By David French
Monday, June 01, 2015
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 the Huffington
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?
Yet despite the on-campus intimidation, there’s good
reason to believe that this most recent wave of political correctness is
cresting. While no one should count on America’s trembling, largely cowardly
professoriate to risk much for liberty, outside pressure is starting to make a
difference. Feminists from Jezebel to The Nation have expressed concern about Kipnis’s
treatment, and Jonathan Chait has discussed her ordeal as part of his recent
campaign against PC. Indeed, there is a growing wave of leftist dissent against
campus intolerance.
Conservatives have long argued to leftists who were
indifferent to the plight of campus conservatives and Christians that PC would
prove hard to contain, that the PC police would one day turn on their own.
Well, now it’s happening, and many on the left are suddenly realizing once
again that free speech has some value, especially when their speech is under
attack. The bottom line is that the current wave of intolerance is too
self-righteous, too joyless, and too malicious to survive in an otherwise open
society. But as the wave breaks, it’s exacting a dreadful cultural and professional
toll — stifling debate, ending careers, and eroding the intellectual
foundations of liberty.
Political correctness will fail, but it will fail in the
way that leftist revolutions always do — at great cost, with high casualties,
and with the revolutionaries themselves largely unrepentant and unbowed, ready
to try again the instant the culture forgets their last failure.
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