…are too fragile to read:
My advice to potential faculty hires — or student applicants — at Northwestern: Go somewhere else. As law professor Jonathan Adler notes in The Washington Post, Northwestern threw academic freedom “under the bus.”
The good news is that Kipnis’ experience has generated a national wave of outrage. Even feminist website Jezebel wrote: “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.”
In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait observed: “I highly doubt that the inquiry against Kipnis will result in any important formal sanction. … But the slim possibility of actual administrative punishment is not the problem her story reveals. The problem is that a major body of progressive campus thought believes her publication of a dissenting column merits punishment.”
And at Reason,Robby Soave pointed out that bureaucrats whose power comes from an outrageously expansive reading of Title IX have expanded that interpretation to include a claim that “criticizing Title IX violates Title IX.”
Yes, Congress should have very public hearings about this. But they almost certainly won’t.
But they almost certainly won’t.
If you watched the hearings on Women in Science, you know why. Congress, even the Republican version, is scared s*itless of the feminists. So much so that they overrode the NRA to put gun confiscation for domestic violence into law. Watching a Republican led committee cringe and crawl before NOW was disgusting.
It is not just feminists, although they are pretty loud on campus. All those claiming “free speech, but” seem to have a fear of words. If you can’t handle a cartoon, you really should consider a padded room for safety.
A counter-example showing Northwestern’s continued committment to academic freedom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Butz
Really?
So your response is that Norwestern supports Nazis, but not people who disrupt the anti-men feminist narrative?
Interesting.
Reynolds provided an example. I provided a counter-example. My counter-example does not show that Northwestern supports Nazis. My counter-example is a current instance of Northwestern supporting academic freedom. And my counter-example is stronger: while it is deplorable that Kipnis is being “investigated”, she has kept her job, and Holocaust denier Arthur Butz has also kept his job (despite plenty of protests).
Yes, she has “kept her job,” after the inquisition. The process is, after all, the punishment.
Are you happy that she had to go through that?
I won’t even ask if you’re happy that I’m still going through mine with the Mann lawsuit.
I said it was deplorable, so why are you asking if I’m happy? It sounds to me like you are too intent on pigeonholing people to understand what they have to say, so I’m glad you won’t ask about the Mann suit.
—
I bet you didn’t read Kipnis’ article. I hadn’t, when I commented, and even when I wrote the above words. But now that I’ve read it, my reaction is astonishment that Kipnis would have wanted to publish such a thing, and I’m completely unsurprised that her targets are willing to use any legal pretext (such as Title IX) to retaliate.
Read what she wrote here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/
The truly questionable stuff starts around paragraph 22 or 23. And by questionable, I mean that I question her mental status. I think only a professor with a psychological disorder would publish stuff like that about an undergrad. Sheesh.