The Cornell rape story -- which is starting to look much more complicated as new information comes out -- is not a "Duke Lacrosse" incident where an accuser has fabricated an incident. Rather, it's a "campus rape," or a "sexual misconduct" -- a gross and squalid sexual incident the experience of which the woman considers to be nonconsensual, at least in hindsight, but which in the eyes of the law, based on a third-party assessment of the facts as she alleges them was a consensual sex act. However, there are numerous instances where men have been punished with social shunning, reputational destruction, job loss, university disciplinary penalties or other extra-legal sanctions for alleged acts that did not meet legal definitions of crimes or were not supported by sufficient evidence to sustain criminal prosecutions. "Rape" is a concept with many definitions. Traditionally, it was defined as "sex with an unwilling woman, obtained by force, overwhelming her resistance." Since the 1970s, the laws surrounding this have changed. The first big reform was the requirement of resistance: You don't have to resist to be a victim of robbery or battery, why is the victim's resistance an element of sex crimes? So, the requirement that the woman be resisting was removed. But when the woman is not resisting and does not have to be violently overwhelmed, what does it mean to obtain the sex by force? Clearly, whatever achieves sex with an unwilling woman is sufficient force to satisfy the element. So we're left today with "Sex with an unwilling person" or "sex without consent." But now, how do you define consent? How does a third party examining disputed facts after an incident determine its presence or absence? What if there was consent for one act but not for another? What if it was given at one point but revoked later? Is mere acquiescence consent, or must consent be enthusiastic? What if there is a spoken verbal agreement to participate in the act but the woman was intoxicated? Several of these questions are implicated in this case. According to a statement the woman made, she drank ten drinks and then went to the fraternity house, likely with the intention of having sex with one of the accused men. When she got there, the man offered her ketamine, which she voluntarily ingested. He then asked her if his friend could also have sex with her. She -- in a state of intoxication -- verbally consented to the three-way and engaged in it. While this was going on, a third man came into the room and asked if he could join in. According to her statement, the woman refused because she believed that having sex with three men would require her to have anal sex. The first man, who was heavily intoxicated, as all the participants were, could not maintain an erection and eventually lost consciousness, and at this point, the third man joined in. At some point, the second man began dry heaving because he was so intoxicated. According to her statement, a total of seven men came into the room and she makes various allegations about their conduct. She says several of them snorted lines of ketamine off of her body. A couple of weeks after the incident, the woman went to the campus police and reported it as a rape. During an interview with detectives, she gave a sworn statement six single-spaced pages long detailing the incident. The police sent the statement to the local prosecutor who determined that based on New York state law, the allegations the woman made did not constitute a crime. In New York, it is a crime to have sex with a person who is unconscious or so impaired as to be unable to speak or express consent or refusal, and it is also a crime to give someone drugs without their knowledge in order to obtain sex from them. In this case, the woman voluntarily consumed the drugs and alcohol, which does not invalidate her verbal consent to the sex acts she participated in. The prosecutor sent his finding back to the police and told them that the complainant was welcome to speak with him further if she had any questions. He says she never contacted him. The woman's statement and the Cornell University police investigation also formed the basis of the university disciplinary proceedings that arose out of these events. Cornell says it found some of the men responsible for wrongdoing under university disciplinary policies -- which have different elements and definitions than New York state criminal law -- and that the men were punished. The woman has now filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell, the men and other defendants, alleging facts that differ substantially from the sworn statement she gave to the police two weeks after the incident. The prosecutor has agreed to reopen the investigation and present the facts to a grand jury, but in light of the fact that the woman's story has changed materially from her original sworn statement, it will be a very difficult case to prosecute. Many people have personal ideas or definitions of what rape is that may differ from the offense that is codified in the law. A lot of people believe that if several men have sex with a woman that is intoxicated on alcohol and ketamine, that is unquestionably rape, without regard to her acknowledged verbal agreement to the sex act or her active participation in it; they believe someone who is so impaired cannot meaningfully consent. That is not what the law says in New York. As such, prosecutors in New York, disciplinary tribunals at Cornell University, and pundits on social media may reach different conclusions about whether this is rape or not. This was, by all accounts a squalid, disgusting and shameful event. The question is whether this is something that was done to this woman or whether it is something she was a willing participant in.

The issue is not teacher quality. Schools like Stuyvesant don’t actually have extraordinary teachers and most failing schools don’t have particularly bad ones. The reason bad schools are bad is because of the kids who attend them and because of the educational philosophies they are organized around. Students do best in a cohort of other students whose abilities and level of preparedness match their own. Classes move faster and cover more material when all the students are at the same level of preparedness. What’s more, in a mixed ability classroom, the lowest performing students will always get the most time and attention from the teacher, because teachers may be considered accountable for the failure of low performers, but there is no teacher incentive to push students who are at or ahead of grade level forward. In a school that deals with students with serious problems, where few students are at grade level and a third or more are chronically absent, the students who show up, behave themselves and perform within a range deemed adequate on standardized tests are given A’s and told they are doing well. In fact, they are far behind their peers at schools that don’t have these problems and fall further behind as they languish in classrooms where teachers are trying to triage all these problems. Progressive school districts are run by people with education degrees who have been trained to believe that all children are equally capable and can perform equally, so the goal of these schools is to take students with a range of abilities and bring them to parity. They believe chronically absent students do not come to school because the school is failing them, so they believe that to be a good school, they must figure out how to reach and engage those students. They believe behavior problems can be rectified with the right interventions. I cannot emphasize enough that while the schools are focused on all this dumb shit, the students who actually show up and want to learn are languishing. In school systems where everyone is white, they always do tracking by ability, and in school systems where nobody is white, they always do differentiated classrooms because they believe tracking is a fig leaf justification for segregation, even though the schools are segregated because the whites all pulled their kids out when the schools eliminated tracking. Nikole Hannah-Jones believes that all black people have to rise together. But the kids in the neighborhood school are going to spend their whole lives in the project they grew up in unless they go to prison. The only way a kid in that school gets to someplace better is to leave the rest of them behind, and the only way to give a kid in that school opportunity is to create a way for them to do that.

One really important problem with Nikole Hannah-Jones's approach to and values about education are right there in her headline: She is "fighting for every black child." But there are no white parents who make their education decisions within a framework of "fighting for every white child" or Asian parents who are "fighting for every Asian child." Rather, members of these groups understand their kids as competing with other white or Asian children for scarce opportunities for social advancement. Whites and Asians are competing for those scarce opportunities with whites and Asians from all over the country, so no matter how well their kid may be performing relative to the local cohort, they always need to push harder, move faster and do and be more. In a setting where everyone is white and there are no race politics implicated, white people have absolutely no compunction about pulling the highest performers out of a class and putting them on a gifted track, and pulling the low performers out of the class and putting them on a special education track, and getting the discipline problems out of the classroom entirely. And then the special ed parents advocate for special ed, and the gifted parents advocate for gifted funding, because everybody is advocating for the resources they think their kid needs to compete against all the other kids. Hannah-Jones believes whites and Asians favor academic tracking and sorting through standardized testing and selective admissions primarily as a ploy to separate their groups from blacks and Latinos, because she perceives all of politics as being about groups that practice internal solidarity lobbying for collective benefits over other groups. She despises people who are not like her and limits her contact with them to the point that she does not understand them and has no theory of mind for them. She simply assumes they are a mirror of herself and therefore she assumes white people hate black people the way she hates white people. She thinks all the sorting of children whites and Asians do is actually a shell game that is just meant to keep people like her out. But the truth is, people like her aren't even part of the consideration, because kids like hers are not part of the competition. This has historically worked out fine for children like her daughter, because affirmative action has historically meant kids like hers have seats reserved and don't have to outperform whites and Asians for a spot. As long as her kid was doing well among her cohort, she could go to any college she wanted. That is now less true since SFFA. Najya perceived that the schools that weren't like hers were better than her school, and Nikole tries to blame that disparity on resources or on privilege or on systemic racism. But the truth is, it's about values and it's about the perception of school as a competition that brings about better outcomes. Nikole Hannah-Jones has a values system built around resentment and complacency. She doesn't think in terms of trying to beat an Asian kid on a math test, instead she dismisses the test as an inaccurate instrument steeped in racist assumptions. But then it turned out her kid really couldn't do math. And, like her daughter, she didn't learn anything.