Campus crusaders love to use the statistic that 1 in 5 women will experience some kind of sexual assault on a college campus. It’s not surprising really. It’s a scary-sounding statistic that makes it seem that there are threats everywhere. Fear of that number can spur colleges to implement any measure at all that will make it look like they’re taking campus sexual assault seriously.
Unfortunately, that statistic is basically bunk and has been thoroughly discredited.
Now, the dean of students and deputy Title IX coordinator at Fordham University is under investigation because he didn’t completely buy into the number. After all, if he had, he wouldn’t have presented both sides of the conversation.
Fordham University has launched an investigation into its Dean of Students and Deputy Title IX Coordinator Christopher Rodgers after several RAs reportedly left a sexual assault training in tears because he screened a Prager University educational video that uses facts to dispute the stat that one-in-five women will be sexually assaulted or raped during their college years.
“Given the seriousness of the issues involved, the University has begun an investigation into the training session and Dean Rodgers’ comments therein,” Fordham said in a recent statement.
This incident came about in mid-August when Rodgers (pictured) showed two videos displaying the political agendas of the left and the right during a Campus Assault and Relationship Education training session for Resident Assistants. Called RAs for short, they are peer leaders who supervise students living in dorms.
Rodgers started the training with a documentary called “The Hunting Ground,” which, according to a statement from Rowan Hornbeck, an RA at Fordham, “was his example of the agenda of the political left.” Hornbeck claims that during this time “students began leaving the room upset” because of the way he framed the documentary as biased toward the left.
Rodgers then showed the five-minute PragerU video disputing the claim that 1-in-5 women are sexually assaulted or raped in college.
Yes, “The Hunting Ground” is biased from the left. More to the point, however, it’s been grabbed by the left and used as absolute proof that men on college campuses are rapists in the making.
What Rodgers did was present both sides. Yes, he said one side was biased to the left, but he also presented the other as biased to the right. In other words, he didn’t claim one side was right or wrong, instead leaving it up to the audience to make that determination for themselves.
And that was his sin.
Social justice jihadis and campus crusaders don’t want people to think for themselves. They want people to be spoon fed specific information so they can regurgitate it on command, but they don’t want anyone to really delve in and look for themselves. They don’t want people to really be able to engage in debate because they know they’ll lose the debate.
Rodgers sinned because he wanted to present information that contradicts the sacred shibboleth that is the campus rape statistic that PragerU’s video was debunking. By allowing the audience to decide for themselves, he gave them agency to make up their own minds, rather than simply telling them what to think.
If there was any doubt that campus leftists don’t want an honest discussion of issues, this should eliminate it.
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