JDonaghy4 said: "HogansHero said: "
I think both of you are missing the forest for the trees. It's not about our feelings. It is about the fact that she is the dean of the school and as such the would be arbiter of any complaint that, as an example, a professor sexually assaulted a student. If you were a woman who had been raped by your professor, would you want the person who wrote what Rashad wrote on twitter to be the person responsible for protecting you? I am not a student or a woman but I sure as hell wouldn't."
Bingo. And this is hardly a typical "cancellation" where someone says something that is perceived to be offensive/not PC. She lauded someone who has admitted to raping many, many women. What is the other side of that argument? Being agnostic on rape is not something you get "cancelled" for when you are involved in a position of authority on a college campus.
the whole thing is a mess."
Well, first of all, of course there is another side to the argument because you can't have an argument without their being two sides (doesn't mean both sides are equally right, or even close to that).
And, again, this is a personal Twitter account, not a school Twitter account. Also, again, this brings up the very problem of the blurring public and private roles I complained about in my initial response: we want an unfiltered look into people's thoughts, but we get upset/defensive when those unfiltered thoughts don't mirror our own. And in this case apparently are now holding someone professionally responsible for expressing a personal thought. The dangers inherent in this worth considering.
For the record, as someone who has worked in academia for twenty plus years: you don't go to your dean with a complaint of sexual assault. You go to the office in charge of the Title IX on your campus (you may even be reporting your dean). Technically, anyone who works for the campus should report to the Title IX office any such an incident a student confides to them, which would definitely include Rashad, should she be told something by a student, but that also means far more people than just Rashad are supposed to do/are capable of doing this. So she's not a barrier to assault victims at her college attempting to report a criminal action.
As for the idea that she may stop someone from having the confidence to report their abuse to anyone on campus because of her position, that argument is fraught with so many issues that's it's really a separate topic. It's a complex issue of what we expect college campuses to be, to what extent we expect college campuses to be law enforcement agencies, and to what extent we think colleges are responsible for insuring the emotional confidence of legal adults to report crimes to proper authorities. It's way too big an issue to unpack in this comments section.
I still think it's irrelevant to most of us here what she thinks of Cosby or how she views his release. It may well be relevant for those who attend her college or others who work at her college--but does that include anyone here? And I am quite sure some of them have already made their voices heard. That's likely why the tweet disappeared. She may end up facing disciplinary actions. Again, not really relevant to most of us, and prior to the internet age, not something most of us would have felt the need to take a position on.
Which again circles back to my original comment: the extent to which things that do not really concern us because subjects on which we need to opine--and feel outraged at anyone who disagrees with us--because the internet continues to collapse the distinction between personal and private life.
I always end up wishing Twitter just didn't exist, though I know that wish changes nothing.
