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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) by hemocyanin on Friday April 14 2017, @04:35PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday April 14 2017, @04:35PM (#494062) Journal

    Other times it was things like threatening to report a sexual assault against a faculty member unless they increased the students grade, or gave them a good recommendation.

    You failed to address this point and the question of whether there is a power imbalance in a legal structure where the professor is denied legal counsel, denied even knowing the charges until being questioned, and where female student's word is accepted as truth even without evidence. Who, in that situation, is the person in power?

    Fromt TFA:

    During the investigation into her conduct, Kipnis was told that she could not involve a lawyer, that she could not record her sessions with the investigators Northwestern had employed, and that she would not learn the charges against her until she was sitting in front of these investigators (ie she would have no time to prepare her answers to their questions – though she fought this, and won). I can’t, here, wander too deeply into the chilling labyrinth in which she subsequently found herself – read her book if you want your blood to freeze – but the Kafka-esque nature of it all reached a bizarre climax when, on day 60 of the investigation, her accusers filed yet more Title IX complaints. This time they were against a faculty member who had spoken out about her case, which he saw as a violation of her academic freedom, and against Morton Schapiro, who had written a column for the Wall Street Journal about academic freedom, a piece the accusers regarded as a veiled commentary on the Kipnis case (the president had, in fact, not mentioned it in his article).

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