Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Blurred Lines
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/21/1973
WEBSITE: http://www.vanessagrigoriadis.com/
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017117080
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017117080
HEADING: Grigoriadis, Vanessa
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100 1_ |a Grigoriadis, Vanessa
370 __ |f New York (N.Y.) |2 naf
373 __ |a Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) |2 naf
374 __ |a Journalists |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Blurred lines: rethinking sex, power & consent on campus, 2017 : |b title page (Vanessa Grigoriadis) ; jacket flap (contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, and a National Magazine Award winner)
670 __ |a Wikipedia entry for Vanessa Grigoriadis, viewed September 6, 2017 : |b (she grew up in New York city, graduated from Wesleyan University, and won a National Magazine Award in 2007) |u https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Grigoriadis
PERSONAL
Born September 21, 1973.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University graduate; also attended Harvard University for one year.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalists and writer. New York magazine, New York, NY, began as an editorial assistant and became a contributing editor; also was a writer on the Style desk at the New York Times, 2003.
AWARDS:National Magazine Award, 2007, for a profile of fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes, Charta, 2003; Best American Magazine Writing 2007, Columbia University Press, 2007; Best American Magazine Writing 2007, Columbia University Press, 2008; Seventeen Real Girls, Real-Life Stories: True Crime, Hearst, 2007; New York Stories, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008; and Best Music Writing 2009, Da Capo Press, 2009. Contributor to periodicals, including New York magazine, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair.
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis grew up in New York City and played classical violin and danced when she was a youth. Since graduating from college she has been a generalist writer working for and contributing to several periodicals. In her first book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, Grigoriadis provides an inside look at the controversy surrounding sex on U.S. college campuses, from entrenched sexism and sexual assault to a growing willingness for women to own their own sexuality. The book’s origins date back to a 2014 cover story Grigoriadis wrote about Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student who became known as the Mattress Girl after she conducted a performance work for her senior thesis. The work involved Sulkowicz and some of her female classmates carrying a dorm-room-like mattress around campus, saying they would continue to do so until a student that Sulkowicz alleged raped her in their dorm room two years earlier was expelled from or left the university.
The performance Sulkowicz and her friends gained both accolades and some criticism, especially after the student was found not responsible following a university inquiry, which Sulkowicz and others criticized. The case was somewhat complicated because Sulkowicz acknowledge that the two had consensual intercourse but that the male student then forced her to have anal intercourse without her consent. “I was inspired by Sulkowicz and her peers, but in these women’s impressive march into the nation’s consciousness, they’ve left questions in their wake,” Grigordiadis writes in the introduction to Blurred Lines. Grigordiadis goes on to note that not only did Sulkowicz’s tactics raise questions but that Grigordiadis also began to think of other issues, from what kinds of students are assaulted to what exactly constitutes sexual assault to how to gain further knowledge about students who engage in sexual assaults and how to use this information to guide future efforts to fight the problem.
In Blurred Lines, Grigordiadis writes about how attitudes are changing concerning consent on college campuses in the United States. To write the book and closely examine these changing attitudes, Grigordiadis traveled to colleges throughout the United States and taking part in social activities. She interviewed more than 100 students, some of who have been accusers and others who have been accused of sexual misconduct. She also talks with administrators, parents, and researchers to examine how the common views and rules of sex and power are changing. Grigordiadis “paints a dismal picture of college social life, where students feel pressured to hook up, where boys are confused about what constitutes consent, and where girls … acquiesce to sex that they don’t really want,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
Grigordiadis provides insight into the conflicting data concerning sexual assaults on campus and demystifies the data in the process. She delves into what makes a sexual encounter sexual assault and makes her case that not all encounters classified as sexual assaults are the same. Grigordiadis also discusses how campuses can be made safer by the schools, students, and the students’ parents. In the process, Grigordiadis writes about how modern life has impacted the entire issues of sexual assault. For example, she examines the profound effects of social media and the dangers involved concerning increasing the risk for sexual assaults. In essence, Grigordiadis states that social media allows people to think they know other people better than they really do, which could lead them to letting down their guard down and into potentially dangerous situations. Blurred Lines includes recommendations for further reading and research as well as notes and an index. “The breadth of her research… and her exploration of toxic gender roles and stereotypes … are reason enough to pick up this book,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Grigoriadis, Vanessa, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Commentary, December, 2017, K.C. Johnson, “Whitewashing Campus Tribunals,” review of Blurred Lines, p. 41.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Blurred Lines.
Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2017, review of Blurred Lines, p. 64.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (November 17, 2017), Eric Nelson, “The Instinct to Protect Each Other: An Interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis.”
Vanessa Grigoriadis Website, http://www.vanessagrigoriadis.com (March 27, 2018).
Vanessa Maia Grigoriadis is an American journalist.
Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Career
3 Blurred Lines
4 Awards and honors
5 Bibliography
5.1 Books
5.2 Essays and Reportage
6 References
7 External links
Background[edit]
Grigoriadis is of Greek descent and grew up in New York City. When she was younger she played classical violin and danced. Grigoriadis graduated from Wesleyan University. She also spent a year studying the sociology of religion at Harvard University.
Career[edit]
Grigoriadis is a generalist writer for The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. Her feature Power Girls reportedly inspired the MTV reality series PoweR Girls.[1] Her work does not cover one specific topic. She has been working on and off for the New York magazine since she graduated from college. Here, she began working as an editorial assistant and eventually worked her way up to becoming a contributing editor at the age of 25. In 2003, she was a writer on the Style desk at the New York Times.[2]
Blurred Lines[edit]
In 2014, Grigoriadis wrote a cover story on Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student known as Mattress Girl. That story grew into Grigordiadis's first book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. Published in September 2017, the book is an exploration of the changing attitudes toward consent on college campuses across the United States. Female students have been using fresh, smart methods to fight entrenched sexism and sexual assault even as they celebrate their own sexuality as never before, and many “woke” male students are more sensitive to women’s concerns than previous generations ever were, while other men perpetuate the most cruel misogyny. Grigoriadis investigates these complexities in the book by traveling to campuses, embedding in their social whirl, and talking candidly with dozens of students, administrators, parents, and researchers, ultimately chronicling how long-standing rules of sex and power are being rewritten from scratch.
Awards and honors[edit]
Grigoriadis received the National Magazine Award in 2007 in profile writing for a profile of Karl Lagerfeld.[3] She was nominated in 2008 for feature writing, a piece titled Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass.[4] She was also nominated for a Mirror Award for a profile of Arianna Huffington.
B O O K / / A B O U T / / S E L E C T I O N S / / F E A T U R E A R C H I V E
Hi, thanks for visiting my site. I recently published my first book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. The book is a sweeping epic drawing on reporting with students, parents, and university administrators from across the country.
I'm also what used to be called a "magazine feature writer," but now that we live in the digital age, let's settle on "long-form writer." I write long-form articles on pop culture, youth movements, and various topics requiring investigatory tools. Some of my articles are weighty, and some not at all.
Right now, I'm a contributing editor at The New York Times magazine and Vanity Fair. I've won a National Magazine Award, the magazine equivalent of a Pulitzer, in profile writing. "Gawker and the Rise of the Creative Underclass," a New York magazine cover story, was a finalist for the feature writing award. A profile of Arianna Huffington was also nominated for a Mirror Award.
I am in awe of the service performed by the HER Foundation, which helps women with hyperemesis gravidarum, and Bone Cancer Research Trust U.K., working to solve rare cancers across the pond.
My writing has also been published in these books as well as mentioned in these articles.
You can reach me at vanessagri [at] mac.com, and you can sign up for a newsletter with recent stories and updates here.
For speaking engagements, please contact Charles Yao.
Cyao@thelavinagency.com
For publicity inquires about Blurred Lines, please contact Taryn Roeder
at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
taryn.roeder@hmhco.com 617.351.3818
The Instinct to Protect Each Other: An Interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis
Eric Nelson interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis
“AH, WELL you’ll be jaded before long,” Vanessa Grigoriadis tells me when I admitted my novice status as an interviewer during our conversation over Gchat. It is evening at the beginning of October as we sit down at our respectful computers on both sides of the country to discuss her debut book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus, published recently by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The genesis of the work, which tackles the issue of sexual assault and unwanted sexual touch, came from a 2014 New York magazine cover story on Emma Sulkowicz, the rape victim who became known to many as the “Mattress Girl” after carrying a 50-pound mattress on the campus of Columbia University as a response to the administration’s gross mishandling of her sexual assault complaint, in which a consensual sexual encounter between her and fellow student Paul Nungesser turned nonconsensual, the latter, according to Sulkowicz, choking, slapping, and anally raping her. Grigoriadis, a contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, performs the labor-intensive task of analyzing statistics, as well as relating anecdotal evidence produced from personally embedding herself in colleges such as her alma mater Wesleyan and Syracuse University, interviewing school administrators, victims, activists, and the accused. In the questions that follow, I asked her about reeducation of men found guilty of sexual misconduct, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and confidence in writing nonfiction.
¤
ERIC NELSON: We assume that the rollbacks of Obama-era Title IX guidelines and policy under Betsy DeVos will discourage victims from speaking up and bringing their cases to school courts. Can you foresee any further mobilizing of campus activists as a result of these rollbacks and the resulting diminishment of what Peter F. Lake describes as “the narrative pressures” regarding sexual assault and unwanted sexual touch?
VANESSA GRIGORIADIS: The activists are mobilizing on campus. Whether they will generate a ton of media attention for their mobilization remains to be seen.
In terms of “narrative pressures,” those are considerable. Colleges are going to continue to be pressured by a nexus of activist/progressive students, parents, administrators whose paychecks are tied to Title IX, general counsels wary of litigation, communications departments wary of bad PR over sexual assault claims, and college presidents who are responsible for answering for this whole mess.
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that the Department of Education has formally rescinded the Dear Colleague Letter guidelines and issued “interim guidance” while the policy goes through a “notice-and-comment period.” What does this mean exactly?
Yeah, what does it mean exactly?
On the face of it, it seems that colleges should now follow DeVos’s lead and her new “interim guidance.” In reality they probably won’t, or at least most of them won’t. ED’s playbook here may be less important than that “narrative pressure.”
But what DeVos wants is for colleges to blow off the Obama-era rules about sexual assault and follow her lead, which amounts to a lower punishment for boys. This is good for some boys who are innocent; we know there have been problems with Obama’s system. But it’s not great for victims who deserve justice.
“Interim guidance” doesn’t seem to give much clarity as to how long the interim will be.
Well, the notion is that a “notice and comment” period would follow that interim guidance. And then when notice and comment is done, DeVos wouldn’t have only “guidance” around sexual assault. She would have regulations. It is actually a pretty big threat. But most experts I’ve talked to think there will be substantial litigation against these new rules anyway. This is going to be a battle and it’s only starting now.
In the past year, the governors of both California and Virginia have signed into law bills that would mandate sexual consent education as part of high school curriculum. Could we in our lifetime expect the remaining 48 states follow suit?
Definitely. I don’t think it will even take that long. All the signs point to consent education in middle or high school as an important part of solving the sexual assault conundrum. Most of this kind of forward-thinking stuff starts in California, and it has this time too.
Could this be extended to private education as well without being challenged by religious institutions in the courts, or will it be up to individual private schools themselves?
I’m not sure about that. But I don’t think religious institutions are embracing this at this time, though they should be, because these lessons are about morality, not “sex.”
For male students found culpable of what you refer to as “murky” sexual misconduct by school courts, you proposed reeducation instead of immediate expulsion, in part because many of them join the “alt-right chorus” on the internet. What would that reeducation entail?
I’m not talking about book reports or stupid stuff they’ve been “punished” with in the past. Suspension instead of expulsion. Or many hours of education about ethics, sexual assault, and prevention.
I do believe we can reeducate some of these boys, just the way most people who study the prison system believe that rehabilitation is possible. We can’t think of them as sexual predators who need to be cast out of society.
A portion of the book discusses the conducting of and analysis of surveys, such as the one-in-five statistic released from a study designed by Christopher Krebs for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in January of last year. BJS director Lawrence Greenfield was removed by the Bush administration over his refusal to alter results of a report on racial profiling of drivers. Could we see similar interference from the Trump administration?
The Trump White House has already taken down a page with campus sexual assault stats, if that’s any indication.
The one-in-five stats are a bit problematic, it’s true. But we don’t need to erase them; we need to understand them. I don’t have much else to say on that because it’s not clear what will happen yet.
You agree with university sexual-misconduct advisor Brett A. Sokolow and Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law, that the abolition of the fraternity system on campuses “probably won’t work,” but that co-ed houses are a step in the right direction.
Definitely. Part of my book runs through the wacky events that led to the closure of Wesleyan’s fraternities. But barely any schools in the NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference) have frats today; it wasn’t a huge surprise that Wesleyan wanted to get rid of them. And Harvard is likely to continue taking a stand against single-sex frats and finals clubs. But most colleges aren’t in as plum a position. Most universities need to attract students, not turn them away. And a Greek party scene is attractive to potential students. It’s part of what 18-year-olds want in college.
The Greek system is up by 50 percent over the past decade while radicalism on campus is also growing. It’s a pretty stunning turn of events. The popularity doesn’t seem to be abating. Young millennials like to be in constant contact with each other.
At the same time, we know that the cemented gender norms of the Greek system have a ton to do with sexual assault. So to all of the college presidents worrying about what to do about the standard of proof in their campus courts now that DeVos is telling them they should follow new rules, I’d say: actually concentrate on the problem on your campuses. And the problem is unsupervised drinking in frats and the way those nights end up with sloppy sex, violating sex, or predatory sex.
I’m curious about how you understand your work as writing: do you think your self-confidence is based on knowing your subject, for instance, or is it based on your sense of having developed the necessary writing tools?
I’m pretty obsessive, not always in a good way.
Years of writing have made me realize that if you don’t believe what you’re saying, no one else will either. I think that’s where the self-confidence comes from. But I am also an arguer and an argument-maker, someone who truly enjoys unspooling a point of view and then having someone come at me with another argument. I don’t mind changing my mind when I am wrong. That’s the way I am in real life and on the page.
In The New York Times Vows section (after your wedding in 2007) you described yourself as “one of the most analytical people on the face of the planet. I overanalyze everything.” Do you still find this to be true and has it ever proven to be a hindrance in your work as a journalist?
Ha! I haven’t thought about that for a long time. I do drive everyone around me crazy, that much is true. But I didn’t have kids then. Now I have two kids and I don’t have as much time to obsess over tiny issues. Still, part of the reason this book was such a great fit for me, in terms of topic, is that this topic lends itself to over-analysis.
In the book you discuss the negative effects of social media on students. On the flip side, hasn’t social media also increased activism on campus, getting more students involved beyond simply writing a tweet or a status?
Yup. Social media has had a profound effect on all types of socializing. It’s not only changed the way college kids hook up. It’s also encouraged all kinds of socially responsible activism. One student’s activism can now spread and metastasize to not only students at her own university, but also other campuses. Ideas about victimhood and the convention that victims should stand down and not cause too much trouble have been completely upended by social media. Here, victims are embraced for their bravery. (Of course, others call them liars; the trolls are particularly vicious toward rape victims.)
Did you find your own values changed after completing the book?
Yes. Before I started embedding on campuses, I thought about college kids the way a lot of Gen X-ers do. I thought that they were probably snowflakes and grabbing the victim mantle too quickly. I thought they were overentitled and underdeveloped. But meeting dozens of kids changed my mind.
It reminded me that kids are much more idealistic than adults, and that this is a good thing. The desire for sexual parity in the bedroom is one that can only be won by kids who are interested in remaking the world as a kinder, better place. If they use faulty rhetoric sometimes, okay. Let’s fault them for that. But their instinct to protect each other and to raise the bar on the definition of sexual assault is a good one.
I cared about these kids. I liked them. I wanted them to succeed.
¤
Eric Nelson is a fiction writer and cultural critic living in Queens, New York.
quotes from introduction xviii
Print Marked Items
Whitewashing Campus Tribunals
K.C. Johnson
Commentary.
144.5 (Dec. 2017): p41+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus
BY VANESSA GRIGORIADIS
Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 368 pages
VANESSA Grigoriadis's new book on the campus sex crisis, Blurred Lines, features some startling
assertions. Grigoriadis observes that accusers' exaggerating claims probably "happens more often among
students than in the larger culture"--even though reaching this conclusion felt like "a betrayal of
womankind" for her. The college adjudication system that handles these claims is "flawed," she writes,
because "the institutions lack the powers that a court has to gather evidence, subpoena witnesses, and so
forth."
And after reading a score of legal complaints from accused students, Grigoriadis concludes that the students'
"position that they're innocent--if not by the letter of university codes, then by the spirit--is strong." No
wonder many of the male students she interviewed were possessed of an "intense and primal" fear of "being
falsely accused." Grigoriadis further asserts that activist groups such as Know Your IX or End Rape on
Campus adopted a strategy of "overstating the case and conflating lesser slights with forcible rapes."
College administrators, Grigoriadis reports, spoke to her of "students out there who are claiming assault
when they haven't been assaulted and then claiming trauma from the [nonexistent] assault."
These observations challenge the foundations of the Obama-era campus sexual-assault policy, which was
indifferent both to due-process concerns and the possibility that not all accusers were actually survivors of
sexual assault. Through "guidance" documents, since rescinded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos,
Obama officials reinterpreted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to force colleges to adopt
procedures for campus tribunals that dramatically increased the chances of guilty findings. This material is
all the more arresting coming from an author who clearly sympathizes with the campus activists. Grigoriadis
opens her book with a flattering portrayal of Columbia "mattress girl" Emma Sulkowicz, who claimed that a
fellow student raped her and about whom Grigoriadis already had written an article she herself describes as
"sympathetic." She labels as "heroines" the accusers'-rights leaders who exaggerated claims. And she
enthusiastically backs the standard of "affirmative consent"--even though, by flipping the burden of proof to
the accused student, this novel notion "effectively render[s] students guilty until proven innocent," as Robert
Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has written.
The question raised by a reading of Blurred Lines is whether Grigoriadis's sympathies will win out over her
findings. Distressingly, they do. Grigoriadis follows her ideological preferences and declines to entertain the
logical conclusions of some of her more provocative discoveries. Instead, she retreats to a zealous belief that
universities "are equipped to handle assaults among students, and they're getting better at it all the time."
Showing the extent to which defenders of the Title IX status quo have abandoned long-held legal principles,
Grigoriadis frames the central question: "Should we prioritize fair punishment of the one in a thousand
[students who allegedly get charged] over the need for justice of the one in five or ten?" She appears
unwilling to acknowledge that fair procedures are vital to achieve "justice" for both sides--and for
universities as well.
While Grigoriadis mostly maintains a neutral tone, the mask occasionally slips. She labels Betsy DeVos--
who favors same-sex marriage--as the "most important religious-right supporter in America." She gushes
about the trauma theories of Michigan State psychology professor Rebecca Campbell, whose ideas were
recently compared to "junk science" in an Atlantic expose by Emily Yoffe. And she describes as "a more
typical campus predator" Brock Turner, a former Stanford student who sexually assaulted a woman in
public, in front of witnesses, and could fully defend himself at trial. Scarcely a handful of campus sexualassault
allegations have featured all three of these characteristics.
Grigoriadis generally looks the other way when her findings might cast doubt on the statistics that upheld
the Obama administration's guilt-tilting policies. She concedes that "there are few, if any, representative
national numbers about college sexual assault," and she does interview a critic of the much-discussed claim
that 20 percent of the nation's roughly 10 million female undergraduates will be sexually assaulted while in
school. Yet 137 pages later--without acknowledging these earlier points--she asserts that "something along
the lines of one in five girls will be victimized over the course of college." Does this figure include the
millions of part-time students? Students at nonresidential institutions? Those enrolled in distance-learning
programs? Grigoriadis doesn't say.
She also downplays claims of innocence by noting that "repeated studies have demonstrated that just 2 to 8
percent of all accusations are false." She doesn't cite any of the studies, which define falsity very tightly; the
author of one even declined to deem "false" the allegations in the 2006-7 Duke lacrosse case (which
Grigoriadis believes occurred in the "early 2000s"). Nor does she explore whether the correct number of
not-guilty findings is higher, perhaps substantially so, than the number of "false" claims, since most cases in
these studies are inconclusive or unfounded, rather than clearly false or true.
When all else fails, Grigoriadis returns to her rote faith that the current campus Title IX system is working
well. If the students of Know Your IX are her heroines, her hero is Brett Sokolow, who helms several
companies that provide training, adjudication, and legal advice to colleges on Title IX matters. Sokolow,
who termed the Obama administration's Dear Colleague letter "one of the most important moments of my
professional life," once dismissed FIRE as "sticking up for penises everywhere." Neither of those quotes,
which might raise questions about his partiality, appears in the book.
For a book eager to defend the effectiveness of campus Title IX investigations, Grigoriadis spends
remarkably little time examining actual campus adjudications. She covers a few highly atypical cases
involving star football players, where schools seemed eager to cover up any and all offenses for financial
reasons. A few more, including cases at Auburn, Occidental, and North Dakota, involved what were at best
dubious allegations other reporters have persuasively argued the schools mishandled. Perhaps the most
factually ambiguous case Grigoriadis examines came from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
Nothing in her recounting of it inspires confidence in her assertions about the validity of university
disciplinary procedures.
In 2014, UTC student Molly Morris claimed that a fellow student, Corey Mock, sexually assaulted her after
a party where both students had been drinking. Grigoriadis spends several hundred words laying out the
events and sympathetically portraying Morris, whom she interviewed. (Grigoriadis does not indicate
whether she sought to interview Mock.) She ends the section with a brief description of UTC's adjudication:
"It doesn't seem like UTC could figure this out, so they eventually reminded both parties of the school's
affirmative-consent standard and expelled Mock for violating it. But on appeal, a Tennessee court
overturned the decision in a complex reading of burdens. The judge wasn't so sure affirmative consent was
lawful, and she noted that Morris didn't claim that she'd said no. UTC readmitted Mock."
Grigoriadis's discussion of the case's adjudication is badly incomplete. The book recounts Morris's claim
that she was drugged but doesn't mention that she declined to provide the results of a drug test to UTC.
Grigoriadis likewise ignores how the initial UTC adjudicator, Joanie Sompayrac, issued 49 findings of fact
in determining that Mock was not guilty. (That decision was reversed after the university's chancellor
intervened at Morris's request, but the findings of fact remained.) The chancellor then denied Mock's appeal
by claiming Morris had been intoxicated--even though Sompayrac had found that Morris's "testimony did
not convince the hearing officer she was intoxicated." After he was expelled, Mock didn't "appeal," as
Grigoriadis claims-he filed a lawsuit, which cost his family more than $40,000 in legal fees. And the judge's
ultimate decision was unequivocal: She held that the chancellor had failed to adhere to his own institution's
disciplinary code by "erroneously shift[ing] the burden [of proof] onto Mr. Mock."
Mock was not a particularly sympathetic figure. But UTC's handling of his case helps demonstrate why the
current campus system has so often gone astray. The fact that Vanessa Grigoriadis describes it so poorly is
one of the many reasons Blurred Lines is such a disappointment.
Reviewed by KC JOHNSON
KC JOHNSON is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Johnson, K.C. "Whitewashing Campus Tribunals." Commentary, Dec. 2017, p. 41+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519935819/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6a6fbe0c.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519935819
Grigoriadis, Vanessa: BLURRED LINES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Grigoriadis, Vanessa BLURRED LINES Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction)
$28.00 9, 5 ISBN: 978-0-544-70255-4
An award-winning journalist reports from the front lines of the sexual assault controversy.Entering the
complex, contentious conversation about sexual assault on college campuses, New York Times Magazine
and Vanity Fair contributing editor Grigoriadis offers an extensively researched investigation based on
dozens of case reports and interviews with 120 students (accusers, accused, and activists) from 20
universities and 80 administrators and experts. What has emerged from her three years of research, though,
are more questions than satisfying answers: what constitutes sexual assault? How prevalent is the problem?
How should colleges address assault charges? How can assaults be prevented? Types of college assault, she
found, occur in four main categories: penetration ("intercourse, oral sex, and fingering"); "incapacitated
rape," meaning "sex that happens when the victim is unconscious"; any aggressive act, such as groping; and
"the vast middle ground" of sex without consent. Incapacitated rape, the author reveals, is the most common
type, resulting from a culture of heavy drinking at most residential colleges. The most significant risk factors
for assault are "free-flowing alcohol and misogyny," both of which are hallmarks of fraternities. "If you
want to maintain your status as a striving middle-to-upper-middle-class member of society," Grigoriadis
asserts, "having been part of the Greek system in college is a sure way to do it." She paints a dismal picture
of college social life, where students feel pressured to hook up, where boys are confused about what
constitutes consent, and where girls--often falling-down drunk--acquiesce to sex that they don't really want.
As a society, writes the author, we're afraid "to tell girls that they too bear responsibility for their sexual
behavior and safety." In an appendix, she offers common-sense advice for students and parents: "watch out
for guys who exhibit toxic masculinity"; watch what you drink; "learn a few self-defense tricks"; and
carefully read the sexual-misconduct section of the college handbook. This is a vital, timely issue, and the
author's research is impressively in-depth, but an overabundance of anecdotes and statistics offers little
clarity on the issue.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Grigoriadis, Vanessa: BLURRED LINES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572682/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=145185f3.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572682
Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power,
and Consent on Campus
Publishers Weekly.
264.32 (Aug. 7, 2017): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus
Vanessa Grigoriadis. HMH/Dolan, $28 (368) ISBN 978-0-544-70255-4
National Magazine Award-winning journalist Grigoriadis explores sexual assault, rape culture, and sexual
politics at American universities. She uses the story of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student
who carried her mattress around campus after the administration failed to expel her alleged rapist, as a
launching pad to define consent and assault, which Grigoriadis argues are murky concepts. Her focus on
acquaintance rape rather than stranger rape highlights campus cultural issues such as alcohol and drug use
and institutions such as fraternities and sororities that contribute to increased rates of sexual violence. In
researching the book, she interviewed more than 200 students at 200 universities, speaking with young
women, campus activists, and victims, as well as young men who deny the accusations of rape and assault
made against them, and the young men's families. Grigoriadis adds context to the often-polarizing topics
with numerous first-person accounts. Her view that "we, as a society, are terrified to look at boys as boys
rather than men and give them a break as such" seems to make excuses for criminal behavior. However, the
breadth of her research, including her discussion of how university administrators deal with rape allegations
and her exploration of toxic gender roles and stereotypes, are reason enough to pick up this book. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 64.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500340386/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=456077db. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500340386