Category Archives: Education

Sauce For The Goose

…was sauce for Laura Kipnis’s gander:

It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Kipnis, though. One wonders where she’s been for the past two decades when kangaroo courts were set up at institutions of higher education all over the country.

Has she been rushing to defend all the men convicted by campus courts of sexual assault with no lawyers present?

Kipnis learned (much to her surprise) that, as she wrote, “any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.”

No kidding. And Title IX is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone with a political agenda and an ax to grind can get professors reprimanded, students kicked off campus and commencement speakers disinvited.

Did self-described feminist Kipnis rush to the defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Condoleezza Rice when they were told they couldn’t come to Brandeis and Rutgers? (In an essay for Slate, Kipnis referred to Condi as President George W. Bush’s “Stepford Wife.”)

Has she been defending Christina Hoff Sommers when the students at Georgetown and Oberlin tried to prevent her from giving a visiting lecture and then demanding “safe spaces” to be protected from her harsh words?

Somehow, one suspects not.

[Update a few minutes later]

“I pity the fool, for not opening her eyes and seeing what little fascist enclaves universities have become thanks to progressive intolerance and lack of ideological ‘diversity.’ Other than that, as a court of equity would say, Kipnis has “dirty hands,” and her involvement in the progressive cabal diminishes her entitlement to relief.”

Advice For Young Men

from my neighbor, Kurt Schlichter:

Remember my exceedingly hot wife? You should, because your romantic relationship should be the cornerstone of your life and you want to get it right. Now, in a world of creepy feminists and whiny femboys, you need to understand that biology still trumps stupid social fads. Women want men. Not girly men. Not boys. Not manchildren. Men.

This is true of liberal women too, whether they admit it or not, but you don’t want one of them – well, at least for more than a few hours. Which reminds me – have an alias and use it.

The point is to avoid liberal women. If you see a chick hauling around a mattress, keep moving no matter how open to experimentation you hear she is. Do not become the lead in some daddy issue-plagued hysteric’s personal psychodrama.

You want a conservative woman. Ignore the liberal deniers – science proves that right wing women are hotter and sexier. Hey, conservatives don’t tend to have large families because they’re prudes. With liberal girls, a romantic interlude means a lot of sobbing about patriarchy, plus the vibe gets spoiled when you have to constantly stop to notarize affirmative consent forms.

There’s a lot of pressure on you young men to be passive and, frankly, wussy. Reject it. Call the girl. Don’t freaking text – texting is for the weak. Call her, like a man, and tell her what you want: “Hey, I want to take you out to [Quality Place] Friday. I want to pick you up at 7. You in?”

It’s about life in general, though, not just love life.

“Blue-State Justice”

…is rarer than red:

On Thursday, Virginia Governor and Democratic candidate for president Terry McAuliffe issued a Task Force report on campus sexual assault organized by the state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring. This 107-page report was perhaps most notable for what it did not include. It did not once mention the phrase “false accusations.” It appears being framed does not concern Virginia policymakers. Perhaps for that reason, this report, which discussed how Virginia colleges need to respond to sexual assault allegations didn’t mention the highest-profile rape allegation on a Virginia campus in recent years. Rolling Stone, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, or the false accuser “Jackie” were, it seems, not relevant to a discussion about campus rape claims in Virginia.

If you wanted to destroy academia, it would be harder to come up with better plans than these people have.

[Update a while later]

“We literally can’t afford to let the Title IX inquisition continue.”

Feminists

…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.

The Former “Law Professor”

has been schooled:

he would have failed my constitutional law class if he had tried to justify such sweeping authority to categorically rewrite existing law and confer benefits Congress never provided as “prosecutorial discretion.”

I think his reputation as a Constitutional (or any other kind of) scholar is highly overrated. It’s nice to see the courts finally stepping up to rein in these power grabs.

[Update a while later]

The “I” word is really the only remedy to this kind of overreach.

But partisan politics takes precedence over Congressional prerogatives.