David French:
Laura Kipnis is a feminist professor at Northwestern University — and not just any feminist. She’s long been one of the few professors in American public life who are capable of making news with their scholarship, find their books reviewed by the most elite newspapers, and help start elite “conversations” about academe’s favorite topics: sex, power, and identity. She’s liberal, certainly (well known for her sympathetic views of pornography), but she’s a free thinker. And that is intolerable.
Earlier this year she wrote an essay entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, she decried bans on students’ dating professors, declaring, “If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.” Students were being taught to “regard themselves as exquisitely sensitive creatures.” Their “sense of vulnerability” was “skyrocketing” as a result of the “melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators.” She warned that “the climate of sanctimony has grown too thick to penetrate,” with any dissenter labeled “antifeminist, or worse, a sex criminal.”
Predictably, her words prompted a campus backlash, with mattress-carrying protesters demanding that the university immediately and officially condemn Kipnis’s essay. They used adjectives such as “terrifying” to describe the traumatic effect of her words. Kipnis shrugged off the protests — after all, when you’re a feminist professor writing on pornography, you’re used to a bit of negative public attention. But she couldn’t shrug off what happened next. Two students filed Title IX complaints against her, claiming that she’d violated federal law with her essay and a subsequent tweet. In essence, they were claiming that her writings on matters of public concern constituted unlawful gender discrimination.
What happened then should be familiar to anyone who has ever been embroiled in the Star Chamber that is academic “justice.” Rather than laughing the claims out of the university — which would have been the appropriate response — the university retained an outside law firm and launched an investigation. The university not only denied Kipnis legal assistance during the formal proceedings, but its investigators also initially refused to even describe the nature of the charges against her, insisting on interviewing her before she knew precisely what she’d been accused of doing. According to Kipnis, she’d “plummeted into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it.”
It turned out there were two complainants, one who filed “on behalf of the university community,” claiming that Kipnis’s essay would have a “chilling effect” on students’ reports of sexual misconduct. The other student claimed that mentioning her involvement in a lawsuit (not by name) was “retaliatory and created a hostile environment.” In comments to theHuffington Post, the students said that their complaint was about alleged “factual inaccuracies” in Kipnis’s essay. Somehow, to these students, Kipnis had violated federal law because she had “refused to correct” her original essay in a manner that pleased them. As one student said, “What reasonable person would want to report their assault if it meant a professor of their own university would take to the Chronicle of Higher Education to publicly misrepresent some of the most traumatizing events in your life?”
Let’s translate the statement into plain English: According to the complainants, a student has a right — under federal law — to accuse another individual of illegal conduct (sexual assault or sexual harassment) and then dictate exactly how that accusation is reported to the public. This contention is constitutionally, morally, and academically absurd. Yet the university moved ahead with its punishing, intimidating process.
On Friday, Northwestern finally cleared Kipnis of most of the charges (though it continues to investigate whether she violated a “nonretaliation” provision of the faculty handbook). And while Kipnis — a uniquely combative figure — is unbowed by the pressure, the mere existence of this investigation will itself no doubt have a dramatic effect on already-intimidated professors. Who wants to risk a Title IX investigation merely for dissenting from the party line?
This goes all the way back to the story that G. W. Bush had taken a secret ride on an SR-71 in order to get the Iranian hostages released when Reagan was inaugurated.
We were told at the time that it was not the facts which mattered; rather, it was the seriousness of the charge.
Some things never change.
Aside from viciously attacking any opposition, leftists are always ready to “eat their own” and go after anyone, including a fellow leftist who strays off the plantation/reservation/party-line “good-think” “newspeak” message. This asinine insanity is what eventually always leads to meltdowns within the “cool crowd” as they cannibalize their own body politic from within.