NOTE: I’m posting this from Salzburg, Austria on the back end of a three-week vacation in Eastern Europe. Though I only had two weeks to search for September IGGY-worthy statements and actions before leaving the U.S., as you can see below I had little trouble finding a solid representative list.
1. Education Secretary Betty DeVos. DeVos floated a couple of plans this month that so stood out in their absurdity, even amongst her many foolish proposals, that she definitely deserves an IGGY nomination.
First, she is considering using a federal grant program to let schools buy guns and pay for firearms training for faculty and staff members. If DeVos had only a modicum of knowledge about education children, she’d know that study after study has equated more guns on campuses with more injuries and death, not to mention numerous research endeavors that stress how harmful a culture of fear is for the learning process.
Sadly, DeVos is not alone in her thinking; lawmakers in 14 states have proposed laws that would use taxpayer dollars to arm educators. I’d like to say unbelievable, but nothing is unbelievable anymore in the Trump age.
Were DeVos not such a tunnel-visioned, right-wing extremist, and was even modestly interested in real solutions to school shootings, she’d realize that violence prevention experts have recommended numerous more promising, and less contentious solutions than her hair-brained plan. These include prioritizing a general level of well-being and comfort students and teachers experience on campus, providing more mental health services, and implementing proven threat-assessment programs.
Her second ignominious idea centers on her plan to replace the Obama administration’s guidelines on campus sexual assault policy with a policy that seeks to protect rapists, abusers, and harassers on college campuses. Among other things, DeVos’s regulations would allow perpetrators to cross-examine survivors during mediation and have access to survivors’ evidence obtained during the investigation. They would also narrow the definition of sexual harassment.
It’s clear that DeVos’s new policy will have a devastating impact on survivors. Just a few months after DeVos rescinded the Obama-era guidance, some colleges simply stopped responding to reports of sexual violence at all.
Now, with new barriers to reporting, survivors could feel even more unsafe to come forward than before—and schools may not provide them with support and care if they do. With these new rules, DeVos is actively endangering and harming survivors while propping up their perpetrators. This ignominious policy must be stopped immediately.
