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jezebel.com: Feminist Students Protest Feminist Prof for Writing About Feminism


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As feminist student activists fight to expand their circle of vulnerability in collegiate life, Title IX has gone from a law designed to protect college students from sexual misconduct and discrimination to a means by which professors are put on trial for their tweets.

 

Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis found herself entangled in one such trial after two female graduate students filed Title IX charges against her because of an essay and a tweet she authored. Kipnis was then plunged into a secretive and labyrinthine bureaucratic process that she believes threatens her academic freedom.

The trouble for Kipnis started a few months ago when she published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the growing sexual paranoia on college campuses. Though Kipnis primarily focused on conduct between professors and students, her essay did feature a cutting indictment of the current activism around consent and sex on campus: “women have spent the past century and a half demanding to be treated as consenting adults,” Kipnis writes, “now a cohort on campuses [is] demanding to relinquish those rights, which I believe is a disastrous move for feminism.”

 

Student activists at Northwestern protested Kipnis’ essay by carrying around mattresses in the style of Emma Sulkowicz, which Kipnis regarded as “symbolically incoherent,” given that Sulkowicz’s mattress had come to symbolize student-on-student sexual assault and that Kipnis’ essay was primarily about sex between students and teachers. Further, Kipnis hadn’t assaulted anyone. Nevertheless, the students, with mattresses in tow, went to Northwestern’s president with a petition demanding swift and official condemnation of Kipnis essay.

Of the protest, Kipnis writes, “the new [consent] codes infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas, which seemed to prove my point.”

Though the President said he would consider the petition, Kipnis assumed that academic freedom would prevail.

But Kipnis was wrong.

 

http://jezebel.com/feminist-students-protest-feminist-prof-for-writing-abo-1707714321#

 

It's worth clicking and reading the rest of it.  Note that this is from a feminist blog

 

Hot take:  Claiming to feel "unsafe" because you don't like what someone has to say and using it as a shield from which to hide behind while lobbing accusations and demands doesn't make anything more fair and open for anyone. 

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Just the title of this article makes my head hurt.

 

Grab some advil and dive in, it gets so much worse.  Kipnis' essay is a good read, even though I'm not sure I agree with much of it.  Here's another article on it from NYmag.com.

 

You have to admit, it gets a little boring limiting ourselves to gun control, abortion, and religions where we can all just line up according our political affiliations. 

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This is absurd. Really I'm not surprised though.

As a prof, I can tell you that the Title IX stuff has administrators freaking out. I've had to do Title IX training twice in two years, and it is just as Kipnis describes it in her Chronicle piece.

I think she is quite right to label it paranoia. We're walking on eggshells.

Here's her article:

http://m.chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/

You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder.

It’s been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).

Of course, the residues of the wild old days are everywhere. On my campus, several such "mixed" couples leap to mind, including female professors wed to former students. Not to mention the legions who’ve dated a graduate student or two in their day—plenty of female professors in that category, too—in fact, I’m one of them. Don’t ask for details. It’s one of those things it now behooves one to be reticent about, lest you be branded a predator.

Forgive my slightly mocking tone. I suppose I’m out of step with the new realities because I came of age in a different time, and under a different version of feminism, minus the layers of prohibition and sexual terror surrounding the unequal-power dilemmas of today.

. . .

I’ve done what I can to adapt myself to the new paradigm. Around a decade ago, as colleges began instituting new "offensive environment" guidelines, I appointed myself the task of actually reading my university’s sexual-harassment handbook, which I’d thus far avoided doing. I was pleased to learn that our guidelines were less prohibitive than those of the more draconian new codes. You were permitted to date students; you just weren’t supposed to harass them into it. I could live with that.

However, we were warned in two separate places that inappropriate humor violates university policy. I’d always thought inappropriateness was pretty much the definition of humor—I believe Freud would agree. Why all this delicacy? Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.

. . .

Kudos to her for using her brain and having the courage to speak up. I think she hits the nail squarely on the head. You should really read the whole thing to get a sense of what's happening.

Shame on the administrators for perpetuating this nonsense, although their response is typical.

I wouldn't think of having a relationship with anybody on campus, even if we are all consenting adults. I've seen too many careers ruined by this craziness. Several profs at my alma mater have been canned. One guy committed suicide after Title IX charges were brought against him.

I suppose we academics should all be celibate.

The fact that even discussing this can land you in hot water speaks to how bad it's gotten. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, but I doubt it.

Anyway I've probably said too much already. God forbid my school figures out I made this post. I might lose my job.

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For those of you that love reading, there is a follow up to the essay s0crates quotes. 
 
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/?key=Tj8iIVA8NStOZnEyMTsVbG4EbHA/OB94YHUYOH5xbltWEQ==
 

A week or so earlier, the investigators had phoned to let me know that a "mediated resolution" was possible in my case if I wished to pursue that option. I asked what that meant — an image of me and the complainants in a conference room hugging came to mind. I didn’t like the visual. The students were willing to drop their complaints in exchange for a public apology from me, the investigators said. I tried to stifle a laugh. I asked if that was all. No, they also wanted me to agree not to write about the case.
 
I understand that by writing these sentences, I’m risking more retaliation complaints, though I’m unclear what penalties may be in store (I suspect it’s buried somewhere in those links). But I refuse to believe that students get to dictate what professors can or can’t write about, or what we’re allowed to discuss at our Faculty Senate meetings. I don’t believe discussing Title IX cases should be verboten in the first place — the secrecy of the process invites McCarthyist abuses and overreach.

 

Any discussion or disagreement violates the sanctity of the "safe space" and constitutes a misdeed demanding punishment.  I can't agree with any group that looks to silence critics and then shield themselves from any counter arguments or ever having to defend their positions. 
 

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For those of you that love reading, there is a follow up to the essay s0crates quotes.

http://chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/?key=Tj8iIVA8NStOZnEyMTsVbG4EbHA/OB94YHUYOH5xbltWEQ==

Any discussion or disagreement violates the sanctity of the "safe space" and constitutes a misdeed demanding punishment. I can't agree with any group that looks to silence critics and then shield themselves from any counter arguments or ever having to defend their positions.

I'm liking this lady a lot. Her writing is excellent, and she is articulating something on the minds of a lot of academics who are afraid to speak up.

Here's a bit more from your link.

Most academics I know — this includes feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer — now live in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster. After the essay appeared, I was deluged with emails from professors applauding what I’d written because they were too frightened to say such things publicly themselves. My inbox became a clearinghouse for reports about student accusations and sensitivities, and the collective terror of sparking them, especially when it comes to the dreaded subject of trigger warnings, since pretty much anything might be a "trigger" to someone, given the new climate of emotional peril on campuses.

I learned that professors around the country now routinely avoid discussing subjects in classes that might raise hackles. A well-known sociologist wrote that he no longer lectures on abortion. Someone who’d written a book about incest in her own family described being confronted in class by a student furious with her for discussing the book. A tenured professor on my campus wrote about lying awake at night worrying that some stray remark of hers might lead to student complaints, social-media campaigns, eventual job loss, and her being unable to support her child. I’d thought she was exaggerating, but that was before I learned about the Title IX complaints against me.

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It's an interesting perspective/line of thought. While I did teach as an adjunct faculty for a few semesters at a community college in Southern Maryland, most of my time as a teacher was working with middle schoolers. There the line was obviously clear, but even when I taught college I thought there was a certain power/authority relationship that made relationships inappropriate. The protocol was never dictated to me, but inferred or maybe invented by what I thought was right.

 

I can see a relationship blossoming with one's teaching assistant or grad student as you spend many hours together working on projects, sharing ideas, and things could happen. I don't think that relationship has to be monstrous or evil, but it's really  delicate. Teachers need that level of remove.  It's certainly grayer in college where the students are adults (by age, if not maturity and experience.) 

 

I guess what bothers me about this case was that it wasn't one of moral trespass, but one of censoring ideas. That's the last thing a college should be doing. Ideas need to be wrestled with, debated, torn apart, and put back together. That's the purpose of higher learning. When I worked at VOR, some of the Euros that worked there were surprised and uneasy that Mein Kampf was available in bookstores and that these ideas could be discussed in different settings. While I hate Nazism to its core, I disagreed arguing that it's important to confront ideas and not hide from them... an academic setting is the best place to do that.

 

I will always believe that students deserve a certain degree of protection from teachers, but not from ideas.

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Title IX has turned into a real headache for colleges.  If you look at where college budgets has increased over the last 20 years, most of it is administration.  I'll bet at least 1/4 of that increase is related to Title IX.

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Title IX has turned into a real headache for colleges. If you look at where college budgets has increased over the last 20 years, most of it is administration. I'll bet at least 1/4 of that increase is related to Title IX.

There are some crazy anecdotes regarding title ix for sure. And some unfortunate results.

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Feminism eating itself. Parts of the modern feminism (and social justice movements) are just bizarre. Similar vitriolic anger you see from the tea party.

I actually made this same comparison to a friend at work when reading a feminists Twitter posts. I understand wanting things to be equal and what most are fighting for, however the radical feminists who basically want men to grovel at their feet and continually apologize for the acts of other men is insane.

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Saturn still devours its children.

In this case it's the children doing the devouring. The young feminists of today have no use for their predecessors that fought the notion that women were fragile creatures. Mom and Grandma have become inconvenient and also needs to be intimidated into silence.

I actually made this same comparison to a friend at work when reading a feminists Twitter posts. I understand wanting things to be equal and what most are fighting for, however the radical feminists who basically want men to grovel at their feet and continually apologize for the acts of other men is insane.

Careful, an opinion like that will get you labeled an MRA.

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I actually started following this one radical feminist on Twitter because I find it funny. She posts things and then people will respond with actual statistics that defeat the point she's trying to make which always results in her cussing at the person lol.

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I think some of you are missing the point.

I don't think the complaint is about feminism as much as it is about Title IX paranoia, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, etc.

 

The paranoia is not just present at the college level, secondary schools face the same issues. Granted issues are not related to Title IX, but fear about expressing ideas and opinions is present at the secondary level. Teaching students to think about their opinions and beliefs are often taken as an attack on them and teachers do not want to deal with the hassle if a parent or administrator finds out about something. I do think part of the problem is this vigilante justice system that social media and 24 hour news networks has created. Challenge someone's thoughts and it is instant fines, firing, suspension, etc. It really is said that in many places good, informative, and intelligent dialogue cannot take place.

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I think some of you are missing the point.

I don't think the complaint is about feminism as much as it is about Title IX paranoia, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, etc.

I agree, this is about paranoia, silencing critics, and imposing a view on others. It is however a branch or type of feminism in this instance that's behind it. Not feminism in general and not the goal of equality, which is still (and always will be) a noble goal. Every movement has it's less proud moments.
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