NUS Woman's Campaign Proven to Be Rightwing Hoax Designed to Make All Feminists Look Shrieky and Hysterical

It must be, right?

She deleted that tweet, but Twitchy grabbed up on it first.

I got the next several articles from Instapundit and Powerline.

Powerline suggests the these attacks on the New Salem may represent a liberal revolt against this.

Maybe. However, in my experience, most liberals are fairly weak, and buy into Marxism's complaint that liberalism is an inauthentic political philosophy which empowers the Capitalist class or whatever. Thus, liberals believe Marxists when Marxists say liberals are weak and traitors to their class and really should just defer to Marxists.

So my guess is that liberals will continue being worthless, and continuing deferring to and empowering Marxists, and continue seeing a soft Marxism as the path of least resistance.

This is great article by film professor Laura Kipnis in the Chronicle of Higher Education decrying the "Sexual Paranoia" which has swept through the academy.

Kipnis argues that professors should be free to have sex with their students (and vice versa), as it used to be, back when she was younger.

You can disagree with that as you like, but the enforcers of the New Morality aren't doing so out of deference to the Old Morality; they're outlawing sex in order to vindicate far-left feminist concepts of the Woman as the Eternal Victim. And of course of "power disparities" and all the rest of it.

The whole thing is a great read. I'll just quote some of her more piquant moments.

It's the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction--kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air of rectitude. If this is feminism, it's feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination's obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students' sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

...

The climate of sanctimony about student vulnerability has grown impenetrable. No one dares question it lest you’re labeled antifeminist, or worse, a sex criminal.

...

To a cultural critic, the representation of emotion in all these documents plays to the gallery. The student charges that she "suffered and will continue to suffer humiliation, mental and emotional anguish, anxiety, and distress." As I read through the complaint, it struck me that the lawsuit and our new consensual-relations code share a common set of tropes, and a certain narrative inevitability. In both, students and professors are stock characters in a predetermined story. According to the code, students are putty in the hands of all-powerful professors. According to the lawsuit, the student was virtually a rag doll, taken advantage of by a skillful predator who scripted a drunken evening of galleries and bars, all for the opportunity of some groping.

Everywhere on campuses today you find scholars whose work elaborates sophisticated models of power and agency. It would be hard to overstate the influence, across disciplines, of Michel Foucault, whose signature idea was that power has no permanent address or valence. Yet our workplaces themselves are promulgating the crudest version of top-down power imaginable, recasting the professoriate as Snidely Whiplashes twirling our mustaches and students as helpless damsels tied to railroad tracks. Students lack volition and independent desires of their own; professors are would-be coercers with dastardly plans to corrupt the innocent.

...

There was more, but my eye was struck by the word "survivor," which was repeated several times. Wouldn’t the proper term be "accuser"? How can someone be referred to as a survivor before a finding on the accusation--assuming we don’t want to predetermine the guilt of the accused, that is. At the risk of sounding like some bow-tied neocon columnist, this is also a horrifying perversion of the language by people who should know better. Are you seriously telling me, I wanted to ask the Title IX Committee, that the same term now encompasses both someone allegedly groped by a professor and my great-aunt, who lived through the Nazi death camps? I emailed an inquiry to this effect to the university’s general counsel, one of the email’s signatories, but got no reply.

Do you think she should be fired for that pro-rape article? No?

Well your opinion doesn't matter. The feminists say she should be, and they're all that matters.

At the Nation, Michele Goldberg (who's written about the nastily smothering new feminist sex-panic militancy before) talks with Laura Kipnis.

You need to know that Kipnis is being personally protested for the violent, pro-rape column you just read parts of.

Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school's administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university's failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,: which argues against her school’s ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus.

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As the protesters wrote on a Facebook page for their event, they wanted the administration to do something about "the violence expressed by Kipnis' message." Their petition called for "swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article," and demanded "that in the future, this sort of response comes automatically." (University President Morton Schapiro told The Daily Northwestern, a student newspaper, that he would consider it, and the students will soon be meeting with the school’s Vice President for Student Affairs to further press their case.) Jazz Stephens, one of the march’s organizers, described Kipnis's ideas as "terrifying." Another student told The Daily Northwestern that she was considering bringing a formal complaint because she believes that Kipnis was mocking her concerns about being triggered in a film class, concerns she’d confided privately. "I would like to see some sort of repercussions just so she understands the effect something like this has on her students and her class," said the student, who Kipnis hadn't named.

Kipnis could hardly have invented a response that so neatly proved her argument. Not the argument about prohibiting student-teacher sex--there's still a good case to be made for that... Yet the reaction to Kipnis--the demands for official censure, the claims of emotional injury--demonstrated how correct she is about the broader climate. "The new codes sweeping American campuses aren't just a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom, they’re also intellectually embarrassing," she wrote. "Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen."

I'll send you over there to read what more Kipnis has to say.

A professor takes to Tumblr to agree with Kipniss.

I’ve been in academe for about a decade now, and the only professors I’ve known who have slept with or dated students were female....

But lately I've noticed a marked, very loud silence from these professors and instructors, the ones who dated students. See, there’s a big kerfuffle going on about a female Northwestern professor, Laura Kipnis, who made the mistake of speaking honestly on the internet. She said that blanket bans on teacher-student relationships were dumb and infantilizing. In response, students and colleagues have called for her to be formally censured. And out of the several female professors I've known to have engaged in relationships with students, not a one has lent Kipnis a single word of support.

This isn't an issue of hypocrisy. This is a matter of real, palpable fear. Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy is now grounds for a firin'. Even if you make a reasonable and respectful case, if you so much as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe professional consequences. My friends and colleagues might well agree that the student-teacher relationship ban is misguided, but they’re not allowed to say as much in public.

C-can you guys see the problem, here?

Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip--not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery--and that's it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

Indeed, this has grown so foully toxic that even the New York Times is compelled to note that something smells rotten among their Fellow Travelers.

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. "Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity," he wrote. But "if college students are children, then they should be protected like children."

Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don't create a "hostile environment" for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure or don't prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.

This article is worth reading (all of them are, this is gripping, frightening, lunatic stuff) but she glances over an obvious explanation:

Just like as was the case in Salem, lodging an accusation which cannot be disproven and which must be taken as true by your Holy Dogmas is an extremely "empowering" thing for weaklings without any power.

Yes, kids like bossing adults around. It's an old fantasy that every child has. And our current children -- children until 26 -- are the most coddled and fantasy-addled in all of human history.

This is a case of the lunatics running the asylum, as teachers and faculties are now scared shitless of the administrative punishments and harridan disciplines that the students will impose on them.

Eh, they all deserve each other.

Let it burn? I give that sentiment Jazz-Hands.

posted by Ace at 05:28 PM

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