viewers with a more nuanced exploration of the play’s protagonist – Atticus Finch.
This is a man we believe we know. A ne plus ultra of integrity and morality in an unjust world, ready to defend what is right using the system that, ideally, treats all people the same. That veil falls quickly, and we quickly learn we don’t know Atticus Finch at all. As Jed Gottlieb’s review of the play in the Boston Herald says of Finch:
“[D]evotees of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel will find less innocence and certainty here. Fans of the 1962 Academy Award-winning movie will discover this Atticus lacking Gregory Peck’s Lincolnesque quality.”
“I believe in being respectful,” Finch says to her.
And with eyes that could cut the glass protecting the stage lights, Cal responds without flinching, “No matter who you’re disrespecting by doing it.”
Atticus in this production is a Don Quixote trapped in a Machiavellian world.
Throughout the play, Finch – played masterfully by Thomas – is shown teaching his children to respect all people, to “step inside and crawl around in their skin,” regardless of how heinous they may seem. Sometimes, that advice is both admirable and redeemable. This was the case with Link Deas, who is portrayed as morally troubled but proves to be the most clear-eyed white man in the town of Maycomb. Dill’s taking a sip from Deas’ brown paper bag – the act which reveals Deas’ true character - proves one of the lighter moments in the play, which is sprinkled with jovial witticisms.
But in most other cases, Finch’s advice is simply misguided. There is nothing redeeming about the ignorant father of Mayella Ewell, Bob, who rapes his daughter and makes crude references to oral sex to Finch about Scout. There is nothing likeable or kind about the crusty Mrs. Henry Dubois who lives just down from the Finches, and who is forever criticizing Scout.
Finch feels sorry for Mayella, understands the tragedies of Bob Ewell and where they’ve led him, and lectures Scout on the actions of Klansmen and those who follow mobs.
“Mob’s a place where people go to take a break from their conscience,” Finch tells Scout. “A mob acts out of emotion, absent facts, absent contemplation, mostly absent responsibility. What they get in return is anonymity. Conscience can be exhausting.”
Only Atticus’ son Jem seems to see through this character flaw – a naïve belief that every human is inherently good - throughout the play. But there is a quieter, more powerful observer who will speak the truth plain: Calpurnia, Finch’s housekeeper, or in the ugly racist language of the day, the family’s “domestic.”
Cal watches quietly throughout most of the play as Finch’s nonpartisan, treat-everyone-as-equal approach causes an unending array of pains. Far from defusing hatred, it ignites the very dehumanization and racism and violence it pretends to address.
Deep in the second act, following Tom Robinson’s death, Cal can take no more. She challenges Finch directly about how he can continue to treat the white people of Maycomb with respect.
“I believe in being respectful,” Finch says to her.
And with eyes that could cut the glass protecting the stage lights, Cal responds without flinching, “No matter who you’re disrespecting by doing it.”
This.
This reality.
This is why the Advance will not fall into the pit of nonpartisan news. For nonpartisan news merely masks and perpetuates what needs to be exposed. Nonpartisan news doesn’t just turn its back to those organizations and people in society who would use our democracy to harm others and strip rights from those they might disagree; nonpartisan news empowers those forces.
If there is any doubt, consider the corruption and rot that is on the verge of turning Spotsylvania County into a modern-day Maycomb.
To treat the lies of school board leaders and the superintendent as true in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary; to hold as morally equal those people who espouse ideas that would inflict devastating consequences on the most vulnerable members of our society. This is not journalism.
This is cowardice. Cowardice that will kill a mockingbird.
Journalism – the type that walks in the steps of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward, of Upton Sinclair and Ida B. Wells – sits at the core of the Advance.
This is cowardice. Cowardice that will kill a mockingbird.
We are multipartisan because a commitment to uncovering and exposing those who would abuse power, abuse the weak, and abuse our system of government for their own ends is not a partisan issue. And there are people aplenty across the political spectrum who understand this.
As Scout reminds us in the play’s final words, in the face of wrong overtaking right, there is no room for those afraid of the fight.
“All rise.”
ANALYSIS: UMW’s Student Conduct System Underwent External Review - Concerns Remain
by Jess Kirby
WRITER
On April 22, 2022, University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino sent a community-wide email calling for an external review of UMW’s entire student conduct system. The call was in response to an investigative piece I published in The Weekly Ringer, UMW’s independent student newspaper, exposing how the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility had mishandled on-campus assault cases.
The review was originally to be completed by August 2022. In September, however, Paino announced via email that the reviewers would continue working on the report through the fall semester to give them time “to connect with several key stakeholders in the process, including students.”
When the report was released in February 2023—10 months after Paino’s initial call for the outside review—it was missing a key perspective that they had promised in the email: students who had experienced the student conduct process firsthand.
[An] outside review is ineffective without the perspectives of those who matter most—students who sought help from the process and instead were retraumatized by it.
As detailed in the report, the reviewers only interviewed one complainant, and that was Tirzah Rao, a former UMW student who transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University after reporting being assaulted and receiving a lack of support from the university thereafter, which I reported in my April 2022 article. Before the reviewers spoke to Tirzah, however, they initially interviewed Tirzah’s father, Anand Rao, a UMW professor, and the communication and digital studies department chair.
It was his suggestion that they speak with Tirzah, as he said in a Weekly Ringer article about the outside review.
Of the eight total students interviewed for the report, Tirzah was the only one who had experienced the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility process firsthand, and her case had occurred in 2017. The seven other students either served on UMW’s Honor Council or Student Conduct Review Board, a student-run board within the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility that deals with minor violations of UMW’s Code of Conduct.
Therefore, these students know the system more as adjudicators than as complainants seeking support after reporting an incident on campus. This may have given the reviewers insight into how the system works from an insider’s point of view, but it misses the perspective of those who turned to the system for help after being assaulted, such as Tirzah.
In my time with The Weekly Ringer, I reported on the stories of two students who had been through the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility process: Tirzah and a student who asked not to be named.
Though their cases were five years apart—Tirzah’s in 2017 and the other in 2022—their experiences were similar. They both reported being assaulted on campus and both chose to report it to the university rather than the police. Since neither of them was in a relationship with their assailant and the assaults were not sexual in nature, UMW administrators told them they did not have access to the Title IX process and, instead, their cases would be handled by the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility.
During the hearing process, they were both questioned in front of their respondent, and their respondent was allowed to ask them questions, but they were not allowed to be present while their respondents were questioned.
Both hearings were conducted by Raymond Tuttle, the director of the Office of Student Conduct and Responsibility, who is the office’s only staff member. The one-man staff was troubling to many people that the reviewers interviewed, and page nine of the report says that “one full-time role in student conduct is scarce” compared to other universities.
Both Tirzah and the other complainant I interviewed felt that Tuttle was unfair and unsupportive throughout the process, as detailed in this article. Concerns about how Tuttle was conducting the hearings were not present in the reviewers’ final report.
The report does make some helpful suggestions for the office, such as making the process more efficient; expanding the office so it consists of more than just one staff member; improving communication between the office and other offices on campus, such as Title IX and Residence Life, so that they may work together to support the complainant; and clarifying the procedures so that they are easier to understand. But UMW has not said how they will implement the findings.
Page 13 of the report says that “it was abundantly clear that complainant rights and support are at the core of the concerns in the case examples shared with the reviewers.” So why was only one complainant interviewed?
I don’t know. But ultimately, this outside review is ineffective without the perspectives of those who matter most—students who sought help from the process and instead were retraumatized by it.
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-Martin Davis, Editor
The commentary strikes at the very center of the current free speech arguments. Right now, it's become practiced as "my speech is free, but yours is invalid unless it agrees with me." Your analysis is basically a call to restore the missing elements of classical debate, which call for a dialectical approach to decision making. I cannot locate the transcript for the broadcast, but NPR host Peter Sagal struck at it when he complained that NPR required that all sides be presented, even in the case of indefensible or simply made up arguments by one side. Paraphrase: "If one person gets kicked in the crotch, NPR requires that not only the person kicked gets interviewed, but the person who kicked them. And also...the boot." No ideology or political stance is pure. All reactions to events are messy combinations of facts, motivations, emotional reactions (and sometimes trauma). Each person who reacts needs to have their say, and to have their say weighed and reacted to by another voice that is equally active, informed, and responsible. It's the only way to validate attitudes, beliefs, and values.
Your comparison of the new "To Kill a Mockingbird" play, which I haven't seen, to the original movie, that I've watched ( and the book, that I've read and recently re-read ) provides much food for thought. I'm able to easily draw a parallel between your description of the new play, the Atticus Finch character in general, and what's happening on the SCPS Board.
Those who've been paying attention to Spotsy's Board have seen the absolute mess it's become. I often hear three suggestions that concern me.
The first is that we need to replace the entire board. No, we don't. The three women who make up the minority are bending over backward to let their constituents know what's going on, what the motives seem to be, and pointing out nuances and blatant egregious behavior that the general public doesn't know or understand. These women, whose elected power has been stripped by Lisa Phelps and this board's majority, are doing their best to communicate with their constituents whom they have been left powerless to serve that the goal of this board's majority, with help from Mark Taylor, Jon Russell, and others, is to destroy our public schools in favor of privatizing them to fulfill a political agenda and promote a specific religious doctrine.
The second is that all we need is more civility on the board. This suggestion includes the assumption that the problem with the board is that meetings are too long and they need to be streamlined and made more efficient. That sounds great until you peel back the onion to the very serious core issues this division is facing. Keeping in mind the complexities of the issues that plague this public school division, the only solution for now, until the election, is to continue plowing through, even when it's tough to watch. The only other solution we have is for the three women in the minority sit down, shut up, and rubber stamp every motion and policy change introduced by Phelps and Taylor. Rubber stamping will shorten meetings. Is it what we need? Surely not.
Finally, we have the suggestion, often made in good faith by people who want a neat solution to this mess, that we just need more compromise on the board. The problem with that is that at some point moral and ethical concerns rise to the forefront. Book banning is an example. When must reasonable people ask themselves what logic and core beliefs they must disregard in order to hold the belief that has been propagated by this board's majority and its followers (along with the extremists nationwide) that most school librarians and many teachers, most of whom are neighbors, community members, and many who are themselves parents, are pedophiles whose main professional goal is to sexually groom children? At what point does memory and history remind us that banning books from school libraries because some parents don't like them will lead our society to a very dark place? At what point do we acknowledge the importance to society that students be taught real, unvarnished history? When do we stand on the belief that when even one child is marginalized or discriminated against because that child doesn't fit into the definition of "normal" that this superintendent, or these board members, or some parents who follow this extreme ideology hold, all of our children are at risk? So while compromise seems like a nice word, a kind of a "Kumbaya" and "Let's all just be friends" belief, is that what we really want? I hope not.
While it should be obvious by now to anyone paying attention to the disaster happening at 8020 River Stone Drive and in dark corners where the real decisions that impact this school division are made, we don't need Mark Taylor. Based on this article, perhaps we don't need an Atticus Finch either.