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| Gary Alan Fine |
Undergraduate sociology classes usually consist of little more than bull sessions on current events punctuated by some statistical mumbo-jumbo so that the professorial bull session leaders can justify their $190k annual salaries.
That is why on most campuses, sociology classes are what students quite unscientifically refer to "easy A's."
Most sociology professors are little more than blithering idiots and left-wingers to boot, but that of course is redundant.
So I was not at all surprised when the esteemed Northwestern sociology professor, Gary Alan Fine, came out last month and said that sexual molestation of students by teachers was an expected and quite forgivable way of life in the 60s and 70s.
He also said that the victims of such would be "unseemly" to pursue revenge or justice.
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| Buggery of students by teachers was said to be endemic at the Horace Mann School |
Fine said this on the pages of the April Fools Day edition of the New Yorker magazine, but he apparently uttered that complete gibberish with a straight face.
He was commenting on the sexual molestation scandal at his preparatory alma mater, the Horace Mann School.
The Horace Mann School is an elite, largely Jewish and outlandishly pricey private school located in Manhattan.
It has been rocked by accusations that during the 60s, 70s and 80s, sexual molestation of students by faculty was common and frequent and covered up by school administrators.
Most of the allegations center around buggery of boys when the school was an all male bastion. The school went co-ed in '77 and since then at least one female student has alleged having been raped (in 1980) by a male Horace Mann teacher.
In the New Yorker's voluminous article on the controversy, many of the allegations center on an HM English teacher, Robert Berman.
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| Alleged RMS serial molester Robert Berman was Gary Alan Fine's English teacher |
Berman is said to have been a domineering, control freak who psychologically manipulated vulnerable students into performing homosexual acts with him.
Northwestern's Gary Alan Fine was a 1968 graduate of Horace Mann and one of Berman's students which is why the New Yorker asked him for his two cents on the matter.
In the article, Fine accepts that Berman’s accusers are telling the truth, but worries that the Horace Mann teachers are being judged by the standards of a different time.
“This was the late sixties, and what we now think of as rape or sexual assault didn’t quite mean the same thing in that age of sexual awakening,” Fine said. “What some teachers did was wrong, absolutely, but there are degrees of wrongness, and what was wrong in 1966 is today much more wrong.
“I can’t imagine that in the late nineteen-sixties anyone would have been terribly surprised had they learned that some faculty were having sexual relations with students. Most would not have thought it good, but it was the way of the world.”
WTF?????!!!!!
This was a time when even consenting homosexual acts were illegal in most states. It was a time when the American Psychological Association listed homosexuality as a certifiable mental disorder.
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| Larry Fine |
It was a time when social conventions would not allow things like the F-word in movies and Bob and Laura Petrie, although married, could not be shown on TV as having a double bed.
And crack social scientist Fine is telling us that parents of that era would shell out thousands of dollars for private school tuition, fully expecting that the hired help would be buggering their boys and raping their daughters?
And get this -- Fine tells the victims of the molestation to just let bygones be bygones:
“Even if they did something wrong, at some point revenge or justice becomes unseemly. At what point do you say, ‘Let it rest’?” Fine said.
Oh, by the way, according to the article one of the alleged victims of sexual abuse at the Horace Mann School, on March 10, 1976, hung himself in his parents' basement.
Another victim committed suicide in 2009.
But Fine says, let bygones be bygones.
Is this clown at Northwestern named Gary Allen Fine --- or Larry Fine?
