Thought crimes on campus
Madness has been unleashed on college campuses — not by drunken frat boys but by the White House. A wildly mishandled Obama administration campaign to combat student sexual assaults has morphed under a federal gender-equality law into a nightmarish weapon against free speech and academic freedom.
The statute, called Title IX, obligates colleges to act on sexually related complaints to protect students from a hostile environment. But enforcement now encompasses any member of a college community deemed by an accuser to have prompted discomfort in connection with his or her sex.
As Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis discovered, that includes writing or saying the wrong thing. Defying a gag order, she has gone public with a hair-raising account of being accused under Title IX after writing an article about Northwestern’s recent ban on sexual relations between faculty and students.
Kipnis had criticized the ban for casting professors as all-powerful predators and female students as helpless damsels, thus denying students experience navigating the complex realities of sex.
Soon Northwestern’s administration informed Kipnis that two students had initiated Title IX proceedings. The accusers were unnamed; the charges, unspecified.
Kipnis would be told no more, the university’s Title IX coordinator told her, until she met with investigators for questioning. Only when she insisted on hearing the charges before answering questions did an outside law firm reveal them.
Both came from grad students. One charged that the article had a “chilling effect” on students’ ability to report sexual misconduct. The other came from a student whose entanglement with a Northwestern professor got a mention in Kipnis’ article.
Mercifully, Northwestern cleared Kipnis shortly after she published her embarrassing account. But the threat remains for faculty everywhere, whose words now put them at professional risk.
The fault is not with Northwestern, which is bound by law to pursue every complaint, but with federal regulators who wrongly saw in Title IX their key to a social revolution.
This insanity must stop.