SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I'm-not-touching-this-with-a-ten-foot-pole dept.
The Guardian has a fascinating piece entitled Sexual paranoia on campus – and the professor at the eye of the storm. There is a lot going on in this article/interview and it touches on a lot of different issues in both society and higher-ed in general. Some choice quotes:
But you do end up making strange bedfellows. The people supporting free speech now are the conservatives. It's incomprehensible to me, but it's the so-called liberals on campus, the students who think of themselves as activists, who are becoming increasingly authoritarian. So I'm trying to step carefully. It's not like you want to make certain allies, particularly the men's rights people.
Kipnis's original essay was provoked by an email she received about a year before, informing her that relationships – dating, romantic or sexual – between undergraduates and faculty members at Northwestern were now banned. The same email informed her that relationships between graduates and staff, though not forbidden, were also problematic, and had to be reported to department chairs. "It annoyed me," she says. The language was neutral, but it seemed clear that it was mostly women this code was meant to protect. She thought of all those she knew who are married to former students, or who are the children of such couples, and wondered where this left them. It seemed to her this was part of a process that was transforming the "professoriate" into a sexually suspicious class: "would-be harassers all, sexual predators in waiting".
On a personal note, when I interact with students (which is every day), it's always either with an open office door, or in a public area. So as not to be discriminatory, I do the same for all students, men, women, or others. This sort of culture on campuses does make everyone suspicious of everyone else and it makes it hard to trust others. Students can't trust the instructors because they might "do something", staff can't trust the students because even a false accusation can be career ending, so there's this overall chilling effect that occurs when what should be a collegiate environment turns into an us vs them thing. This is definitely worse in some places than others, but there is an undercurrent of it everywhere. I applaud Laura Kipnis for bringing these issues to the light -- if we're going down this route, it should at least be a conscious community decision rather than bureaucratic policy handed down from University Counsel and risk assessment teams.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday April 14 2017, @03:27AM
Project the trend line out. The expense of all that drama, lawfare, loss of skilled menfolk from the workforce. Sooner or later a few of those unemployable men band together and found their own company and women won't want to, really couldn't be allowed to work around officially labeled serial harassers, convicted sex criminals, etc. As the system becomes ever more strained it will find it hard to refuse the conversion of unemployed wards of the State to productive taxpayers if the only hitch is turning a blind eye on their lack of gender diversity. How long before men who have never even been accused of doing anything decide they would rather work there on the "Isle of Misfit Toys." Especially since the lack of drama means the misfits are competing at an advantage that will be a lot bigger than it is today, assuming we keep sliding to Hell which is a safe bet. Competitive advantage means better pay. How long until political pressure build to permit a gender segregated workplace without needing to find a magic number of undesirables? Pretty soon the gender segregated workplace is mainstreamed again. The wheel will have turned.
And while the women are the most toxic drag on the workplace at present, it isn't because the rest of the diversity circus isn't trying. As they 'succeed' a similar solution would be an idea that would occur to more than a few. Circles everywhere. Action, reaction. Common sense and compromise just doesn't seem to be an option; we bounce from extreme to extreme.