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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday April 13 2017, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday April 14 2017, @01:37PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Friday April 14 2017, @01:37PM (#493952) Journal

    That's precisely what's so frightening about it. No only is proving innocence difficult (and unjust) in general, but the only possible way would be to keep a detailed logbook of one's day on a minute-to-minute basis, every day, on the off chance that one actually is accused of rape (or sexual relations), and just pray and hope that during the time period the rape supposedly happened, there is some way to prove that the supposed victim was somewhere else.

    I'll never forget the presentation I was required to attend in college because of my assigned gender. As an assigned male, I'm already guilty of rape—their words as best as I can remember, not paranoia or exaggeration on my part—, and all that needs to happen is for somebody to bring forward “evidence” of the most circumstantial kind.

    I'm not even attracted to women, and that presentation had me scared to death about even being in proximity of a cisgendered woman. I admit, though, that I could not have been brought to that extreme of fear without first going to a school district with grossly sexist policies in the first place, particularly group punishments for an entire gender when one boy in the back was misbehaving.

    (If only I'd heard of Title IX at the time, there were plenty of incidents from elementary school to that presentation in college that could have led to a slam-dunk lawsuit, alas. Also, I should note that whether or not I'm remember the presentation correctly, it didn't do anything to decrease rapes on that campus, and even many, many moons later, that campus is now apparently having an actual rape crisis, provable by police reports because it was the local police who finally voiced a concern! [Also verified by my psychologist.] It's almost as though the goal of the on-campus rape advocacy group didn't have anything to do with lessening the impact of rape on the campus. Strange thing, that.)

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