Feminist film professor Laura Kipnis is controversial because she believes, among other things, that I have a right to exist. You see, I am the product of a professor-student relationship (turned 40-plus year marriage) — something that is highly controversial on campus these days because of the perceived power imbalances between faculty and students.
For countenancing such relationships and for criticizing other aspects of what she calls “sexual paranoia” on campus, Kipnis, a liberal feminist, has become a polarizing figure. Her opinions are apparently considered so outlandish that a group of six Wellesley College professors just responded to her appearance on their campus by proposing new guidelines for speaker selection.
Their claim: Speakers like Kipnis unfairly “impose” on students by forcing them to spend time engaging with ideas they disagree with.
The horror!
This dangerously anti-intellectual argument — coming from faculty at one of our nation’s elite colleges, no less — represents a new low in academia’s privileging of student comfort over critical thinking and intellectual engagement. If, as these faculty suggest, it is inappropriate to ask students to have to “invest time and energy rebutting” arguments with which they disagree, then what, exactly, is the purpose of a liberal education?
Kipnis, a communications professor at Northwestern University, first made headlines in 2015, when she published an essay entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Two students filed Title IX sex-discrimination complaints against Kipnis over her article, which mentioned some already-public details about sexual harassment investigations at Northwestern.
For this, Northwestern subjected her to a lengthy investigation until she publicly exposed her treatment in a second essay entitled “My Title IX Inquisition,” at which point they quickly cleared her of any wrongdoing.
Kipnis, who spoke at Wellesley on March 8, is no Milo Yiannopoulos. But you wouldn’t know that from the reaction of the faculty on Wellesley’s Commission for Ethnicity, Race and Equity, who emailed the college’s faculty listserv on Monday with a statement regarding her visit and its aftermath.
The CERE faculty argued that because of their “controversial and objectionable beliefs,” speakers like Kipnis inappropriately “impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley.” They lamented the fact that students have to “invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments,” though nobody was forced to attend her speech.
As a free speech advocate, I believe in the right of even the most controversial speakers to air their views in the marketplace of ideas, so I would be writing this piece even if the speaker in question were someone far more inflammatory.
But the fact that these faculty members have whipped themselves into such hysteria over someone as wholly reasonable as Kipnis serves to illustrate how far removed academia seems to have become from the kinds of conversations and debates that occur every day in a democratic society.
How can someone believe they are educating the next generation of leaders while simultaneously believing that it is an unfairly heavy burden on them for a frank discussion of the changing nature of gender relations and sexual politics to take place in their same general geographic area?
The CERE faculty’s first recommendation for improving the speaker selection process is, unsurprisingly, to appoint themselves as arbiters of who can speak, noting that they are “happy to serve as a sounding board” and help hosts “think through the various implications of extending an invitation.”
To this, the Wellesley community should say “Thanks, but no thanks.” Wellesley students themselves did an admirable job of engaging with Kipnis. And yet these students are being educated by people who believe their job is to protect them from the “distress” and “harm” of challenging ideas.
It’s simply astounding.
Harris is vice president of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
