Use evidence from these text.
Text 1:
Supreme Court to Decide if Students Have Right to Post Vulgar Comments about Teachers
Source: David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2021
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear its most important case in decades on the 1st Amendment rights of students, and ultimately is expected to decide whether young people are free in the era of social media to post vulgar, cruel or racist comments about their teachers,
coaches, classmates or school.
At issue is whether social media posts are “off-campus speech” beyond the control of
teachers and schools.
It is the rare case whose outcome could affect every public school in the nation, but only
if the justices succeed in drawing a clearer line between the rights of students and the
disciplinary authority of school officials.
Since 1969, the high court has said students retain their rights to freedom of speech at
school, including famously by wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
But that landmark decision in Tinker vs. Des Moines was a compromise. It also spoke of
“affirming the comprehensive authority … of school officials to control conduct,” and to forbid
speech that could lead to “substantial disruptions” or “disorders on the school premises.”
With the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, the
question is whether provocative posts that circulate quickly through a school community are
beyond the reach of school officials.
Judges and lawyers cited instances in which students falsely portrayed a principal as a
“sex-obsessed pedophile,” aided cheating by posting exam questions and answers in advance,
encouraged harassing an unpopular classmate or threatened to kill a teacher.
The case before the court this week arose from a Pennsylvania girl’s F-word rant on
Snapchat after she learned she did not make the varsity cheerleading team. She posted a photo
with her middle finger raised and repeated: “F— school, F— softball, F— cheer, F—
Everything.”
Her Saturday afternoon post made its way around the school, including to her coaches.
They suspended her from the junior varsity team, citing the team rules that said cheerleaders
must show “respect” for the school, coaches and other cheerleaders, and avoid “foul language
and inappropriate gestures.”
She and her parents filed a suit in federal court, alleging a violation of the 1st
Amendment and seeking an order that would reinstate her to the team. A federal judge agreed,
ruling that her brief outburst did not cause a substantial disruption at school. When the Mahanoy
Area School District appealed, the 3rd Circuit Court in Philadelphia broke new ground with a
broad ruling in the girl’s favor.
“We hold today that Tinker does not apply to off-campus speech — that is, speech that is
outside school-owned, -operated or -supervised channels and that is not reasonably interpreted as bearing the school’s imprimatur,” the appeals court said last year.
Its opinion said the girl’s words were “protected speech” uttered on Saturday afternoon
that during an earlier era would have been beyond the control of school officials.
“New communicative technologies open new territories where regulators might seek to
suppress speech they consider inappropriate, uncouth or provocative. And we cannot permit such efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, without sacrificing precious freedoms that the 1st
Amendment protects,” wrote Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, an appointee of President Obama. She
was joined by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee.
“True, our rule leaves some vulgar, crude or offensive speech beyond the power of
schools to regulate,” she said, but shielding such online postings from oversight “provides much-needed clarity to students and officials alike.”
But the decision came with limits. She said it might be different if a court were
“confronted with off-campus student speech threatening violence or harassing particular students or teachers.”
The 3rd Circuit’s broad ruling fueled an appeal to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for the
school district cited suits against schools for disciplining students who sent racist messages to
Black students and anti-Semitic ones to Jewish students. They also noted that in California and
25 other states, schools are required to protect students from bullying and harassment by other
Students.
“The 1st Amendment is not a territorial straightjacket that forces schools to ignore speech that disrupts the school environment or invades other students’ rights just because students launched that speech from five feet outside the schoolhouse gate,” they said.
In January, the court agreed to hear the case of Mahanoy Area School District vs. B.L.,
and decide whether public school officials “may regulate speech that would materially and
substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school,” even when it arises from an off-
campus posting.
Lawyers for the school district argued that social media posts may cause “substantial
disruption” at school and therefore can be regulated. They did not say that the girl’s posting did
indeed disrupt the school, but told the court it should send that question back to be reconsidered
by a district judge.
Text 2:
The “Manly” Jobs Problem
By Susan Chira
The New York Times, February 8, 2018
1 Sexual harassment came along with being one of the very few women on a construction site, in a mine, or in a shipyard. Those professions remain male-dominated and the harassment can seem, for countless women, to be intractable.
2 But what if the problem isn’t simply how their male co-workers behave? What if the problem is the very way society has come to see the jobs themselves? Some jobs are “male”—not
just men’s work, but also a core definition of masculinity itself. Threatening that status quo
is not just uppity—it can be dangerous.
3 This dynamic plays out in workplaces of all classes and crosses partisan political lines. But it is particularly stark in the blue-collar jobs that once scored a kind of manly trifecta: They
paid a breadwinner’s wage, embodied strength and formed the backbone of the American
Economy.
4 As Christine Williams, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin,
pungently put it, women in so-called men’s jobs are labeled horribly derogatory language. Each
abused in their own ways. Although statistics are spotty, some studies have concluded that
sexual harassment is more regular and severe in traditionally male occupations. And a
Times Upshot analysis of blue-collar occupations showed that women’s presence in these
jobs stayed static or shrank between 2000 and 2016.
5 Women are so scarce in these trades that some men refuse to see them as women. The
only woman in a repair crew at wind-farm sites charged in a lawsuit that her co-workers
called her by male nicknames, from common to obscene, because they thought only a man
could handle the job. Men suggested she must have a penis or be a lesbian.
6 In interviews with more than 60 women in male-dominated trades like construction, Amy Denissen, an associate professor of sociology at California State University at Northridge
and Abigail Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles,
found countless similar examples. While lesbians are also harassed, “in some ways women
who are lesbian are seen as less threatening,” Professor Saguy said. “They’re seen as not
fully women.”
7 Women who try to go along with the sexual banter, or who act feminine, are seen as either coming on to men or less competent in a workplace culture where proficiency is defined in masculine terms. “Sexual harassment is often a way in which the men reaffirm women’s
femininity, say this is who you are, back in your place,” Professor Saguy said. “At the same
time, women will play up their femininity and flirt a little bit, and play along with some of the
stereotypes of femininity to be accepted.”
8 Women as well as men can wield the weapon of sexuality in the workplace—as I saw in
months of interviews about sexual harassment at two Ford plants in Chicago. In that case,
in addition to persistent abuse by men, several women were also accused of trading sex for
better, less physically demanding jobs. Whether women were coerced into sex or gaming a
system, one constant has been that in most cases, men are supervisors and have the
power to dispense threats or favors.
9 Power has been entwined with the evolution of male manufacturing jobs since the industrial revolution, said Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor emerita of history at Columbia University. Although many of the earliest factory jobs in places like textile mills were held by women who could be spared from the farm, men reserved many of the highest-status, highest paying jobs. “It isn’t new,” Professor Kessler-Harris said of sexual harassment and male
resentment. “It’s as old as male culture. The men assumed the best jobs, the skilled jobs,
were theirs. If a woman dared to enter them, God help her.”
10 Jobs took on specifically male or female characteristics—and society valued them
accordingly. Nurses, often men in the early days of the profession, were redefined as
nurturers when women swelled their ranks; secretaries, once exclusively men, yielded to
the dexterous fingers of women who typed and were recast as “the sunshine of the office,”
Professor Kessler-Harris said.
11 These jobs often paid less, while the ones requiring physical strength paid more. When
women were needed during World War II, cutting sheet metal was likened to cutting a
pattern through cloth, and welding to opening an orange juice can, she said. Then after the
war, men reclaimed these jobs and most women were exiled back to the kitchen.
12 After 1964, as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was gradually used to pry open industries
once largely closed to women like construction, mining and shipbuilding, some men’s rage
swelled, Professor Kessler-Harris said.
13 “I don’t think you can understand this notion of sexual harassment and men’s anger with
women, their willingness to take out on them all this sexual hostility, unless you imagine
that sense of entitlement in the job,” she said.
14 Professor Saguy said that employers played on this sense that manliness was intertwined
with such jobs. “Even if they have to tolerate bad working conditions, the compensation is
they were real men,” she said. “Then women were moving into these occupations, so what
does that mean? If women can do the job, maybe it’s not so masculine after all.”
15 Already, some fear a backlash to the intense focus on sexual harassment. And there are
worries that many of the prescribed remedies, from training to promoting women to
stiffening penalties, could fall short, generate more resentment or perpetuate stereotypes
that women are always victims. Lawsuits abound but seldom force upheavals in entire
systems, Professor Williams said.
16 Many scholars I interviewed argued that fundamental changes are necessary, such as
restructuring organizations to be less hierarchical and re-examining pay scales for men’s
and women’s work. “I would like to think there will be permanent changes that come out of
this,” Professor Saguy said. “I don’t see them yet.”
17 But some who have observed or trained once-recalcitrant men cite small successes in
changing perceptions about the nature of “male” jobs. Ellen Bravo, a director of Family
Values at Work, found that male firefighters in Kansas City, Mo., had adapted to changes
they once dismissed as unmanly, such as wearing masks to protect against lung cancer or
talking about grief after witnessing death and suffering.
18 Jessica Smith, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, studied the
successful experience of women in a Wyoming mine in the 2000s during a time of hiring
expansion, when women were not perceived as taking jobs from men. “They redefined what
it was to be a good miner away from this very hyperbolic masculine image,” she said. “A
good miner was someone who cared for their co-workers. They were responsible. These
were issues that women could also embody.”
19 Now that leaders of some organizations are toppling, Professor Kessler-Harris surveyed
this moment with a historian’s eye. “After 50 years when women swallowed hard and put up
with it, or quit, finally women are saying this is not acceptable anymore,” she said. “What
we’re seeing now is an attack on male power and the possibility at least of change.”
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Supreme Court to Decide if Students Have R appeared first on blitzarchive.com.