CASC's Incoherence
In a private Facebook post Sheila Marie Connolly (member of the CASC Project Team) writes about Simcha Fisher's second article on Christendom:
There are a bunch of bombshell admissions in this:
1.a) Sheila admits that Simcha's article reports details that seem to be wrong, offering as an example the report of a 10PM curfew--a factual error that could have been easily fact-checked before printing, though it evidently wasn't.
1.b) Simcha seems to "have a negative view of the college" overall.
2) Sheila admits (contra Simcha, and in general agreement with what Adele has elsewhere said privately) that the college can't be held responsible for all rapes that occur between students, including specifically the rapes reported in Simcha's articles.
3) She admits that it isn't always going to be possible to know if an allegation is true. That's a huge part of our point! That's why we, and so many others, believe that due process--granting a presumption of innocence to the accused until he is proven guilty, along with fair and unbiased questioning and testing the allegations before punishing the accused--is important. But to admit this is to take the teeth out of the outrage generated by Adele's story, which--being reported 18 months after the fact, with no witnesses and no physical evidence--was a pure he-said-she-said situation.
Of course the "students are hung up" on these things. They are not minor details.
She writes that "we clearly need to be communicating better." Here's a thought: start with your President (Adele Smith) and your VP of Communications (Donna Provencher).
All of the nastiness and divisiveness might well have been averted if Donna hadn't taken it on herself to brand six guys with a scarlet letter 'R'--smearing them as rapists--based on unsubstantiated rumors (i.e., by assuming that all allegations are true).
Or if Donna hadn't (and didn't continue) to label alumni "rape apologists" for pointing out the fact that there are false allegations and that due processes is therefore important. (We saw Sheila point out earlier that she found one of these allegations difficult to believe, but that hasn't stopped Simcha, Adele, Donna, and other CASC supporters from insisting that one of the people Donna labelled with a scarlet 'R' is suing Donna just to silence her advocating for victims when he was forced to bring suit to try to clear his name.)
Or if Adele had publicly stated what she admitted in private, namely, that she disagreed with Simcha's principal thesis: that the college and its policies cause rapes.
Or if the CASC founders had not chosen to ally themselves with a biased blogger who wore her "negative view of the college" on her sleeve.
Or if CASC had simply acknowledge from the beginning that Adele's was one of those cases in which it is impossible to know what actually happened, rather than fabricating outrage that the college didn’t summarily expel the accused based on an unsubstantiated allegation brought more than a year after the alleged incident.
If Sheila really believes what she wrote in this internal post, then why is she still a member of the CASC "Project Team"? She is contradicting all the principal points that separate CASC from its opponents.
Of course, we have asked a similar question of Adele in the past: If you reject Simcha's principal thesis, why didn't you publicly disavow it? Why let your story be used to advance an agenda you reject? Why be complicit in Simcha's smear campaign? And why would you get upset when alumni and others who know the college call the article a hatchet job?
1.a) Sheila admits that Simcha's article reports details that seem to be wrong, offering as an example the report of a 10PM curfew--a factual error that could have been easily fact-checked before printing, though it evidently wasn't.
1.b) Simcha seems to "have a negative view of the college" overall.
2) Sheila admits (contra Simcha, and in general agreement with what Adele has elsewhere said privately) that the college can't be held responsible for all rapes that occur between students, including specifically the rapes reported in Simcha's articles.
3) She admits that it isn't always going to be possible to know if an allegation is true. That's a huge part of our point! That's why we, and so many others, believe that due process--granting a presumption of innocence to the accused until he is proven guilty, along with fair and unbiased questioning and testing the allegations before punishing the accused--is important. But to admit this is to take the teeth out of the outrage generated by Adele's story, which--being reported 18 months after the fact, with no witnesses and no physical evidence--was a pure he-said-she-said situation.
Of course the "students are hung up" on these things. They are not minor details.
She writes that "we clearly need to be communicating better." Here's a thought: start with your President (Adele Smith) and your VP of Communications (Donna Provencher).
All of the nastiness and divisiveness might well have been averted if Donna hadn't taken it on herself to brand six guys with a scarlet letter 'R'--smearing them as rapists--based on unsubstantiated rumors (i.e., by assuming that all allegations are true).
Or if Donna hadn't (and didn't continue) to label alumni "rape apologists" for pointing out the fact that there are false allegations and that due processes is therefore important. (We saw Sheila point out earlier that she found one of these allegations difficult to believe, but that hasn't stopped Simcha, Adele, Donna, and other CASC supporters from insisting that one of the people Donna labelled with a scarlet 'R' is suing Donna just to silence her advocating for victims when he was forced to bring suit to try to clear his name.)
Or if Adele had publicly stated what she admitted in private, namely, that she disagreed with Simcha's principal thesis: that the college and its policies cause rapes.
Or if the CASC founders had not chosen to ally themselves with a biased blogger who wore her "negative view of the college" on her sleeve.
Or if CASC had simply acknowledge from the beginning that Adele's was one of those cases in which it is impossible to know what actually happened, rather than fabricating outrage that the college didn’t summarily expel the accused based on an unsubstantiated allegation brought more than a year after the alleged incident.
If Sheila really believes what she wrote in this internal post, then why is she still a member of the CASC "Project Team"? She is contradicting all the principal points that separate CASC from its opponents.
Of course, we have asked a similar question of Adele in the past: If you reject Simcha's principal thesis, why didn't you publicly disavow it? Why let your story be used to advance an agenda you reject? Why be complicit in Simcha's smear campaign? And why would you get upset when alumni and others who know the college call the article a hatchet job?
Finally, Sheila says that, "Christendom is a good place and shouldn't be burned to the ground." But if there actually is a culture of misogyny and overt sexual assault (See Simcha’s Part II, "the school has a 'boys will be boys' attitude which allows the male students to harass and grab at the women. If a young woman is raped or assaulted, the other students are ready to assume she did something wrong"), if there actually is (as CASC writes) a decades-long history of the school covering up rape and other sexual assault, then how can you possibly say it shouldn't be burned to the ground? If the school's culture "allows the male students to harass and grab at the women," it should be burned to the ground--and we are pretty sure that most Christendom alumni would agree. We’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the Christendom alumni don’t want to defend a school that encourages and systematically covers up sexual assault (speaking for ourselves: we certainly don’t). But the alumni know perfectly well that these allegations are pure slander; the description of Christendom culture as “allow[ing] the male students to harass and grab at the women” is laughable to anyone with any familiarity with the place and its culture.
So if you actually believe this nonsense, how can you agree with current students that "Christendom is a good place"? And if you don't believe this nonsense, why are you a member of Dinah's Voice and a CASC Project Team member?
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