Northwestern University students outraged by the opinions of NU professor Laura Kipnis (she doesn’t think highly restrictive codes prohibiting professor/student sexual affairs are a good idea), now note the lack of response on campus to an article of hers stating her views. She is helping to destroy the “safe culture of healthy sexuality” on campus, and the university – its community, and its leaders – should join this group of students and condemn Kipnis with “resounding opprobrium.” The students themselves – thirty of them – have so far organized a protest march.
For a number of reasons, UD is not surprised by the lack of response. I’ll start with the big stuff.
People in this country – especially (despite what conservatives will tell you) people at universities – are heavily invested in the principle of free speech. Free and fulsome and even over the top speech — all okay. All fine. So in order to produce the symphonic campus vilification they’re after, the protesting students are going to have to overcome the instinct many people have to defend the right of people to produce even what to some people seems obviously offensive speech. The more intemperate their letter gets, the more the student writers make some readers suspect they want to shut down free speech.
It’s possible that a lot of people agree with Kipnis’ basic position (they might not express it as lightly as she does). They might find more plausible her dark take on sexuality (“Other people’s sexuality is often just weird and creepy. Sex is leaky and anxiety-ridden…”) than the letter writers’ “safe culture of healthy sexuality.”
Finally, the student letter is so intemperate in its attack (Kipnis “spits in the face” of anyone who’s ever been sexually assaulted) and so insistent on punishing Kipnis that it begins to generate sympathy for her.
March 11th, 2015 at 7:46AM
[…] Northwestern is freaking out about sex in a variety of entertaining ways. It’s good to see people who get a chance to navel – gaze like this while we are battling for the very survival of higher education down here. […]
March 11th, 2015 at 5:21PM
“people…especially people at universities…are heavily invested in free speech”
Does “people” in this usage include administrators?
March 11th, 2015 at 5:33PM
david: Actually, I think most administrators are like this too.
March 11th, 2015 at 9:45PM
Most administrators, yes. My experience has been that those administrators who don’t get the free speech thing are most likely to be found in the “student affairs” bureaucracy.
My own humble institution has a Red Light rating (basically, an “F” for free speech) from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. We richly deserve it, though we’re not quite as oppressive as we used to be. Our Student Affairs Office used to have a “poster policy” requiring that flyers receive an approval stamp before being posted on campus. It took me many months worth of meetings to get this changed, and the amount of ignorance I encountered in these meetings astounded me. “Prior restraint? What’s that? Are you saying we should just let people post any flyers they want? What if they’re, you know, racist or something?”
I’m proud to say I won that fight. But two years later, the same silly poster policy showed up on the books again. This was most likely just a copying error made in re-issuing our Student Handbook, but nonetheless the rule began once again to be enforced. Dislodging it this second time took even longer — more than a year of re-educating many of the very same administrators as last time.
For now, at least, our students don’t have to trudge to the Student Affairs Office to get the institutional stamp of approval before putting up their “Roommate Needed” and “Books for Sale” flyers. But their expressive rights are still violated in other ways, e.g., they’re required to give advanced notice of any demonstration or protest and register it with the administration; they can be punished for sexting, telling a dirty joke, or giving a classmate the finger; etc. It’s really depressing.