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The Occupy movement was a socio-political movement modeled after the Arab Spring that existed in some form another form 2009 to to today. The first heartbeats of the movement came from the success of the Arab Spring, a movement I have already touched upon but in short was the first effective protest that was mostly organized through the internet. This protest first made its was to the US through students at the University of California. They occupied multiple campus buildings in order to protest the budget cuts, staff cutbacks, and tuition hikes that were severely impacting on campus activity. Little would these initial organizations know the impact this would have. The basic model of making administrative functions impossible by occupying the buildings that the functions occurred was a powerful method of resistance. The protestors drew some inspiration from the sitins of the 1960 Civil rights movements as well, as the protests were famous not only for their ability to affect movement but also for the ability of movements to last for extended periods of time. Additionally the occupy movements saw success through the sponsorship of different online anti-authoritarian movements such as Anonymous, a group of masked hackers, who benefited form being the only really known hacktivist group of the time. The different Occupy movements all had different demands of the administrations they rallied against, but it was a worldwide movement, especially across countries such as the UK, Austrialia, and mostly the US.

The Occupy movements were held together in structure mostly through the shared anti- 1% ideologies, the majority of Occupy protests were placed at the feet of banking or governmental systems. It was through this shared collective consciousness that the slogan “we are the 99%” grew to represent the movements main demands. Now what those specific demands were, really varied.

Small protests in rural areas such as Bennington Vermont pressed for things like the removal of certain banks or change of certain political institutions, while larger protests such as the most famous “Occupy Wall Street” argued for more sweeping changes, such as the destruction of the federal banking system, or the restitution of large amounts of money from the 1% back to the 99%. It may seem from an outside perspective that this protest was not that organized. You would be correct. The occupy movement became so successful and failed in equal parts from its lack of central organization. As police around the country began to crack down on the Occupy protests, many protests folded quickly. With people dispersing quickly. However to call the Occupy protests a complete failure could not be further from the truth. The protests assisted in the larger class consciousness that some people have today where the phrase “the 1%” immediately is recognizable. Additionally, almost every protest movement since occupy can trace its organizational structures to the failures that were learned from the Occupy movement.

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March 26

RCL 4

The troubling history of misconduct within Penn State is not an unfamiliar problem to a single member of the Penn State student or administrative body. In the most recent “Living Our Values” survey conducted on Penn State faculty, staff, and graduate students, Only 57% of surveyed respondents believed that Penn State would be able to hold its administration accountable if an ethics violation occurred. This was a 6% decrease from when the study was last conducted, and this has been a consistent trend since the first survey was undergone in 2013.1

Penn State has a transparency problem, even after the reform of its ethics and compliance departments in light of the Sandusky scandal, Penn State still faces organizational mismanagement that results in the obscuring of important decisions on both a compliance and administrative oversight front. The confidence that lawmakers have in Penn State’s ability to remain an open and compliant organization to all legal mechanisms it is expected to follow has held up funding bills and been the primary force for the denial of state funds that is currently gripping Penn State.

Penn State is not unaware of this crisis, the US Federal Government made sure of this when in 2016 it leveled a record breaking 2.4 million dollar fine upon the university for its failure to properly address the Title IX violations relating to Jerry Sandusky.2 Penn State’s ethics and reporting office has improved post-Sandusky, but concerns around Penn State’s ethics and compliance division still remain unaddressed. In 2020 the University faced another criminal investigation relating to its continued lack of Title IX reporting up until the 2019-2020 school year.

This is not a crisis that can be addressed at a later date, as Penn State has chosen to do for over a decade. Through this administration’s choice to create an ethics department with procedures as obscured from public view as they are, Penn State has chosen an obligation to create robust, transparent, and trustworthy compliance procedures. This is an obligation that Penn State is currently failing.

As shown through the continued lack of governmental trust, both on a State and Federal level, Penn State’s ethics and compliance department still has a long way to go before an equitable and fair student accountability process can be established. This report seeks to provide a proposal for the creation of two University based positions and policies that will help to amend Penn State’s accountability process in an attempt to produce a more effective and transparent Penn State.

Universities, especially those that are publicly funded, maintain a special obligation to its students and the taxpayers of the state of transparency and accountability. Without this implicit agreement of trust, universities will be forced to be held accountable through the usage of legal processes and fines, all of which spend valuable tuition and taxpayer money on failures of administration.

These failures are slowly being purged from Penn State in the post-Sandusky era, but the work is not over yet. In recent years Penn State has been subject to legal intervention that has required more transparency in regards to the sunshine law, a law which requires Penn State’s administrative processes to be made public in return for accepting public funds.

While this added, legally mandated transparency has been helpful, Penn State still has two major failures of transparency. The first is that the reporting system for Penn State misconduct still does not produce favorable outcomes for those who report misconduct, and worse it has consistently produced worse outcomes every year that Penn State’s ethics survey has been conducted. This is a problem both for the accuser and the accused when it comes to allegations of misconduct, as it shows Penn State is unable to come to satisfactory outcomes that incentivize further reports of misconduct to Penn State.

Secondly, the misconduct process is still shrouded in secrecy within Penn State. While a vast majority of students are aware of the existence of reporting processes, the specific processes that Penn State undergoes within its misconduct hearings are not clear, or well understood. This is partially to do with FERPA issues, and the confidentiality rights that students do possess, but the added scrutiny Penn State has faced in the last decade has produced an added layer of security that Penn State still fails to uphold.

This failure of transparency has wide reaching ethical and political ramifications that contribute both to the universities current ability to recruit new students, but also for its ability to continue to serve the community for decades to come. The University has an obligation to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania and the tuition paying students of this university to construct a trustworthy misconduct system. This system must be transparent and understandable both for the ability of students and faculty to regain their confidence in this university that has demonstrated a failure of its ethical responsibilities.

The current administrative process that Penn State follows for reports of misconduct goes as follows. A report is made to the body of Student Conduct and Accountability, then the Senior Director is given the opportunity to pursue alternative resolution strategies. If those strategies are not followed and the university feels it has met its fact finding burden, the accused student then is given the ability to be present in both an initial fact finding meeting, and then the student may be given an action plan that contains the university’s desired resolution process. If that plan is not followed, an administrative conference may be held in which a university fact finder determines whether a preponderance of evidence standard has been met. Throughout this process, the accused is allowed to have one advisor who is copied on any university correspondence.3 Notably, The university will not provide an advisor for a student, so if a student is unable to afford a lawyer who is familiar with the administrative process, the student may be unprepared for the administrative procedures. Additionally, this entire process is highly confidential and the university does not make its fact finding or conduct resolutions public at any time, even in larger aggregated reports like it is required to do with the investigations of university police.

Improvement of Penn State’s administrative hearing process can occur in two ways that can both benefit each other. Firstly, it is critical that Penn State institute students conduct advisors for those that are accused of misconduct. This would be a crucial step in removing barriers that prevent students from interacting with the student conduct process, such as international students or students with communication disabilities who may have difficulties understanding and representing themselves effectively. This is in line with other public universities such as those in California which have recently legally mandated this exact process. 4 Additionally it would allow students to better understand the administrative process and feel as though their desires are actually being effectively represented in the administrative process. Secondly, Penn State must produce a publicly available report which details things like which student conduct outcomes occurred most often, how often secondary outcomes like mediation were pursued, and how severe penalties for specific conduct violations actually were. As it currently operates, students are aware of the code of conduct, but the actual impact of violations remains unknown.

Penn State has an obligation to its students and the public at large to remain accountable, not only for the actions of individual students, but also for the accountability process as a whole. In a post-Sandusky Penn State, the university still maintains some systemic failures within its student conduct system that perpetuate a culture of misconduct. Through a relatively minor restructuring of the student accountability process, Penn State can present a more honest, and realistic presentation of its accountability process. This failure to maintain the standards of transparency that public institutions are held to is a failure that Penn State has a moral duty to correct.

Sources

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March 13

Civic Issue Blog

Magnus Hirschfeld (in glasses) holds hands with his partner, Karl Giese (center).

Anti-trans legislation is the newest fad sweeping legislative sessions across the United States, this concentrated legislative aggression is not foreign to the LGBTQ+ community but the newfound ferocity with which these bills have been published is shocking. According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, since 2021 over 1,440 bills have been filed in their respective state and federal legislatures regarding every trans issue from participation in sports and the military to access to gender affirming care. These bills have destabilized families and communities across the country and their impact is not theoretical. This blog started out as a historical examination of the development of the trans community inside of the United States, but it has evolved into much more as the concerted effort to erase trans people from the US became clear throughout the research process of this blog.

It is important to begin by stating that the people and gender identities that we now know as transgender people have existed across cultures for nearly as long as history itself has existed. Hippocrates, who is widely referred to as one of the founding voices of modern medicine reported of the enarei, or people with the male sex who dressed as women and performed the cultural role of women in 400 BCE, and there are numerous other examples of gender variance throughout history. These include groups such as intersex individuals, who are born with some combination of male and female sex characteristics, and two-spirited individuals who are members of various indigenous tribes across North America who occupied some gender varied space within the tribe. With that being said, the first large body of medical research regarding the experience of gender dysphoria and the transgender community was conducted by Magnus Hirschfeld, a German-Jewish sexologist who opened the first Gender Affirming Care clinic in 1919, that was performing the first gender affirming surgeries and hormone replacement therapies by 1930 (some of the patients are featured in the image that accompanies this blog). He conducted research that documented people who he would refer to as “transvestites” as well as people who existed outside of the gender binary such as gender-fluid and nonbinary people. This work was vital and allowed many people to live a life that more suited their desired gender presentation for the first time ever. His work and study resulted in the largest library and collection of medical research that related to the care of trans people in the world with over 20,000 books. Those who are familiar with German history around the 1930’s may not be surprised by the fate that befell the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. In Adolf Hitler’s first act as Chancellor of Germany he passed a law that resulted in the burning of the Institut, and in that fire, large amounts of vital information regarding the care of transgender people was lost for decades. It is vital to point out that the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was used heavily by Adolf Hitler as a political tool to reinforce the idea that German men were becoming weak, and to instill a national fervor that the Natzi political party was the solution to this “weakness”.

That history is the context that is needed for the second half of this essay, for fascism and transphobia are not only related, but they nearly always occur together. Modern far right political movements are using the tool of transphobia as an excuse to pass extreme legislation that strengthens the administrative power of the state. This is all done under the guise of “protecting America ” and is portrayed as a way to get revenge for the ailing communities of rural America that have become impoverished by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and increasing economic inequalities. As former Secretary of Labor Rober Reich points out, “Fascist politics distorts and expands this male anxiety into fear that one’s family is under existential threat from LGBTQ+ people who reject the family’s traditional structure and traditions.” This form of political targeting is specifically used as a way to crack down on the existence of the recent gains that have come from LGBTQ+ advocacy in the last 25 years. Through which, the LGBTQ community has found itself in a space where the hopeful optimism of some that there may be space in America for tolerant or progressive attitudes towards queer identities has left the once strong Queer rights movement weakened in public sentiment specifically related to trans issues. The examples of lawmakers proposing transphobic bills specifically targeted at those who are most vulnerable to transphobic arguments, such as the cases of trans women in sports or trans children attempting to transition before the age of 18, are plentiful and it is visible that that is not where the political forces behind these bill intend to stop.

In leaked messages from a large email thread, constituting over 3,000 total messages, the true depths to which far right voices have organized specifically in opposition to trans voices is highly visible. As Elisa Rae Shupe, a former detransitioned activist who has since disavowed her old ways puts it “Religious-right rhetoric about wanting to help children with gender dysphoria is just a front for what they do behind the scenes,It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can.” These messages were leaked through a collaboration with trans activist Maia Crimew and news organization Mother Jones, who published the emails in full in an attempt to raise awareness of the ongoing plan to further criminalize trans life and existence within the US. The items they point to as the most pressing to draft legislation against include things like childhood healthcare and involvement with athletics, both things that have been shown to significantly reduce trans people’s chances of suicide or depression. As depressing as these topics are, they are not a done deal yet, through effective political organization and effective counter demonstration tactics, the impact upon trans people can be reversed in time.

Works Cited

Jones, Jeffrey M. “More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation.” Gallup.Com, Gallup, 7 Feb. 2024, news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx.

Pauly, Madison. Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws across the Country, Mother Jones, 8 Mar. 2023, www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/.

Schillace, Brandy. “The Forgotten History of the World’s First Trans Clinic.” Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/.

“Two-Spirit: Health Resources.” Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health, Indian Health Services, www.ihs.gov/lgbt/health/twospirit/#:~:text=Traditionally%2C%20Native%20American%20two%2Dspirit,status%20as%20two%2Dspirit%20people. Accessed 13 Mar. 2024.

What’s Really behind Republican’s Mounting Transphobia?, Robert Reich, 27 Apr. 2023, robertreich.substack.com/p/whats-really-behind-republicans-mounting.

“Tracking the Rise of Anti-Trans Bills in the U.S.” Trans Legislation, translegislation.com/learn. Accessed 13 Mar. 2024.

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