Petition calls on MSU to cancel George Will speech

Petition calls on MSU to cancel George Will speech:
A group of activists will deliver a petition signed by tens of thousands of people to Michigan State University to protest winter commencement speaker George Will, who they call a "rape apologist," leaders announced Monday.
.....because Will stated in a column that sexual assault victims make it up to achieve the "coveted status" of "victimhood."
The column can be read here.

A group of students will deliver the petition at noon on Wednesday to the MSU administration office. Molly Haigh, a spokeswoman for the women's advocacy group UltraViolet, said more than 40,000 people had signed the petition as of Monday evening.
"It is appalling that MSU, a school currently under Title IX investigation for failing to address rape on campus, would invite a man known for shaming survivors of rape on campus to speak at their graduation ceremony," said Shaunna Thomas, co-founder of UltraViolet.
"One in 5 women are sexually assaulted before graduating from college across America; this is an issue that MSU and every university should take extremely seriously.
We urge MSU to stop condoning rape and cancel George Will's speech."

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By George F. Will Opinion writer June 6 

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”: 

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent......