By Maria Padhila
There are so many things to get outraged about in this world that I’ve had to limit myself to a short list. Currently, this list includes fracking, prisons-for-profit, “nice-guy” misogynist bloggers, union busters, health insurance executives, and for-profit education. (Teabaggers, of course, are so universally disliked that they don’t need to be mentioned; and coincidentally their numbers are well represented among my other dislikes.) So in following news about both polyamory and for-profit colleges, I would have seen this story sooner, except traveling kind of had me out of the loop.
A place calling itself “The University of Northern Virginia” — a name hilarious to anyone from the mid-Atlantic, and located in a small office building off a honking commuter road — was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, on charges that it had failed to comply with federal regulations for administering foreign student visas.
Shortly after the raid, with about 2,000 students in limbo, someone curious did a search on the name of the chancellor, and found that among his recent online activity was a posting to a BDSM website, with photos and a request for attractive single women “to become part of our poly family.” After The Smoking Gun published this, chancellor David Lee resigned.
What is going to happen to all those students? I don’t know. Everyone’s too busy checking out the pictures of the dungeon to ask that question.
The Smoking Gun was able to out him with a pretty simple search. Contrary to what many in comments on various articles seem to believe, he wasn’t outed by DHS, and he wasn’t fired for being on the site. It was The Smoking Gun, followed by other blogs, websites, and articles, that made the sex dungeon and not the possible scam on both students and taxpayers into the big story. My big question isn’t “should a dungeon master be able to hold down a professional job” but “how come we can’t get the goddamn DREAM act going for students who are already here and working hard, but there are still diploma-mill scams that run for years at a time, luring people in, ripping them off, working them without protections, and then kicking them out?” However, I doubt anyone would find it shocking if there were some selective enforcement involved; it’s immigration and DHS after all.