Some people are ecstatic at the news. Some people are furious. It'll hit the national news cycle in about twelve hours.

Basically, it's another Friday at Harvard.

Every lunchtime conversation is about the same topic, in hushed tones. Friends measure their words, not quite sure whether what they're about to say will cause offense to their closest friends. One can't sit in the dining hall without overhearing tense, but hushed, conversations about it. "How about that President Faust?" is acceptable as a casual greeting between friends.

It's not just another Friday at all.

(1a)

Today President Faust announced by email that she's accepting Dean Khurana's recommendations that:

1. For students matriculating in the fall of 2017 and thereafter: any such students who become members of unrecognized single-gender social organization will not be eligible to hold leadership positions in recognized student organizations or athletic teams. Currently enrolled students and those who are matriculating in the fall of 2016 will be exempt from these new policies.

2. ...any such students who become members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations will not be eligible to receive the Dean's endorsement letters for those fellowships that require such endorsements.

...

These new policies will not prevent undergraduates from choosing their own paths while at Harvard. They are not designed to regulate the internal affairs of the unrecognized social organizations; the organizations retain the authority to set their membership criteria, even as the College will continue to urge them to adopt inclusive and non-discriminatory policies. Likewise, students will be able to continue to join these organizations and remain in good academic standing with the College. The recommendations are instead focused exclusively on decisions belonging to the College about

I've got an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson today, expressing my concern that an important narrative is missing from the discussions of the AAU sexual assault climate survey. Excerpt:

When male survivors are invisible, they face stigma against seeking help. Though male and female survivors of sexual assault seek out institutional resources at roughly the same (low) rates, male survivors are 60 percent more likely than female survivors to speak to no one—not even a friend—after an assault. (31.2% versus 19.3% for assault by force; 38.1% versus 23.3% for assault by incapacitation.) And so male students make up more than a quarter of silent survivors, in large part because we so rarely acknowledge that they exist at all. (...)

Those numbers, by the way, come from tables 3.1a,c and 3.5a,b in the full report. Below, I've got few thoughts that didn't make it into the published version.

(1)

I've heard (and more or less believed) "one in three women" for longer than I can remember. And so the fact that the report basically confirms that number doesn't mean all that much to me. I suppose if you doubted that number but believe it now, then the report is big news, but otherwise, this isn't a new crisis because we already knew that it was a crisis, and hopefully, were already acting accordingly. Waiting until the evidence is undeniable before updating

This week, MIT released Survey Results: 2014 Community Attitudes on Sexual Assault, making them one of the first schools to release such broad survey data on sex crimes. These are the results of a survey emailed to MIT undergraduate and graduate students last April, which had a response rate of 35% from 10,831--3,844 total responses.

Now, MIT is clear that the document they've published should be taken as initial, not final, results:

"This document is a summary of the most pertinent results corresponding to questions asked in the survey; it is intended to be an initial summary of survey results. Throughout the upcoming academic year we will work with the community to use the
survey data to answer additional important questions. New findings will be posted to web.mit.edu/surveys/health/, where the full text of the survey questions and other related information can also be found."

They are also upfront about acknowledging the inevitability of response bias:

"Response bias is expected in virtually any voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. While we invited all enrolled graduate and undergraduate students to take this survey, and more than one-third responded, it is not possible to know if students self-selected in or out of the survey in a way that would bias our results. For example, it is difficult