The Counter-Enlightenment as Gotcha!

A little bit of Enlightenment is okay. But not when it threatens religion.

Similarly, democracy is noble and humane unless electorates choose progressive policies, in which case it’s mob rule and needs a stiff dose of authoritarianism.

And of course the free market is wisest of all, until brands decide gay dollars are still dollars, and then it’s mass extortion.

The question-begging is the fundamental belief that all this is guided by god. So if Enlightenment principles lead to liberal outcomes, it’s anti-religious by default.

“The very worst you could say about those who brought charges against Kipnis is that they are, in effect, shit-canning the Enlightenment.”

No, according to Dreher the very worst you can say is that their substantive agenda is “anti-human.” The irony is that these anti-human principles are the hidden core of the Enlightenment itself.

Believers could accept the Enlightenment for a long time, as a modus vivendi. But now that the window-dressing about religious freedom and toleration has fallen, the game is up.

I think this is the view Dreher is working towards: the best way of life is monastic, the second best is lay, but subordinated to and in service to the monastic. Moreover, anything besides this way of life will inevitably degenerate into moral monstrosity.

It’s not exactly an incoherent view in itself, and is not merely tu quoque. But it is in tension with other commitments of Dreher’s: he has a modern tourists’ rapturous delight in cuisines from around the world; he takes a perverse delight in aggregating follies of modern thought from the internet; he finds spiritual fulfillment in a tradition not his own, but selected by him, after experimentation with others, as if from a menu.

Not every medievalism need be in tension this way: I think some of the theologians he reads are just tragic declinists who really would choose the twelfth century. But I’m waiting for him to admit that *his* more cheerful “neo-medievalism” is deeply modern, in that its essence is swimming against the stream, for which it utterly needs the stream.

Thx for this. Your link to Dreher “kinda sorta said” leads to a blogger named Justin at the Dailynous, not Dreher. The link you’re looking for, I think, is here:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-gay-rights-revolution-in-ireland/

I recommend keep and credit the link to the Dailynous piece. Great background on the specifics of the case.

Re: conservatives are aghast. Perhaps some are. The ones I read are delighted. She is a well-known culture warrior on team blue. Now, Kipnis is being devoured by the beast (they say) she helped create. As for background, the general sense on the cynical right is that informed liberals know that feminists are overstating the threat of rape on campus in order to create a pro-Hillary frame. Kipnis is just collateral damage in this fight. On these issues I’m agnostic.

I think picking on Dreher is a bit mean-spirited, frankly. I used to read him when the National Review was part of my daily intake. I don’t recall Dreher’s writing to offer an ounce of the venom Derbyshire, Lowry and company served up on a regular basis. And I’m certainly not going to read Dreher or any other of his ilk for his intellectual heft.

From Dreher’s post on the enlightenment as part of his response to the gay marriage vote in Ireland:

“Yes. We must be realistic about where we are, and where we are likely to go. Liberalism and its institutions — including, note well, market capitalism — are not destroying Christianity and the traditional family because they are being perverted. They are destroying Christianity and the traditional family because it is in their nature to do so. This is not being forced on people — though their desires have certainly been manipulated — but it is something they have chosen, because it expresses what they believe to be the truth about being, about man, about meaning, and about liberty.”

I do think, however, that Dreher and company do have a point about the lack of political and intellectual diversity in US universities. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s certainly my impression, especially in the social sciences. As the UK election just taught us, that insularity and groupthink can have some unpleasant consequences.

Kipnis: “For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment.”

But this is about the defense of Enlightenment liberalism.

I’ll just go to the end of my comments right away and save time. Your second line begins “Where to start, where to start? Dreher” and you’ve pre-framed any discussion of what’s actually going on as “you can yell about it in comments if that is your bliss.” I’d be peeved if a newspaper skipped the “alleged criminal” phrasing and just wrote that someone was guilty of a crime prior to conviction, and I’d also be peeved if a newspaper wrote that a known person who said they were raped was just trying to get the person they accused in trouble, which is what Kipnis did. Does Kipnis get to write what a newspaper doesn’t because she’s an academic? Sure, but she also gets to suffer from academic rules in that case, which happened to involve a Title IX retaliation claim that was dismissed. That’s “pretty damn nuts” etc.

“Congratulations to all involved for providing the anti-PC brigade with such high-quality ammo!” is directed towards someone who seemingly believes that she was raped, because that’s who filed the Title IX case against Kipnis. Should she have not filed a case against someone for writing that she was a liar and that she was just trying to get her accused rapist in trouble? Probably not. Do I find the phrasing above troubling because it accepts Dreher’s view of what’s going on? Yes.

I don’t trust anyone here to really understand what’s going on and react in anything but a knee-jerk way depending on whether they’ve decided that it’s clearly feminist or clearly anti-feminist to defend or attack Kipnis. I don’t think that you have any chance of starting in the way and disentangling this into anything useful to anyone.

“The very worst you could say about those who brought charges against Kipnis is that they are, in effect, shit-canning the Enlightenment.”

Sorry to be pedantic, but I don’t think this interpretation is right, as it is the opposite of what Dreher is saying . As I read the articles, he is consistent in his deploring of the late Enlightenment* in both articles.

In the article on gay marriage he deplores gay marriage as an outcome of the sexual revolution which he writes was due to the logic of the Enlightenment; in the article on Kipnis he deplores the “social justice warriors” who brought charges, seeing them not as “shit-canning” the Enlightenment but rather as the product of the sexual revolution, so therefore, or so it is implied from the logic of the other article, the people who brought charges against Kipnis are also the late product of the Enlightenment.

*Dreher is not very good with his historical periods , seeming to think The Enlightenment just goes on for centuries. No one calls the 60s The Enlightenment as it is considered the post-modern era, and it seems some historians are thinking now the post-modern era has finished as there is a visiting historian next week lecturing on how the post-modern era ended in 2001. This will be interesting because then the long modern period stretching from the early modern period to the post-modern period should be over, which might be good for nature and sustainability.

So Dreher would do better if he critiqued the modern project which does go on for centuries unlike the Enlightenment, and if he did this he would also be at the very cutting edge of the discourse on what should replace the modern project.

JH: “For the record, I think what Kipnis originally wrote was horrible. I just don’t think that all horrible things people write are, plausibly, Title IX violations. ”

It wasn’t a Title IX violation. The claim that it was was dismissed.

Characterizing the person pursuing the Title IX claim as providing the anti-PC brigade with ammo for pursuing the claim is really agreeing with Kipnis. Title IX could be a bad law / regulation / policy without saying that it’s up to people who pursue claims to think about whether they are giving the anti-PC brigade ammo before they pursue them.

Bianca, it is more complicated than that but only a few months after reading her latest book I can’t remember enough to tell you how. I came away wondering why she considered herself a feminist and not liking her very much. That I remember, but not much else.

I think it was reasonable that the complainant brought the case, given that Title IX exists: I think it was reasonable that the case was dismissed. I think that nothing is gained except agreement with Dreher by characterizing bringing the case as providing ammo for anti-PC brigades.

Opening legal discrimination challenges based on opinion pieces is not a good thing. It makes the claims about liberals from conservatives true, it’s dramatically chilling to free speech, and I doubt that the Golden Rule would hold in terms of people welcoming being the targets of lawsuits themselves.

Random off topic observation. If I google Laura Kipnis, the “People also searched for…” list includes Jane Gallop, Andrea Dworkin, Eimear McBride and….Jaime Hernandez? I’m trying to work out what the Love and Rockets connection could possibly be.

Are people actually buying that Kipnis’s writing quoted in 12 is rightwing. Its exposing the fact that the left is losing because they aren’t even trying. Its a plea to up their gameplan.

I think an issue here, is that legislation which was written with good intentions can sometimes metastasize, as it appears that perhaps has happened to title nine. We have to be vigilant that our cures don’t end up becoming worse than the disease. And in the American hyperlegailistic system with many players desperately trying to protect their backsides, we see how something like this can morph into a witchhunt. If we want to retain any sort of credibility for future efforts to right social wrongs, we will have to deal with this issue.

Marc: “Opening legal discrimination challenges based on opinion pieces is not a good thing. It makes the claims about liberals from conservatives true,”

Why is it that the person who opened the challenge is best characterized as a “liberal” rather than someone who believed she was raped and that someone had just written an opinion piece saying that she’d made a false claim of rape? How does this person’s decision to open a case make any claims about liberals true?

Sorry: it’s The World BeyondYour Head

#32 – “someone who believed she was raped and that someone had just written an opinion piece saying that she’d made a false claim of rape”

The claim did not involve rape. One of the points Kipnis makes is that the accuser never claimed she was raped:

“He sued local media outlets for using the word “rape” as a synonym for sexual assault—a complaint thrown out by a different judge who said rape was an accurate enough summary of the charges, even though the assault was confined to fondling, which the professor denies occurred… What a mess. And what a slippery slope, from alleged fondler to rapist.”
http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/

(Ludlow appealed the dismissal of suit against the local media, and the appellate court affirmed the dismissal on the ludicrous ground that the headline using the word “rape” might have referred to someone else, and therefore it was not defamatory. It did not reach the question of whether “rape” means fondling and vice versa.
(http://www.illinoiscourts.gov/r23_orders/AppellateCourt/2015/1stDistrict/1142370_R23.pdf)

The Enlightenment got one thing right: the fundamental question is whether God invented man, or man invented God. The only testimony we have to the former is, not surprisingly, taken from men. Never mind that they’re wearing red shoes, or imperial starbursts and sashes on their chests, they’re just men, who, as my staunchly Jacobin father used to say, put their pants on the same way I do, one leg at a time. As far as we ordinary mortals can discern, God himself — if he exists — is mute.

To make a long story short, Ordnung muss sein, which I understand to be the essence of Dreher’s argument, is hardly a sufficient proof of the existence of God. It is, in fact, a non-sequitur masquerading as a moral imperative. Whose order? What ends is it intended to serve?

If the absence of a universal moral authority dumping us straightaway into depravity is our real problem, then giving our superegos an emergency religious injection might very well be the appropriate solution. The evidence suggests, however that Dreher, and in fact most conservatives, have no idea what our real problem is. The rest is just the braying of asses.

Dreher: “Now that liberalism has evolved into hostility to what I believe to be true about religion, morality, and human nature, I — like all orthodox Christians — have to face the fact that liberalism, which all of us Americans took in with our mother’s milk, may ultimately be alien to our faith, because in the end, it enthrones the choosing Self over God or any conception of external, transcendent Truth.”

What the hell does he mean by “orthodox Christian”? He evidently means something more than Trinitarian (e.g., not the Unitarian Universalists). Here is the closest he comes:

“The “new climate of prohibition concerning certain forms of thought and speech, an Orwellian revisionism directed at texts and records bearing witness to old ideas” is coming to America too. If you don’t see this, you are being willfully blind. Bishops and leaders of the orthodox, or at least officially orthodox, churches — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — who are not soberly but unhesitatingly preparing their people for this is a sign of their dereliction of duty.”

This is word salad.

As far as I can tell from context, an “orthodox Christian church” is one that forbids same-sex marriage. This is as fine an example of “no true Scotsman” as you are likely to find.

“I think it was reasonable that the complainant brought the case, given that Title IX exists: I think it was reasonable that the case was dismissed.” — RP

The cost of bringing a complaint is very low and the actual and potential cost of defending one is very high. How low do you want to set the bar?

Dreher :

One of the most difficult things for many American conservatives, especially religious conservatives, to accept is that gay marriage did not come from nowhere. It is the logical outcome of the Sexual Revolution, which in itself is the logical outworking of Enlightenment liberalism.

Christopher Lasch , “The Culture of Narcissism” :

Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, became absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business–pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure–on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal or merely immoral. [ …] In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeois itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.

Going back to Enlightenment values: consider Gibbon’s analysis of the polytheistic religions of the pre-Christian Roman empire (I’m quoting from memory, but I think I have the gist of it right):

“The various religions were considered by the populace as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.”

Guessing as to the CT commentariat’s view on that: I suspect that the true/false discriminant might lean towards Christianity/Islam/Hinduism as false, Sikhism/Buddhism as neutral, animism/paganism as false for different reasons. Am I wrong?

As for usefulness: a sensible Englishwoman once complained to me “the trouble is, I can’t see a way of getting the beneficial social effects of Christianity without intelligent persons like you and me having to pretend to believe in it”. I replied, ineffectively, that the Church of England used to be the solution to that problem. I should point out that Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, animism and paganism were at the time in England very much minority interests, as some still are.

Having read so much of Rod Dreher’s verbiage, I think it is remarkable that Holbo can, with such determined faith in his ability to find one, search for an argument in each new essay.

Dreher’s conservatism consists largely of the attitude that his prejudices and preferences should not require justification by argument. He finds things liberals are arguing about, or, more disturbing to him, have argued thru to some conclusion, and he complains. Whines, really. But, the core “argument” — presumption really, because no argument is argued — of every essay is to the effect that there should not be an argument, because it is all so obvious or faithful or something. All the bobbing and weaving as he tours the landscape of argument in the course of one of his essays is driven by rules of engagement that dictate no engagement by argument. He just wants to emote in reaction to what he notices, like the narrator of a travelogue, keeping up the calm front of a detached, but superior observer, even while he expresses hysterical alarm at how wrong-headed people who argue can become. The closest he seems to me to come to an argument in the Kipnis essay is when he exclaims in horror at the lowly status of the instigator of this assault on the prerogatives of authority, “A kid!”

Bruce Wilder @ 48

So, yes, Enlightenment Reason does expect us to try to agree, on the basis of reason and evidence, what the consequences of social institutions and policies may be, and to take responsibility for acting accordingly in deliberately instituting appropriate policies.

And of course, if we get it wrong, our betters will explain that we need to shut up and do what we’re told (that’s pretty much the history of gay marriage in the US).

Marc: “Opening legal discrimination challenges based on opinion pieces is not a good thing. It makes the claims about liberals from conservatives true”

Interesting fact: we don’t know anything about the politics of the person who filed the complaint. The whole premise of this right-wing mudfest is grotesque.

MPAV @41

The article by Kipnis is beyond dumb. Typical “kids these days” nonsense combined with rape apologia…

I don’t agree with this characterization of her piece. I read it only once, rather quickly, and a week or so ago, but it seems to me most of her criticism was directed not to students but to university administrators who are guilty, in her view, of “infantilizing” students and depriving them of autonomy. Now, one can agree or disagree with her argument and the way it is made and the evidence adduced (or not), but to suggest she was engaged in “rape apologia” I think is inaccurate.

@52: We do know for certain that they targeted the writer of an opinion piece with legal action. People on the left had no trouble understanding why it was a problem to sue scientists in court for studying climate change; we have no trouble understanding why corporate lawsuits against activists are a problem. It’s also a problem when speech that we don’t like gets slammed with lawsuits.

That’s a different matter from disagreeing with what someone writes: the idea, that writing an editorial that you disagree with *creates a hostile work environment* isn’t a borderline case. The fact that it’s hard for people here to see that is an indication of an actual problem.

@53

Do you think two lawyers hired by your employer showing up at your door threatening you with the potential loss of your job is a slap on the wrist? Esp. if your told by your employer that you can’t have representation during your “interview”/deposition?

If your answer is yes, I think you should give a trigger warning before you post.

I am immediately suspicious of those who readily turn to the Law/State/Administration to resolve problems that can also be handled through private or public discourse. Likewise, I am immediately sympathetic to those who are forced to confront the Law, in its various forms, in modern American society.

Rich, I am surprised to see you so quick to declare this all tidied-up, because the ultimate decision was a reasonable one. The process itself is quite trying, in many ways. ‘Kafka’, as they say.

But seriously : the conservatives were right on this one. We should be troubled by how neatly this sort of dust-up fits (along w/ others) into the narrative they have been spinning for a while now.

Amanda Marcotte, who considers Kipnis the “enemy,” nonetheless acerbically attacks the Title IX complainants for having made her a “martyr” and doing “what a million Wall Street Journal editorials could not, which is destroy all the good work that is being done using Title IX to combat rape and sexual abuse on campus… Worse, a bunch of liberals who otherwise were fully supportive of feminist efforts to fight sexual abuse on campus now think Title IX is cover for some censorious re-education efforts.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/good-work-laura-kipnis-critics-you-made-your-enemy-a-martyr

Not to beat a thoroughly dead horse until it’s completely flayed, but this sounds a hell of a lot like Freddie de Boer’s “backlash” argument.

A lot of CT commenters thought that Jay Caspian Kang’s “the backlash is you” was just excellent. Well, maybe not only.

You know, some people thought it was just hilarious to read that Amanda Marcotte would NEVER FUCK BONERS!!!!

He never asked Amanda Marcotte to fuck him. He did say that it’s stupid to alienate allies. When he said it, it was because he a sexist pig phony feminist. Now that it actually matters, Marcotte is saying it. What a surprise.

That the charges were dropped is a good thing, but they shouldn’t have been brought in the first place

It’s probably been said by now (sorry, not reading previous comments) but this is not sustainable. Any liberal judicial system allows people to state their case, and then decides how that case should be resolved. If the charges here were dismissed, then the system functioned as it was supposed to. What you are implicitly calling for here is that the charges should have been found without merit before any formal evaluation of them took place. How is that supposed to work?

Either you want to deny students the right to any process for making complaints against professors. Or, you want to accept that some unjustified complaints will be made, which a well-designed process will reject. (As happened here.) It doesn’t make sense to ask for a process in which the only complaints that will even be heard are the ones that are already known to be justified.

If we want students to be protected from sexual harassment, we also want professors to sometimes be wrongly accused of sexual harassment. You can’t hear the legitimate complaints without also hearing the illegitimate ones.

The posters at 58 and 60 seem to suggest that private individuals shouldn’t have the right to file legal complaints (whether through the courts or, in this case, through a university anti-discrimination office). It’s a position remarkable only for its insanity. Prof. Kipnis didn’t lose her job and I doubt she was “threatened with losing her job” (I’m not sure what kind of sanctions she would have faced if the complaint had been found justified, but job loss is reserved for the most extreme cases of misconduct). I suggest anybody drumming on about how conservatives were “proved right” about the liberal-fascist world order by the fact that a professor didn’t lose her job because of her public writing should now be compelled to write at least a 200 word essay about the Salaita case.

Interesting case: a Jesuit university is trying to fire a professor. He thinks he is being singled out for his public stance *against* gay marriage. A Jesuit university! O tempora o mores. Where does that leave Dreher? (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2015/02/john_mcadams_marquette_tries_to_fire_tenured_professor_over_blog_post_about.html)

Yes, TM I wholeheartedly believe that private individuals should not have the right to file legal complaints. I appreciate your commitment to a healthy discussion.

geo@49: I’m not impugning the character of people who admire Lasch (I’ve read your book, so I know you’re among their number), maybe I should take another look at The Culture of Narcissism. I read it years ago, and it didn’t impress me at the time. It just seemed like a lot of cranky get-off-my-lawn fist shaking.

Z @ 43

Is it a debate within feminism? I guess I’m contradicting myself, but my point was that the glee rightwing commentators are expressing is that someone who “obviously” is very far on the left is being attacked for no good reason by other people who are presumably very far on the left. This proves, apparently, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. Where if people are just disagreeing with each other, their fun is lessened, because there’s no problem with people having different opinions. And if this is a woman who’s on or moving to the right, being attacked by those she just criticized in print last month, it’s just victimology, not glee at the left’s and liberals’ supposingly going Donner Party.

JW Mason and TM, even if every word in those accusations was true against Kipnis, it wouldn’t amount to a can of beans. Public commentary on matters of public concern is exactly what academic freedom exists to protect. The correct response is to dismiss the complaint entirely, just as what happens when someone files a lawsuit where the facts don’t meet the law.

The whole point of these complaints was to punish her for her disagreement with a policy, by calling that disagreement retaliation. By forcing her to consult a lawyer, and go through the investigation, for a complaint that could have been dropped immediately, the intended effect was achieved. The message is clear: if you don’t have tenure, or don’t want to run the risk of a star chamber proceeding, don’t comment on political matters in a way some people don’t like.

Perhaps this is a slight derail (not that we seem to be on any sort of unified track anyway), but I’m a little confused and bothered by the retreat to biology in debates about gay rights. I know it’s not meant that way, but when you frame the argument about gay rights in terms of the biology of homosexuality, you’re implicitly conceding that if the orientation were somehow voluntary, then it might be permissible to judge it by different moral standards.

This, of course, is wrong. Whether homosexuality is “inborn” or “chosen” is irrelevant when it comes to rights. There just isn’t any basis for condemning homosexuality, period; that’s the real Enlightenment conclusion, which you get when you strip away all of the tendentious bullshit from the conservative arguments. Dreher, as I said in the last Holbo thread on this topic, sees this much more clearly than his opponents do, because it’s hard not to see the gun pointed right in your face.

74, I said “Public stance”, which implies speech doesn’t it?

WL 73, who was trying to “punish” Kipnis? A graduate student. You’d have a case if some rich (“liberal”, “feminist”) donor had called the Chancellor and asked her to get rid of Kipnis under the pretext that her essay was insensitive or whatever to students, and the Chancellor had complied. But that of course would never happen now would it? Oh wait.

I’m gonna repeat this ceterum censeo ad nauseam: anybody continuing to insist that the fact that a university investigated, and dismissed a complaint filed by an unnamed student against a professor for an op-ed she had written is a case of liberal thought police should be compelled to write at least a 200 word essay about the Salaita case.

Always interesting to read discussion on these issues from America. Sometimes I envy you the freedom of speech you have, sometimes I think (as in this case) that some basic principles of justice have gone missing in the veneration of ‘freedom of speech’.

I’m definitely on the Rich side on this one! (Happy because I generally am, and felt something went awry in our recent disagreement)

I once made a complaint of sexual discrimination and harrassment against some prominent individuals in the state where I live. It was in the civil courts, because the institution where I was working didn’t have any policies or procedures around this kind of thing (it was in the 90s, and the lack of internal policies was part of the problem).

I don’t know what I would have done if a prominent person from that institution had published commentary on my case suggesting it was ridiculous or unfounded while the case was ongoing. However it wouldn’t have just been up to me, as it would have been generally seen as prejudicial to my right to fair hearing and fair treatment, and I don’t think any reputable paper would have published it.

Maybe I’m wrong in the parallels I’m seeing here, but if the original
case was ongoing when Kitnis published these comments, I’m amazed that she was able to.

However I have to say that we did have a somewhat similar cause célèbre here when Helen Garner (well known writer) published a book criticising two young women for bringing a complaint against a prominent academic at Melbourne Uni, though I think – hope – it was after the complaints were settled. She’s a wonderful writer, but it was an appalling attack on young women in my view. Caused huge arguments.

#70: Spoke like a gentleman, sir.

Val, plenty of newspapers and radio stations expressed opinions on the guilt of OJ Simpson, and got in exactly zero trouble for it. Prosecutors would of course love it if you couldn’t stand up in public for the rights of the accused provided the victim was suitably sympathetic. The public can see exactly what happens in court, and decide for themselves if the result is just. Permitting discussion of ongoing cases helps the cause of justice.

TM, imagine if the police came to your house to ask questions about an article you wrote, said someone was filing charges about it, and months later, they were quietly dismissed, after you spent weeks worrying. Don’t you think the person who filed those charges, did so because of what you said? And wouldn’t you worry in the future about what might get you in trouble?

Watson, anybody continuing to insist that the fact that a university investigated, and dismissed a complaint filed by an unnamed student against a professor for an op-ed she had written is a case of liberal thought police should be compelled to write at least a 200 word essay about the Salaita case.

Rich Puchalsky: The concern about “ammo” isn’t necessarily rooted in any notion that tarring groups with the brush of individuals is actually rational or sensible. The point can be “Hey, Guy With A Sign syndrome exists among the public at large. Hence, don’t be a guy with a sign if it’s not a terrific sign.”

I’m probably going to “prove conservatives right” here, but if the type of speech that Title IX “chills” is professors attacking or slandering individual, named or easily identifiable students in nationally visible media outlets (be it CHE or a widely read blog), then I’m all for chilling effects on free speech.
There’s a big difference between writing an opinion piece and using students as convenient illustration for an opinion piece. E.g. Northwestern is consistently protecting the free speech of our in-house Holocaust denier–rightly so. But I’m quite sure that if he were ever to use individual Jewish students to “illustrate” his points about mendacious Jews, he’d be in trouble–and again, rightly so.
Same with Kipnis–she has every right to write her anti-feminist claptrap, no matter how dumb&offensive it is (and it’s plenty of both). I’m not so sure her right to slander students in the national media is a type of academic freedom that needs protection.

TM, the question isn’t about filing the complaint. It’s that the complaint is complaining about activity that isn’t retaliation. If I accused you of murdering my parents, because you ate a waffle on Monday, it would get tossed out of court. Same here: public commentary on important matters is not sexual discrimination. The eventual dismissal of this complaint comes far too late, just as eventual victory in a libel suit can bankrupt defendants. Of course this was motivated by opposition to what the piece said: that’s exactly what the complaint was about. There is zero reason to suspect an investigation would have taken place if the piece had supported the student.

Why should I have to rehash the Salaita case if I want to talk about this one? Do we also need to drag John Zenger and Galileo into this? The simple fact is that students are increasingly complaining about which ideas are presented in the curriculum, treating it as a matter of discrimination, and using administrative measures to get relief. No more Fanon! No more Ovid! No more Nabokov!

TM
74, I said “Public stance”, which implies speech doesn’t it?

Yes, but what I was trying to get at, and did not state clearly, is that a quick reading of that linked Inside Higher Ed piece (as re-carried at Salon) shows that the professor in question wrote a blog post that apparently criticized, by name, a grad student instructor in the way she handled a class (the gay marriage angle comes in only somewhat indirectly). Marquette is not trying to fire him b.c he wrote or said “I am against gay marriage.” Marquette’s saying he wrote a blog post that attacked a student instructor and had various bad consequences, was irresponsible, etc. The prof is saying this violates ac. freedom. There are probably arguments on both sides, but the idea that a prof can be fired for a blog post, except in the most extreme circumstances which I’m not at all sure this case rises to the level of, should ring alarm bells, istm. (It’s true that since Marquette is a private university this prob isn’t strictly speaking a First Amendment case (which requires state action) but that’s a different point.)

I’m somewhat surprised by the defenses of the administration here. The murder analogy is used by a few people above, and it is instructive when used properly in this case.

In most places murder is defined as something like “intentional unlawful killing of another human being.” There are all sorts of legal nuances about ‘intentional’, ‘unlawful’, ‘killing’ and ‘human being’ which can make edge cases difficult. If someone reports a murder, and the police have a reason to believe that the report is true, their job is to investigate. They may find in their investigation that murder has not been committed–maybe the killing was unintentional, maybe it was lawful, maybe the person died of an unrelated heart attack. But with mysterious disappearances or dead bodies, they have to look into it.

However if someone comes in and says “I want to report a murder–Amanda ate corn last night” it turns out that the police don’t actually have to open a murder investigation. They can and SHOULD say “eating corn isn’t murder, what are you talking about?”. The proper response is NOT to open a murder investigation, force Amanda to come to the station for questioning, deny her the right to have legal counsel, charge her with murder, mull it over for a few weeks, have an internal debate about further investigation and then hopefully come to the right decision about whether or not you should continue. If that is your response to even ridiculous charges, your system is set up for harassing people, not investigating murders.

The problem here isn’t stopping people from making complaints, it is dealing with bad faith complaints, or deeply confused complaints at an early juncture. Kipnis’s op-ed ought not be considered retaliation for reporting sexual assault. Given that the proper remedy for retaliation under Title IX would be firing the professor and making her unemployable as a professor at any school which takes any federal funds, the complaint should essentially be considered doxing and shows that the complainants are either raging assholes, or have something else going on. The proper response from the administration should not have been a secretive investigation, it should have been “the facts you are giving us, even if totally true, are protected by free speech, protected by tenure, and aren’t retaliation. So unless you have more facts to give us, we won’t be investigating further”.

If it turns out that Title IX is so ridiculous that these facts ‘should’ trigger an investigation, then Title IX ought to be drastically modified. I tend to think that these facts shouldn’t trigger an investigation, so the fact that they did suggests a serious problem somewhere in the process.

I’m not saying that you can always stop ridiculous complaints from being made. But when they are self-evidently ridiculous they need to be dismissed at a very early stage. The problem is either that they weren’t dismissed initially because of a flaw in the school’s process, or because of flaw in Title IX.

As I said upthread, I read the Kipnis piece some while ago. I was sufficiently impressed with the writing, if not every single aspect of the argument, to e-mail it to someone. It was sharp, polemical, perhaps somewhat exaggerated in its rhetoric as a good deal of writing these days is (esp. on the Internet but not only there). That someone filed a legal complaint on the basis of this piece, especially since no proper names were mentioned in the piece at all as far as I can recall, is … I can’t think of a suitable word. I guess “absurd” will do. (And that wd be the case even if one took a much more negative view of the piece, along the lines of MPAV or, indeed, Holbo, who called it “horrible.”)

As Watson Ladd says, the Kipnis piece is public commentary on matters of interest to at least a reasonably sized readership. It did not strike me as libelous (any more than does a fairly standard op-ed column by some columnist with pronounced views and a tendency to rhetorical excess). Should people file tort claims or claims alleging some form of discrimination every time a columnist, say Krauthammer, spews his idiocies across the op-ed page? Whatever happened to the idea that the remedy for bad or even somewhat offensive speech is more and better speech? Didn’t basically everyone who went through elem or jr high school in the US have to memorize the slogan “freedom even for the thought that one hates”? Is it so supposedly old-fashioned that no one believes it any more? Is it “the elite dominate the real channels of influence so nothing else really matters”? /end of rant/

I’m sorry not to be addressing the OP on Dreher and the Enlightenment etc. but I really don’t care what Dreher says about anything. I don’t know anything about him (except that’s he’s a conservative) and I have no intention of reading anything he has written. Issues involving free speech, on the other hand, are of some interest to me and in this instance it so happens I had read the original piece that kicked off the fuss.

my guess is that she’s a second-wave feminist, like Ellen Willis or Wendy Kaminer, who identifies sexual freedom as a necessary step toward healthy (hetero)sexuality, and doesn’t like the turn feminism took after the seventies

There’s a bit of this, but she’s also coming from an explicitly Marxist background (this is quite clear in Against Love, e.g.), and she’s really into Freud (unfortunately)—and has been from the beginning, I think. So that by itself puts her at least somewhat outside the mainstream of American feminism (including the second wave, I would think). I liked Men more than most, but (a) it’s not so far from what you’d have expected given The Female Thing, esp. the last chapter, and (b) it’s definitely problematic, and I think more so than her previous. (I do really like her writing, which is probably why I’ve read most of her books.)

Sorry this is rather OT—I really have no thoughts about (a) Dreher, and thus (b) Dreher on liberalism. But I am very much in agreement with JH @84 re the Weinberg piece.

As far as I know we don’t have to ‘retaliation’ here, we only have ‘victimisation’ and the grounds for that is that someone subjected you to detriment because you made an equal opportunity complaint. In my case, I made victimisation complaints against several people, one of whom was not involved in my original complaint. All of them were found to have substance, but all were settled before hearing. They were all successful in the sense that I got a settlement that I was prepared to accept, and in fact they contributed to later improvements in policy and practice.

I’m not, as I said, familiar with the American system, but I do think I can confidently say that all this “Amanda ate corn” stuff is silly. Kipnis made derogatory published comments that reflected on students who had made complaints they were legally entitled to make. Whether or not this meets the grounds for retaliation under your laws is a different issue, but it clearly isn’t “eating corn”.

It’s get interesting to ask why some people get so hyperbolic about this stuff I think.

Just one more thing about this quote (since we’re now talking about Kipnis anyway):

I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square.

People do realize Kipnis is joking, right? I mean, they must, but there’s never any acknowledgement, oddly. (For one thing: this is straight up lifted from one of the essays in Men. I can’t find my copy right (suggesting I’ve lost it), so I can’t look it up, but I think it may be the one where she talks about Naomi Wolf and Harold Bloom. Anyway, it’s an obvious use of irony in the original context, and it would be at a minimum bizarre if LK were using it in a completely different manner the second time around.)

To be very clear, I’m not defending Kipnis here. But I do think there’s a possible problem with people often misreading her because her writing is so polemical and, well, the opposite of earnest.

This piece (the “sexual paranoia” one in the Chronicle) was, I think, the first thing by Kipnis I’ve read. I’ve been re-reading bits of it just now and, on reflection, I can see why it aroused some strong disagreement. My main takeaway from the piece was her criticism of a prevailing “cultural climate” (I think she used that phrase), and I thought she mobilized specifics not so much to ‘call out’ particular individuals but mainly to support her general point. Even though she named no names, she probably got too specific — not nec. from a legal standpoint, but from an essayistic one. The piece might have made the same points and aroused less ire had she been a tad more measured or cautious and not referred, even without the names, to these recently closed and/or ongoing cases. Since I haven’t re-read the whole thing, I’ll leave it at that. (Btw/ftr, I would oppose, as generally a bad idea, romantic liaisons, even if ‘consensual’, between faculty and undergraduates. Not that such a thing would have even entered my somewhat cloistered mental universe as an undergrad in the late 1970s. A quite different experience from Kipnis’s own as a student, at least to judge from this piece.)

JH: “But the fact remains: Kipnis didn’t discuss the graduate student’s case – or imply anything about it. She discussed a different case, one not ongoing, and she expressed negative opinions about the state of Title IX enforcement. […] If I’m wrong about this, feel free to correct me.”

OK. From here:

Complainants in the case told The Huffington Post that they reached out to Kipnis about their concerns, and she did not offer to correct her piece. They then turned to the Chronicle and asked for specific corrections. One sticking point was Kipnis’ assertion that in the second case she described, the unnamed professor and the graduate student were dating. In a similar case on campus, the student in question has said she was not dating the professor. The Chronicle has since changed its wording to say that “according to his complaint,” the professor and student had previously dated.

So the sequence goes like this: grad student says that she was raped by a professor, that she had never dated the professor as the professor counterclaimed, and files a Title IX complaint. Kipnis, at the same university, then writes an article and in it the only thing she mentions about the grad student is that she was dating the professor: in other words, she impeaches the grad student’s version of events in keeping with her emphasis on false claims of rape. That’s only reason the grad student is even mentioned in the piece.

Is it common knowledge who the grad student is on campus? I’d guess so, or it’s easily discoverable since the professor sued her. Did Kipnis mention the grad student in the article as retaliation for what she considered to be the student’s groundless Title IX claim? I don’t know, but this doesn’t strike me as especially unbelievable. There’s no reason to mention the professor’s account that he was dating the grad student without also mentioning the grad student’s account that she was raped by the professor unless you want to bring up her story and indicate who you believe.

To get back to Dreher, one of the interesting things is how little he knows about religious history. Because one of the most radically individualistic and autonomous ideas in the early Christian centuries was celibacy. It was opting out of society in the most drastic way possible: because of high death rates, if you refused to procreate, you were contributing to the possible extinction of your society. If you were an (upper-class) woman and decided to remain a virgin, you were also thwarting the entire power structure of families in society. The early Christian texts are full of the heroes and heroines who resisted in this way, not to mention all the martyrs who obeyed their conscience rather than their families and wouldn’t recant their faith.

And even marriage wasn’t all about families and children to them. Augustine hammers away at the fact that a husband shouldn’t divorce his wife because she’s infertile: even if you get married to have a family, you need to stay married if you can’t have one.

So Dreher’s theology, such as it is, is some weird conglomeration of religion and worship of the family that probably only made sense in mid twentieth-century largely Protestant America. And to make another obvious point, getting married is about as non-individual a thing as possible that you can do. You’re explicitly proclaiming that someone else’s well-being is your concern. The individualistic thing to do sexually is never to commit to anyone, to make no sincere promises to anyone.

Same-sex marriage reveals what both religious conservatives and sexual radicals have been trying to ignore: that gay people, like straight people, have relationship preferences that range from the conventional to the unique. A lot of gay people turn out not to want to undo all conventional marriage/family structures, but just to get their share of it. To those who want to remake society and abolish the family, that’s disappointing. But it’s also disappointing to religious conservatives who have spent decades claiming that the “gay lifestyle” is intrinsically promiscuous. To Dreher, gay people are “disordered” and so they shouldn’t want the order of monogamy. To have it turn out that some of them do undermines the Catholic church’s demonization of gay people.

“A system of rules, whose application to particular circumstance can be deduced from a few simple principles and precedents, might satisfy, provided it was accepted as legitimate and everyone could reason out most cases to commonly accepted conclusions, and so avoid disputes in the vast majority of conflicts.”

So me and a few friends will just nut out out a few simple principles tomorrow, put them on the internet, and that’s solved. Really, don’t know what all the fuss has been about!

Dreher’s line is an old one: if you peer too hard at the veil, the mystery goes away. And if the mystery goes away, no-one has any reason to accept the social order that exists (as most people’s conception of their rightful interest is much larger than their actual interest), and THAT’S THE END OF CIVILISATION. And he’s both right and wrong. That particular mystery goes away but, since civilisation requires a validating mystery, another one replaces it.

js @109

This made me curious so I looked it up and you are right, that is verbatim from the book, from a note on the Gropers chapter. I think you are right, too, that she’s not serious, but maybe “joking” isn’t quite the right word? She would reluctantly concede there should be some negative consequences for harassment, sometimes. As lukewarm a concession as possible.

Sebastian H: “When you file a complaint which if true would naturally lead to that person getting fired and barred from all future jobs of that type, you are engaging in something that ought to be admonished if you ought not be trying to get them fired over it.”

Stop Snitching!

But of course this is the conservative version in which perquisites of the wealthy and powerful are accepted without question — any major boss in the U.S. can fire employees at will and with a bad reference that effectively bars the person from future jobs of that type — but when a powerless person gets the potential for doing the same thing through a judicial procedure, it becomes terrifying. And of course the moral responsibility is put not on the law, or the people who administer the law, but on the complainant. Even when the person *isn’t fired*, the moral responsibility is put on the complainant for exciting Rush Limbaugh or Dreher or someone.

JH 120, you are maneuvering yourself into an untenable position. We don’t even know whether the individuals involved (the student, the lawyer hired by the university) are liberals. How can the personal conduct of somebody who might not identify as liberal be objectively blamed on liberalism? Unless you really want to go back to the authors of the law and argue that they should have foreseen that some forty years later somebody would file a complaint under the law that might not have merit, which then would provide ammo against liberalism. Which is an interesting position and I’m sure would make for an animated discussion in your seminar.

magistra 118 is exactly right. You are a liberal and your book is used as ammo against liberalism, that’s an objective fact. That the ammo is constructed dishonestly through tendentious misinterpretation doesn’t change the fact that it was you who provided the opportunity to create that tendentious misinterpretation. Knowing how the right operates, you should have foreseen that precisely that would happen and therefore never written the book.

Peter T,

“Dreher’s line is an old one: if you peer too hard at the veil, the mystery goes away. And if the mystery goes away, no-one has any reason to accept the social order that exists ”

Dreher had an experience of praying to Mary for 30 days after his college years and she answered him, and in an article he writes about saying the rosary with someone who had a statue of Mary and he saw tears form in the statue’s eyes. Also he is critical of the social order thinking people are too materialistic and should live simply and care more for the environment.

js.,

So (referring back mostly to your earlier comment), is it entirely the reader’s responsibility to do the work of figuring out what the writer has in mind, reading everything she’s written and said in interviews, and knowing the background of all her influences? It seems logical to conclude that expecting the writer to do the work is kind of infantilizing, right? But it’s not like she’s a powerless girl who can only make funny comments and wait for her menfolk to draw the serious conclusions, or who is capable only of echoing them. She wrote an op-ed, and that puts her in a totally different position than some random schmo off the street, of whichever gender. I’m not going to deny her agency by pretending that she wrote something different from what she did.

And I agree (again to js.) that Freud and Freudians often seems to be in the vicinity of the unfortunateness–it’s what makes Lasch not just infuriating but unreadable, to take an example that’s been mentioned on this thread.

@ bianca s.
Some of the essays Lasch wrote, for NYRB and elsewhere, in the 60s and early 70s, many of which are collected in his The World of Nations, are readable and worth reading.

Z,

I know you’re French, but I’m at a loss to figure out what your specific question or objection is. Can you be more specific?

LFC,

Yes, I’ve heard that Lasch’s early writing was well though of in Left and Marxist circles when it appeared and is still interesting. It’s not exactly easy to find, though (maybe Boston Public Library employees stole the stack copies).

130: taking that “academic freedom” thing too seriously, I guess?

Can someone who’s read Kipnis tell me whether there are any books by her that actually discuss film, and not just pornographic films (which seems to be her academic specialty, but which this reader has little interest in learning about)?

Rich, I’m sorry, you are of course right.

The sentence about infantilizing was meant to be ironic, a reduction ad absurdum.

Kipnis seems to expect that female students should be learning to stand up for themselves in a lawless environment, an environment conditioned only by sexual libido, and by the exercise of power. To expect the powerful to be constrained by rules, she thinks, infantilizes those who benefit from constraints on power: it implies that women are less powerful than men. Kipnis is clear that, in her opinion, no amount of honest self-reflection on women’s part can permit them to conclude that they are the powerless ones.

Should we then not, in turn, view requests that writers be more clear and frank, in the same light? Is it not “infantilizing” to insist that it’s the writer’s responsibility to make his meaning obvious, not the reader’s to “do her homework”? Surely she should take some responsibility for the outcome of the transactions! (This paragraph is ironic, and in being made explicit, pulled the discussion off-topic and put too much weight on js.’s offhand remark. Sorry for the confusion.)

#136 – As I understand it, “Liberal Harry” said nothing that provided any ammo to anyone. Liberal Harry’s co-author, Adam Swift, said some things in an interview that were perfectly reasonable but perhaps could have used a bit more context for a lay audience. His words were then distorted out of all recognition by the Australian Broadcasting Company presenter, who argued, apparently seriously, that the implication of the Brighouse/Swift book was a straight-forward “Harrison Bergeron” public policy:

“This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion that perhaps — in the interests of levelling the playing field — bedtime stories should also be restricted.”

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/reading-to-children-at-bedtime-abc-questions-value-of-time-honoured-practice/story-fni0cx12-1227335151442

The presenter’s misrepresentation was maliciously printed in the Telegraph as the opinion of Brighouse/Swift, and that was taken up by a few of the American howler monkeys on the right, like Limbaugh (Anne Althouse defended Brighouse/Swift, but her commenters did their usual throwing shit thing).

I do think that academics like all specialists need to be aware of the level of discourse appropriate for a lay radio audience. I don’t think that either Brighouse or Swift provided anything remotely like “ammo against liberalism.”

dsquared@130: Why “dumb”? Criticizing your employer would seem to be, ceteris paribus, an especially laudable thing to do.

Bloix 145: ” As I understand it, “Liberal Harry” said nothing that provided any ammo to anyone.” The right wingers disagree. Who am I to believe?

I started the discussion of what “liberals” should or shouldn’t do and I obviously didn’t make my argument clear enough, so I’ll try again. John doesn’t want “frivolous” claims to be made about sexual harassment, which is fair enough: no-one wants frivolous claims made about anything. But he then goes on to add that frivolous claims about sexual harassment specifically shouldn’t be made because they encourage the enemy/anti-liberals.

What worries me is that a lot of cover-ups of genuine sexual misconduct work by the abuser and their supporters insisting that the complaint is frivolous and that to take it seriously would mean encouraging the enemy (whether it’s anti-Catholics, anti-gays etc). I don’t think John meant it in that way, but I dislike the rhetoric of “frivolous” claims about abuse being combined with arguments about giving comfort to the enemy precisely because such a rhetorical strategy is so often misused by people who want to turn a blind eye to abuse.

Meanwhile, Rod has had more to say:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/liberal-prof-afraid-of-mao-ish-students/

The Kipnes comment about chemical castration et al. is just about boilerplate in conservative denial of rape. First, make a statement about the extremely stern punishment you would impose on those *few* cases where there *really* was rape or sexual harassment, so people know you take it *very seriously*. Then make largely unsubstantiated claims about victims falsifying claims, or women asking for it, ad nauseam. Or use it as a preface for why you are cutting funds for the rape crisis shelter, or the special victims unit that actually makes it more likely that these crimes will actually make it to trial. It’s the sexual harassment version of “some of my best friends are…”

The complaint and investigation in this case is confidential, right? So all we know about the complaint is what Kipnes said about it, is that correct? I ask because I think one completely plausible point is that there may have been more to the complaint than just “she wrote an article”. There may well have been other accusations in the students complaint that a reasonable investigator would consider worthy of investigating, but which can’t be revealed because of the applicable confidentiality and privacy requirements.

If the complaint was simply that the article was retaliation, then it does seem it should have been dismissed upfront. But my guess is that the reason it wasn’t dismissed was due to institutional whiplash rather than a deep flaw in the title IX process. Right now there are several major investigations into institutions for failing to investigate or belittling genuine and egregious examples of sexual assaults and sexual harassment. Whoever was in charge of the Title IX process at that school, either fearing an investigation or genuinely concerned that they had too quickly dismissed legit cases in the past, decides to investigate everything, just to be sure (or to CYA). Or they figured that because it was a high-profile situation with the accuser already involved in several complaints and possibly lawsuits that it would be better to do an official investigation so that Kipnes would be “exonerated after a full investigation”, etc. After this controversy, they will be a little more likely to dismiss.

In a bureaucracy, decisions are often made based on these sorts of local considerations. It doesn’t necessarily indicate an overarching problem, except perhaps of the nature of bureaucracy.

TM.
I’m not saying that because there are a lot of people in the low personal power set, that they shouldn’t be allowed to register complaints. I’m just saying that there needs to be some filter to eliminate the frivolous ones. And it isn’t our justice system involved (which already has imperfect as they may be a filtering function). The problem is we simply have administrative review, with the real potential for star chambers. Thats where some judicious filtering needs to be applied.

#149 – link to “the right-wingers” who attack something Brighouse said or wrote, please.

Is it this?
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/reading-to-children-at-bedtime-abc-questions-value-of-time-honoured-practice/story-fni0cx12-1227335151442
No, the Telegraph quotes the ABC interview with Swift, doesn’t mention Brighouse.

Is it this?
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/05/05/liberals_reading_to_your_kids_gives_them_an_unfair_advantage
No, Limbaugh attacks Swift, doesn’t mention Brighouse.

Is it this?
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2015/05/i-dont-think-parents-reading-their.html
No, Althouse praises Swift and Brighouse. Her commenters dump on what Swift said, but not anything Brighouse said or wrote.

Is it this? http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/22365/
No, he quotes Swift and says nice things about Brighouse.

Is it this?
http://www.independentsentinel.com/leftists-opine-reading-bedtime-stories-promotes-social-inequality/
No, he quotes Swift and the ABC article.

But don’t worry about the facts, believe what you want. Believe in unicorns if it makes you happy.

Slightly off-topic but North Carolina just enacted a law that gives employers powers to specifically sue whistle-blower employees (guess how many frivolous law-suits that will spawn!).

The governor had even vetoed the bill, stating: “I believe [the bill] does not adequately protect or give clear guidance to honest employees who uncover criminal activity. I am concerned that subjecting these employees to potential civil penalties will create an environment that discourages them from reporting illegal activities.”

Conservatives are all up in arms against that massive threat to free speech. Just kidding … what really threatens free speech in this free country are student complaints.

ragweed @ 155: The Kipnes comment about chemical castration et al. is just about boilerplate in conservative denial of rape.

I think it was sarcasm. And, sarcasm aimed at people, she thinks have lost all sense of humane proportion, an Enlightenment value. She’s responding to what she sees as a demand that she engage in ritual denouncement, and one that entails in its emphatic passion, an unwarranted extremity of policy.

Marc — you’ve said this twice now — I still don’t understand why you think everyone subject to a successful Title IX complaint is getting fired when that’s quite clearly factually incorrect. E.g. As a result of the internal investigation at Northwestern, Prof. Ludlow had been found in violation of university policy for sexual assault on the undergraduate student and was not, as a consequence, fired. So D1) The complaint is valid and Kipnis should have received a commensurate punishment, e.g. an official censure to be placed in her file. This was, incidentally, what happened in the case of the Marquette professor, who had been previously admonished not to attack Marquette students in his nationally ready blog. It is my understanding that the fact that he repeatedly did so after being admonished that let to his dismissal.

Also, of course, Justin Weinberg and Rich Puchalsky are arguing something closer to B2) which you conveniently leave out: The details of the case were, in fact, not sufficiently clear without some degree of investigation, after which the complaint was correctly dismissed. (Personally I think both B2 or D1 are possible. I don’t know enough).

Now, I wonder if the fact that you left out these options means that you’re
A) Incapable of basic argumentative logic or
B) Engaging in willfully dishonest arguments ;)

ugh, last one — this was addressed to Sebastian H., not Marc

Norwegian Guy @ 167

Is this ban on working for universities that takes government funds a lifetime ban, or for a set number of years?

Well–that’s the tricky part. It’s not a technical ban–which would probably be flatly illegal. It’s more of a “we will scold you publicly, and threaten you privately, if you do XYZ”–it’s the same basic tactic as used in a lot of banking regulation. It’s not illegal to process credit cards for donations to Snowden, but it “might expose you to risks which should be thoroughly evaluated.” It’s not illegal to hire someone found to have retaliated under Title IX (and we haven’t really defined what that means) but “it will probably increase scrutiny of your eligibility for funding.”

I am not. On the other hand, 1) the new definition of Title IX compliance is only 4 years old, which isn’t long in bureaucracies and 2) I don’t think tenured faculty are the most vulnerable population.

I am aware of banks getting out of a lot of transaction processing roles with controversial clients. I am aware of people losing jobs in other sectors due to contributing to populist causes that the elites hate.

Sorry that should be CU Boulder.

Oh look, Dreher has a new post about Freud.

In writing this, I am taking a break right now from working on getting a pretty clearly meritless lawsuit flushed. You wouldn’t want to have to pay me what it would cost you for me to do that, but what is the alternative?

Sam Chevre replies:

Go to the system every other OECD country uses, and that I think the EHCR is understood to require–that if a complaint is brought and dismissed, the complainant is liable for the costs.

That’s not how we do things around here for reasons a lot bigger than this case. But let’s look at this case. In the ordinary course, the “costs” would be minimal. Here, however, the University retained private counsel — not even using its own in-house lawyers — on its own initiative. Maybe this was a good idea, and I generally favor seeing lawyers get paid, but it surely multiplied the cost of the proceeding by orders of magnitude,. The complainant could not have anticipated such extravagant costs when she filed her complaint, so the prospect of paying normal costs in the normal course wouldn’t likely have deterred her, but having to pay the costs actually accrued would be ruinous.
Of course, for some folks, this would not be a bug, but a feature.

@56: There was also a definite whiff of “My dad hit me all the time and it didn’t hurt me any. These kids today need a good spanking!” (Such statements tend to be an unconscious reflection of exactly how much the speaker was hurt.) Possibly Kipnis feels the gals of today need a good groping to toughen them up some, or at least a prof or two hitting on them, to prepare them for that awful world out there.

I was also truly stunned by the reappearance of the retrograde idea that young women can “empower” themselves by exploiting their sexual appeal to men higher up on the power scale and that seeing the prof with his pants down constitutes some sort of victory over the fellow, a meaningful redressing of the power imbalance (of course, Kipnis also seems to deny that such an imbalance exists) between the man and the woman. Andrea Dworkin, mentioned dismissively by Kipnis in her piece, would have something of interest to say about that.

Nobody expects, or wants, the Spanish Inquisition. However, if I were an administrator I might well want to have a discreet chat with Kipnis about her commitment to adhering to the campus rules in these matters, not to say her attention to detail (two corrections have been appended to her original piece).

Kipnis also links to an article about the Ellie Clougherty-Joe Lonsdale case, a matter that seems more tangled then her summary would indicate. Lonsdale and Clougherty met when he was acting as a mentor to her in a program sponsored by Stanford University. While Lonsdale is not an academic, their story actually demonstrates how close encounters with undergrads can go horribly wrong. I have no idea why Kipnis thinks this story helps her case, unless Clougherty is meant to be just another example of a millenial snowflake in need of toughening up.

The Boulder case (172) is bothering as the university presumes to adjudicate individuals’ private conduct outside of and unrelated to the university, just because they happen to be students. That was never the intention of title IX (remember, title IX is concerned with institutional discrimination in education) and it doesn’t make sense.

I also just learned that this same third party student filed another Title IX complaint against a completely different professor for talking about the Kipnis case.

At that point it strongly sounds like the student is misusing the Title IX complaint process to attempt to punish speech, which casts at least a bit of doubt about her intentions in filing the Kipnis complaint.

Dsquared, the University of California is my employer. I’m 100% sure that they can’t stop me from saying that Jerry Brown’s policies are utterly ruinous for the state, or that Pac-10 has been a terrible idea from the beginning. In fact, I’m sure that some of your co-bloggers expressed opinions on criminal cases within the past year or so, and I’m virtually certain that juries and several investigations disagreed with them.

These lawsuits and the underlying allegations have been on the front page of Chicago newspapers long before Laura Kipnis appeared on the scene.

#12
Kipnis is unafraid, however, to critique the left, which makes me immediately sympathetic. Here’s a passage on Kerry’s defeat by Bush a decade ago from Slate:…

(Sorry to be late to this party). Unless I’m missing some gargantuan irony, kidneystones is so badly misreading Kipnis in that article that it’s hard to believe he could even manage to be so wrong. Obviously, she is not ‘critiquing the left’, but rather criticizing the Democratic party *from* the left. The concluding sentence about her being a ‘nutjob’ makes me wonder if I’ve missed some sign that the preceding point was satire. Or something.

my guess is that she’s a second-wave feminist, like Ellen Willis or Wendy Kaminer, who identifies sexual freedom as a necessary step toward healthy (hetero)sexuality, and doesn’t like the turn feminism took after the seventies

Is there another guess available? (By the way, that “hetero” is nasty and supercilious, entirely uncalled for). Might there be some other reason to not like the turn feminism took after the 70s?

The elephant in the room, the thing I have never heard mentioned in either current establishment feminist circles or liberal opinion in general, is the brazen partial (but pervasive) cooptation of feminism by (among other entities) the advertising industry – which includes not just actual commercials/CMs but also television shows and movies. I even read an article recently (Huffpo? Daily Beast? can’t remember where – sorry) about nostalgia for 90s era feminism as embodied by particular network television shows and movies and characters. That this approach can pass as unremarkable speaks volumes. Serious second wave feminists sneered at Madison Ave (e.g. “You’ve come a long way, baby!”). You might tell me that serious establishment feminists today do too, but that’s not what I see. I see a group (among others) so shamelessly and incessantly flattered and condescended to for so long that some kind of spiritual sickliness almost *has* to ensue.

I have more hope for the nascent or young next wave. And I of course don’t mean the rhetorical targets of Kipnis. I mean feminists and humanists who see through, and far past, our infantile – and, yes, infantilizing – identity politics, which isn’t really politics at all, but the avoidance of it.

Lynne — you’re right. “Joking” is not the right word. I think it’s sort of hard to say what she’s trying to say there, and out of a general liking of Kipnis, I want to try to put a non-offensive spin on it, but it’s not easy in this case, esp. given its reuse. (My thought when I read it in the original context was: she’s saying, yes, harassers should be punished, but she’s saying it in an unnecessarily snarky way.)

bianca steele @139: Yes, Kipnis does talk about (non-porn) film in her books. For example, one of the essays in Men is more or less an extended reading of House of Games. But I don’t know that she’s ever written a book on film specifically. Or what she’s published in academic film journals, e.g.

js

“My thought when I read it in the original context was: she’s saying, yes, harassers should be punished, but she’s saying it in an unnecessarily snarky way.”

One of the reasons why the 1990s Australian example Val mentioned proved controversial was that the second wave author of the first book about the case – The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power – really was arguing that sexual harassment should not be a legal or formal disciplinary issue, and that young women should deal with it by slapping anyone that harasses them instead. Other third wave books subsequently wrote about the case – Generation F: Sex, Power & the Young Feminist by Virginia Trioli (1996) and a book of essays called bodyjamming (1997).

If I’m understanding the case correctly, a lot of this seems to hinge on the difference between legal and practical meanings of “retaliation”. The Title IX regulations are presumably meant to prevent institutional retaliation: if you make a complaint about sexual harassment, the institution should not be able to punish you for making this complaint, even if it is not upheld. People are not going to be willing to come forward to make even a valid complaint if there’s a possibility that they might get a decision go against them and that they would then suffer further.

But what the Northwestern case seems to be about is private/non-organisational “retaliation”. Is someone at the university not directly accused in the case allowed to blacken your name in public fora, especially if they make misleading comments about the case or even actively lie? In the UK you would be liable to a charge of libel if you made inaccurate comments about someone identifiable, even if you didn’t name them, but I know the US libels laws are far less restrictive.

Legally such behaviour probably isn’t Title IX retaliation, but it seems to me potentially to have an equally chilling effect on complainants. If a student is aware that if they make a complaint about sexual harassment, their entire private life can be picked over by staff at the university who are hostile to them and then proclaimed to the nation in a very public forum, there’s a very big reputational risk in them coming forward. (And this is where the power differential comes in: some people do have more access to wide-circulating and prestigious media).

There’s clearly a balance to be struck between deterring frivolous complaints and not deterring non-frivolous ones and it’s difficult to see a way to solve this problem without creating other injustices. Maybe public shaming is appropriate for those who make completely unjustified complaints of sexual harassment. But if you decide that staff at a university are free to carry out public shaming of any student whose sexual harassment case fails, you’re likely to find that a lot of students with valid complaints aren’t going to report them.

JH: “But his general point that the case is complex and dicey, hence a better prima facie candidate for a lengthy investigation, is a bit better than I gave it initial credit for.”

The Title IX rules come down very hard on institutional retaliation, including retaliation by faculty, and Kipnis is faculty. Imagine that Kipnis has the following conversation with an administrator in her department: she tells him that she’s writing an article about how bad sexual harassment law is, the administrator says she should put in something about that grad student because that’s a good example of a bad Title IX claim and it’s bad press for the university, Kipnis says sure, there’s not much room in the article but she could put in a sentence about how the grad student was dating the professor and how its ridiculous that it’s become a bunch of legal cases. Is that retaliation? Do you dismiss the claim without even asking whether this conversation occurred?

Or, come on. The chair of the Faculty Senate, someone with control over the process of responding to Title IX, says this according to Faculty Senate meeting notes: “Eisenman noted that more clearly defined sanctions are a likely objective for offenses falling under the Jurisdiction of Title IX, which at present is fraught with problems.” And he apparently discusses the grad student’s case and says something about the situation being like something out of Stalinist Russia. What would you think of a judge who takes about an open case this way? Is this obviously not retaliation and no one has to look into it?

SH 190: “The Weinberg post is just plain inaccurate (see 107).”

107 doesn’t offer any evidence or even argument that the Weinberg post is inaccurate. I don’t think that you JH have ever pointed to any *factual* mistakes in Weinberg’s account. If you JH have evidence that Weinberg’s account of the facts is wrong, please explain. otherwise, your attack is remarkably dishonest and you should apologize.

Most importantly, this is totally a side issue to your claim that whatever went wrong in this case is somehow the fault of “liberalism”. See 9- and 125, to which you JH studiously have avoided responding. I will just repeat what I said at 86: you are working real hard to frame this whole debate in the Orwellian terms of the right-wingers.

RP 197: The senate chair doesn’t have any control over the title IX process. However, he happened to have been involved in the investigation as a faculty advocate for Kipnis. In that capacity he was bound by confidentiality rules.

When you’ve lost Jonathon Chait, Kipnis, and Josh Marshall…From Chait’s piece in New York magazine: “…Many left-wing writers are torn between their discomfort with p.c. and their recognition that my piece was politically radioactive among their target audience. Freddie DeBoer handled this problem by calling me “condescending” and “an asshole” before proceeding to endorse my thesis. Vox’s author — who has to write under a pseudonym! — instead manufactures a point of disagreement. “Ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker’s identity,” he writes, “Chait appears to believe only the former, and that’s kind of ridiculous.”

Now, I don’t often agree with DeBoer, but I do happen to think Chait is an asshole, no need to list the reason’s why.

From Josh Marshall: “In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right… Kipnis is no conservative. She’s a feminist and though I don’t know a lot about her political views, certainly in the broad sweep of our national politics she’d be considered a liberal of some sort…* Excessive Disclosure: TPM published an excerpt from Kipnis’s new book earlier this year. But I had never had any contact with her of any sort until sending her a question on this topic by email this weekend.”

Kipnis, as I noted above, has a long and semi-illustrious career as culture warrior for team blue. She is unafraid to criticize the left and many on the left evidently believe criticism constitutes some form of apostasy. Who could have seen that coming?

What those who believe Kipnis should be ostracized/censured/punished fail to understand is that Kipnis is, in fact, trying to make the left more effective by illuminating some of the silliness of the moral minority. According to some, Kipnis is evidently the wrong kind of feminist because she thinks women and feminists are often silly. Feminists often are, especially the ones standing on self-erected pedestals. As Kipnis points out, men do not by virtue of their gender have any exclusive ability to beclown themselves. If we accept general notions of equality in intellect, then there must be just as many feminist idiots as there are in any other subset of humanity. Or perhaps, feminism of a very particular superior sort is actually a marker of superior intellect – a ‘real’ feminist can’t possibly also be a real idiot.

Self-censorship is the norm now in a number of environments. I did very well as an undergraduate, but I quickly discerned that I’d have to hide the very real questions I had regarding the intellectual credibility of deep thinkers like Stanley Fish during the pre-Sokol dark ages. Graduate school in the humanities was out in the early nineties, I turned down a teaching position and scholarship rather than undergo the political re-education of the sort one leading ‘feminist’ explicitly prescribed for me for daring to suggest equality between the sexes. Teachers I know in the US teach in a state of fear, lest their charges decide to trash them in evaluations. I grew up among the chalk-throwers and I’ve tossed more than one dozing student from my classes. We owe our students an education, and that necessarily means introducing them to materials and ideas that are going to make them uncomfortable – triggers are a feature, not a bug. Safe zones are the most dangerous places I can imagine.

As for being awful, I wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t being awful at least once a day. I want to be offensive, but very rarely take much. The world we live in is so much cleaner, scrubbed, and sterile than that of the past. We’ve become weak. Worse, we’ve become dull.

“Where did I claim that the case is the fault of liberalism – or even ‘liberalism’?”

You have said that the case provided legitimate (as opposed to contrived) “ammo against liberalism”. (““An individual brought a case under Title IX, and that decision to pursue the case provided ammo against liberalism” is true in this case”, 95). Now logically that implies that whatever bad happened, happened *because of liberalism*. Otherwise it couldn’t be considered ammo against liberalism. Something that happens because an individual makes a poor choice, or some institution overreacts in the way institutions often do, cannot be ammo against liberalism unless the individual’s poor choice, or the institution’s overreaction, was causally connected to liberalism. Again, the argument has been made at nauseam (90, 125) and I think you know exactly what this is about, which is precisely why you have studiously avoided responding to it, instead going distracting us with side issues.

JH: “I see your point, Rich. As I said, I concede that the case is a bit more complex than I took it to be at first. Point taken. But it’s pretty expansive to say that anyone writing anything, about anything, who works at the school, is writing on the ‘school’s behalf’. Hence, if what they say could, potentially, impact opinion about anything related to a Title IX case that could be ‘retaliation’. You want to draw the circle a bit further in than that.”

Let’s draw the circle wider then. Do I think that Title IX claims of this sort are generally a good thing? People getting brought up on judicial procedures because of op-eds, third parties bringing complaints against anyone they want to have investigated, and so on. Of course I don’t. I don’t because I’m an anarchist and I think that the whole setup is fundamentally flawed.

But you’re not an anarchist, you’re a left-liberal. And there is no way that you can have the kind of system that you want to have and simultaneously blame complainants without power for doing something wrong by bringing complaints. The system simply does not work along with denying the powerless access to it based on a “your claim looks ridiculous to me after I’ve read Dreher” clause. Your denial is rhetorical, not actual, but it’s still bad rhetoric. I shouldn’t speak for TM, but the “sneaky agenda” that you have isn’t a conscious agenda: you simply identify with people like you.

Let me recall for everyone here the basics of our society. We have a President with an assassination list. Do those people get due process — do they get to confront the evidence against them? Of course not. They get a drone strike, and another one on their funeral party. We had a Vice President who said that he told people to torture and that he’d do it again, and of course justice sleeps. Do the black people shot by police get adequate justice? Or do they pretty much have judges decide that the police aren’t guilty?

This isn’t an Oppression Olympics argument, a “why do you care about academics when so much worse is going on.” It’s just bringing back to your memory that our society is in fact not based on principles of justice. The reason why people suddenly find it shocking when a case might get someone fired in academia (but the person didn’t actually get fired) is because they’re academics, or white-collar professionals, and they can imagine themselves in that situation. And it’s not supposed to happen to them.

magistra@195: In the UK you would be liable to a charge of libel if you made inaccurate comments about someone identifiable, even if you didn’t name them

I knew the libel laws in the UK were disgraceful, but I didn’t know they were that bad.

Rich @209

Yes, academics who have been promised/pursuing job security their whole adult life will be upset when they see that threatened. Being on a blog frequented by academics, this viewpoint will be especially prominent. This should be obvious, especially to a CT veteran like yourself, so don’t pretend that you have uncovered any sort of deep motivation that people have been trying to hide.

As for the whole ‘the president still drones people’ routine – what>? Seriously Rich, what are you getting at here? Yes, injustice exists, but what is the relevance of that injustice to this conversation?

Frequently, you hear people interject stories of greater suffering into an existing conversation in order to diminish, by comparison, the harms experienced by those involved in the first incident. I would not think this your style, but I am drawing a blank here as to what your point is with this.

After having slept on it, it is interesting how much of this case can be looked at through an abuse of process lens.

Ludlow is accused of sexual misconduct.

Ludlow sues for libel. Even if it is true that his characterization of the events was the correct one (i.e. even if he was falsely accused) the U.S. system of libel is so stringent that any lawyer he consulted would have immediately told him that a libel suit was frivolous. Abuse of process.

Complainant makes a Title IX complaint against Kipnis. In any normal world this should have been immediately dismissed. I’m tempted to think of this as abuse of process, but the fact that the administrators took the ridiculous case further means that was is exposed is an super-abusable process (the correct conservative critique).

Complainant (unrelated to the original complaint against Ludlow) makes a Title IX complaint against Eisenman (who contra TMs misunderstanding followed his confidentiality requirement to not identify the complainant, but had no duty to not talk about the case and its effects on the faculty). That is straight up abuse of process.

Looking at it through this lens makes me much more sympathetic to the original complainant (the libel suit against her was abuse of process). The fact that she would want to reach for an abuse-able process to lash back makes perfect sense to me. The fact that she had just been put through an unnecessary legal proceeding herself makes the reaction even more understandable.

But what she exposed was that the Title IX system is so abuse-able that it could be used to attack third parties who merely allude to the case.

The secondary, non-involved complainant against Eisenman exposed that the Title IX process is so abuse-able that it can be brought against third parties who allude to third party allusions to a complaint while talking about whether or not the system is too abuse-able.

I have lots of sympathy for the initial complainant. I have almost no sympathy for whomever was complaining against Eisenman. But in both cases they have exposed that the Title IX process is very abuse-able.

I am however curious about why Ludlow’s LIBEL suit doesn’t count as retaliation. It seems to me that it should unless I’m missing something.

Marc: “There are no private conversations to parse; there is no hidden information to investigate.”

Marc knows this a priori without investigation, because Marc is God.

I don’t know Rich. I’m generally with you, but if the presence of such a conversation really is key for the prima facie validity of the claim (something I’m not convinced of), wouldn’t we want to require some initial evidence that such a conversation took place before starting a formal investigation? Using Title IX complaints as blanket fishing expeditions for any type of evidence seems problematic (just as it would for criminal trials).

Sebastian: FWIW, I’ve found your comments throughout this thread extremely penetrating and persuasive. Since I’ve frequently heckled you in the past, I just thought I’d mention this.

adam.smith: “if the presence of such a conversation really is key for the prima facie validity of the claim (something I’m not convinced of), wouldn’t we want to require some initial evidence that such a conversation took place before starting a formal investigation? Using Title IX complaints as blanket fishing expeditions for any type of evidence seems problematic (just as it would for criminal trials).”

How is the complainant supposed to get initial evidence that such a conversation took place? The grad student knows three things: that Kipnis wrote an article in which she impeached the grad student’s version of events, that Kipnis refused to correct the article or modify it to present both versions, that the university has a motive for making the grad student look bad. What’s the grad student supposed to do, hire a detective to gain evidence before filing the complaint?

Of course blanket fishing expeditions are problematic. Everything in our society is problematic, but we do it anyways. People were trying to get to the question of whether liberalism is somehow to blame for this. Isn’t this the same legal structure that liberalism implements throughout our society? What, other than academic self-interest, makes this different from any other way in which liberalism says how things should operate?

please operationalize what you mean

What I would like is pretty much basic legal practice in administrative proceedings. That is, violations are sufficiently clearly defined that it’s possible to figure out the “there’s no actionable claim stated here” and dismiss the case for failure to state a claim (or “the alleged conduct isn’t illegal” in the criminal law.)

Rich, these lawsuits were front page news in Chicago for months. It’s not even clear that Kipnis discussed the grad student case, merely mentioned it in passing. Liberalism is supposed to protect people’s right to speak on matters of public concern, including court cases.

Flip this around: should Bill Clinton be allowed to sue Saturday Night Live for joking about how he would have gone to prison if cellphones could take video? Should people attempting to exonerate those wrongly convicted of murder be open to suit from the victim’s families? Do they even have a moral claim against some public discussion of the matter?

Get, Gianni: thanks. I think one of the most frustrating things about the U.S. is how we regularize abuse of process–especially in the legal system. It is pervasive and normalized, especially by lawyers.

Rich, the situation is just not comparable.

Why is the middle manage of Acme Corp writing this op-ed, other than to talk about the office gossip? Status quo: expect 0 op-eds from Joey the Manager. Scandal ensues. Joey writes an op-ed.

Conclusion: it clearly looks like Joey is writing in response to the scandal. Depending on content of course, this looks like retaliation.

But with a professor you have a completely different dynamic. Your status quo is a professor publishing intermittent op-eds and articles about sexuality in popular culture.
So when that professor continues in this way, publishing an op-ed on gender relations in their professional capacity, using the gossip as an illustration, the accusation of retaliation is totally different. You have a completely different baseline.

The thing is, I would suspect retaliation would be SOP at Acme Corp.

I would expect officially sanctioned op-eds denying retaliation had ever taken place or that retaliation was the policy of Acme, long a reputable employer and corporate citizen in the community. The accusations are unfounded, and the unfairly accused employee has had a stellar record of service, has previously undergone mandated training, and Acme does not, of course, condone the alleged behavior; nothing like this has ever taken place before, and a thorough investigation has been initiated, and although Acme will have no comment at this time (beyond denial and obfuscation, ‘natch), if the alleged violations of law have taken place, appropriate action will be taken and Acme will, of course, cooperate fully with authorities. Unfortunately, the investigation determined that surveillance footage of the property taken at the time of the incident had been inadvertently erased.

Many here think that the case should have been dismissed as frivolous. But that’s the Title IX you would like to have, not the existing one (see e.g. @222). @215 says that this is the correct conservative critique. But I think you can raise this criticism from a liberal point of view too.

The current system is very inefficient: think of all the resources spent on this frivolous case, resources which could have been directed on more important cases of sexual misconduct. The latitude in which the law is interpreted also tends to taint the true and valid complaints. You may have a very valid case and yet you risk to be seen as a frivolous complainant.

The politics around Title IX has been great as it has brought more awareness to these issues on campuses. And even if somebody ends up being falsely accused, that’s unavoidable in any justice system. But, still, the source of the problems is the way the system is set up. If a student gets raped, she should go to the police right away, not to the university, which has none of the expertise and all the wrong incentives – e.g. if football players are involved or if it is in the public eye and so it needs to appear “tough”.

As a final note, many here complain about the increasing tuition and fees of higher education. But lawyers are not cheap. If you want to assign more responsibilities to campuses, there will have to be resources devoted to it (just to be clear, I am not saying that all the increase in fees is due to this: just that the cost of running a university would be lower without having to be involved directly in these issues).

As I suspected would be the case, I received a number of suggestions that pretty much mirror what is actually done in a variety of dispute resolution systems such as criminal proceedings, civil lawsuits, administrative procedures, and even academic complaint procedures. Where those systems and standards are in place, it still takes a lot of time and work to weed out insubstantial cases. Not as much as cases with some potential merit to them, but still far more than I like doing or my clients like having to deal with or pay for.

“I didn’t know that.”

Both Dreher and Holbo are talking about Enlightenment liberalism, so, yes.

There is typically a lot of discretion in deciding whether to pursue a complaint. The prosecutor weighs the costs against the potential result given their limited resources. A lot of complaints are dismissed and a lot of charges are never brought. In the Title IX context, the university administrator has every incentive to pass the complaint to outside counsel. What would you do? Appear to dismiss the student’s complaint or send it along to outside counsel at no cost to you? If you inappropriately dismiss one case that gets into the press, you’re pilloried. If you send on 10 crappy complaints that get dismissed later, no sweat — you took everything seriously and justice was done. The costs are borne by the accused.

Marxism, with its emphasis on class, tends to obscure this, but the French Revolution was brought about by lawyers.

Not at all.

Review of Neil Davidson

“Both Dreher and Holbo are talking about Enlightenment liberalism, so, yes.”

Considering the sources of common law, it’s a surprising suggestion. The Law is an ass, but an old one.

Teachable Mo’ @ 243: Considering the sources of common law, it’s a surprising suggestion. The Law is an ass, but an old one.

Remaking the rotted potage of the actual common law into an apparently coherent product of deliberative reason accessible by non-lawyers by sheer dint of persuasive story-telling was one of the triumphs of the Enlightenment, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England being among the most important and influential works of the period. The man gave Britain a constitution and a virtual code of law, where before it had only a history of one damn thing after another.

Said with humor.

And love.

Holbo:
On the one hand, we think that academics are, ideally, free to engage in intellectual inquiry, discussion, and free to publish all that openly. The idea that an op-ed in the Chron of Higher Ed about a general issue of public interest is verboten seems jarring and outrageous. But, as Rich and others rightly point out, Kipnis works for the university and is a colleague of Ludlow, even if she’s never met him. As institutional actors, professors are obviously going to be constrained in a lot of ways, potentially. …Our kneejerk ‘it’s outrageous that a prof can’t write a Chron op-ed!’ reaction should be tempered by the fact that we would understand the constraint perfectly if Kipnis were, say, Ludlow’s spouse….

My apologies to Holbo for doing the “kneejerk” “it’s outrageous” thing. Of course there are limits and the mere invocation of ‘free speech’ does not settle all the issues. The point was simply that she did choose to write about an issue of at least some ‘general’ interest and (to use the language of the old and mostly not-too-lamented FCC Fairness Doctrine) “public concern,” as opposed to, say, writing a witty, brief analysis of the camera techniques in a silent movie from 1913 of which five people in the world are aware and only three of those give a sh*t about it. (Sorry, bad syntax. Whatever.) It doesn’t settle the issues, yes, that’s right. It does perhaps suggest why knees jerked, however. But since this is a measured, quasi-academic blog in which issues are dissected with minute care etc etc, we should not have kneejerk reactions here. Mea culpa.

bob mcmanus @ 241

I was thinking very particularly of Georges Lefebvre’s small classic, 89, best known in its English translation by R.R. Palmer, The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre used a loose Marxist framework to great narrative effect, packing a great deal of information into a small book, but he trampled his own detailed knowledge of the National Assembly’s composition.

I presume you were endorsing Davidson and not that Oxford twit of a reviewer at the link, who seems like an idiot.

T @ 242

Thanks for the clarification.

LFC @ 248

10 years of upheaval, preceded by 30 years of decline and stalemate, followed by 15 years of autocracy and war, in a country of 25 million? — might be complex, I will grant you.

From the failure of enlightened despotism in the collapse of Maupeou’s judicial reforms thru the lawyers’ convention that was the National Assembly down to Napoleon’s eponymous Code, there’s a definite theme there, though maybe one among several.

Rich, your point is far more clear now.

To follow up, person whose name I have a hard time spelling reminds me quite of a Kipnis. The Paglia comparison I still can’t get my head around.

The other point about academic ‘freedom of speech’ is that there is an expectation that academics will write thoughtfully about issues.

I don’t think the Kipnis piece was thoughtful, I think it was glib. I say that from the perspective of someone who has used anti-discrimination and anti-harrassment processes. It can be a pretty gruelling experience, and it is concerned with issues that are important. An academic who wants to criticise these processes should do so thoughtfully and not in a way that makes cheap points at the expense of identifiable students.

In general, whatever you think of these processes, they are an attempt to deal with serious problems. I think on CT there is also some tendency to glibness when talking about these issues – people seem prepared to make judgements about complex processes without fully understanding them – and I suspect that is because they are processes that are predominantly used by women, against men. Call me unfair if you like, but that’s my suspicion.

JH: “Also, there is a sense that the university is different, or is supposed to be.”

Well… “difference”, when it involves more rights than most people get, is usually called something like “privilege”. Of course I think that everyone should be treated more as if they were a tenured professor, and I don’t think that tenured professors should have to give up their privilege by being treated as corporate employees. In the same way, I’d want everyone to be treated as well as white people generally are, rather than “eliminate privilege” by treating everyone as badly as black people are treated in the U.S.

But once you put it that way, you start to see that it’s impossible for our society to treat everyone as if they have the privileges of tenured professors. Or if not impossible in theory, it’s just not going to happen. So the “professors pursued a life of the mind and should get privileges for that” thing is a pretty straightforward meritocratic privilege argument, and straightforwardly leads to a kind of “Twilight of the Elites” analysis. It becomes very problematic when it’s combined with blaming lower-level strivers for making waves for people higher up.

JH: “Partly the problem is that various justice issues are getting crossed, still. 1) should Kipnis have been investigated? 2) should investigations have this secret, star chamber ‘you do not have the right to know what you are accused of until you have given your answers’ sinister quality?”

I’ve focussed on 1) because I really don’t understand how “should Kipnis have been investigated” is a scandal within the precepts of left-liberalism. I’m not a left-liberal, but I was one for most of my adult life, and I don’t think that people who say that the case should have been dismissed uninvestigated are holding up either the principles or the pragmatics of left-liberalism, which depends on offering at least the possibility that some time a less powerful person may be able to use the justice system.

I really think that Omega Centauri @ #134 has a key to a lot of this. “It should be terrifying. Simply look at the numbers; the “powerless” greatly outnumber big bosses, so the odds of running afoul of some sociopathic individual go way up if you include the entire power pyramid, and not just those at the very top. And if you are harmed by someone near the top, you can sue for damages, but win a lawsuit against a powerless person and there is little blood to squeeze out of that turnip.” Call this _Fatal Attraction_ liberalism. What’s really scary? Not the big bosses, what’s really scary is that you may have sex with some woman who turns out to be a “sociopath” and then your life is ruined.

Leaving out the aspect of sexual, sexist terror for now, this is straightforward Hobbes. If you have to consider that you might be (legally) attacked by anyone, then you have to live in fear of everyone, so it’s better to concentrate power and then you have only a few, distant people to keep an eye on and they keep everyone else from hurting you. Is that what contemporary left-liberalism is turning to?

JH: “2) should investigations have this secret, star chamber ‘you do not have the right to know what you are accused of until you have given your answers’ sinister quality?”

Even for this, look — here’s an article about how this works in another context. People in our society are routinely targeted for drawing the attention of the authorities, who then find a crime to fit. As explained in that article, you can be interviewed by Federal agents and if you say as little as “No, I didn’t” to anything that could be considered to be a crime, you’ve just committed a new crime. In the initial interview the agents don’t explain what they’re going to charge you with, they just see whether you’re going to commit more crimes trying to justify yourself.

In a society in which this happens, “that grad student provided ammo against liberalism” is just … well, it’s not delusional precisely, because anything can be ammo, just as anything can be a crime. But it’s a profound agreement with Dreher even if you don’t think that you’re ceding anything but acknowledgement of what is. You may be acknowledging what is, but you’re hiding from all sorts of other things that also exist.

legal practice requires you to say that you have been hurt, injured etc – you are required to present yourself as a victim. It can be very disempowering, when actually you are just someone seeking justice

Well there is a phrase ‘no harm done’. A legal system in which private parties could take to the civil courts to redress ‘wrongs’ acknowledged not to have injured them or anyone else sounds a bit nightmarish to me. Ymmv.

AcademicLurker: “if large numbers of people think that invoking federal laws to potentially end someone’s career because you dislike what they wrote* is bad and worth getting outraged about, isn’t that a good thing?”

They’re unable to generalize from particular cases to an overall principle, or otherwise really follow through on a logical chain of thought, and they don’t evaluate evidence. So sure maybe they’re outraged by “invoking federal laws to potentially end someone’s career because you dislike what they wrote”, or maybe they’re outraged by the thought of a lowly grad student challenging their power after they made it to the top of the heap. Who knows? Since they don’t know what happened and are unwilling or unable to figure it out, the fact that they’re outraged about a fiction that tangentially overlaps with some things that I think people should be outraged about is not reassuring.

Rich, despite considerable sympathy for your overall view, I can’t help feeling that your polemical approach is self-defeating. Why assume that Holbo and everyone who agrees with him don’t feel just as strongly as you do about the evils of the “macrocosm”? That they (we) are just as eager to clean up the whole “garbage dump” as you are?

You might have said something like: “OK, we can all agree that there are some objectionable features of the situation, but by the same reasoning, there are far graver and more extensive injustices happening all around us, which demand our attention even more urgently. Here are some of them; and here’s what I think we should begin to do about them; what do you all think?” Instead you inform us that we’re “unable to generalize from particular cases to an overall principle, or otherwise really follow through on a logical chain of thought” and that we’re only “tangentially” concerned about the “things that I think people should be outraged about.” How exactly do you know this?

In other words, why scold people for not seeing the whole picture, or seeing it and not being angry enough about it, rather than gently reminding them that there is a bigger picture with many of the same features they’re objecting to in this discussion, and maybe even suggesting some possible remedies for it that you’d like their help with? For someone committed to fundamental social change, it seems like an opportunity lost.

I suppose I know why, from my own experience — the urge to correct people is irresistible. So I’m not criticizing you. Just trying to maximize your influence on the world, which would be, from my point of view, an excellent thing.

geo: “Why assume that Holbo and everyone who agrees with him don’t feel just as strongly as you do about the evils of the “macrocosm”? ”

I don’t class everyone together. I wouldn’t say that Holbo is “outraged” by this case, since he doesn’t really perform outrage at this kind of thing. He just is not really figuring out what’s going on. The people who really are outraged by it don’t have as many points of contact between my views and theirs as you might think. It’s kind of like saying that I should try to find common cause with white supremacists because white supremacists are often angry with the police, or for a more historical analogy that the rest of the left were natural allies of the Bolsheviks because they all opposed the old regime.

It’s really not a “there are other injustices that demand our attention more urgently” concern. There’s enough injustice everywhere so that if someone wants to focus just on injustices within academia, they’ve got a life’s work cut out for them and they don’t need to prove sincerity by taking on everything. But are they focussing on actual injustices? If they are, what’s the basic kind of solution they have in mind?

@273: It’s kind of like saying that I should try to find common cause with white supremacists because white supremacists are often angry with the police

But I do think that. I think one should say something like: “Yes, you’re right about the way the police treat you, arrogantly and roughly. I’ll sign your petition/come to your demonstration about that. But look, you don’t seem to care that they treat black people the same way, even worse. Why not? Black people bleed, just like you do.” And hope to go on (admittedly a long way) from there.

I’m not saying you should go out of your way to proselytize them, but if you encounter white supremacists seeking your support against police brutality, you can turn your back on them or shout at them or try to find some feeling or value or principle you share with them and persuade them that if they really mean it, then how can they do some of those other things they do, like …

Similarly, you can tell evangelicals that they’re as benighted as sun worshipers or you can ask them what the person who said all that stuff in Matthew 25 would think about Newt Gingrich or Paul Ryan.

Out of curiosity, JH, has Dreher ever responded to any of your posts on him? I can’t find any evidence that you are even on his radar, which is unfortunate, if that is so.

Rich Puchalsky: They’re unable to generalize from particular cases to an overall principle, or otherwise really follow through on a logical chain of thought, and they don’t evaluate evidence.

Sounds like human beings. You’ve been discussing things with human beings again. Haven’t you been warned about that?

I thought you were great in this discussion, as were Sebastian and several others. Not as many as I would like were willing to fly away to the 18th century, but I don’t take it personally.

Rich Puchalsky: Since they don’t know what happened and are unwilling or unable to figure it out, the fact that they’re outraged about a fiction that tangentially overlaps with some things that I think people should be outraged about is not reassuring.

Speaking of the 18th century, popular opinion about various sensational scandals was common political and cultural fodder. No one knows what “really” happened in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace in some abstract sense of dispositive justice; the confusion of contradictory claims and drama is what made it possible to both focus popular attention and project collective thought. A process was set in motion — better known to anthropologists than to lawyers — that changed the consensus of political culture with profound consequences.

Of course, almost no one remembers the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, so my allusion is useless. But, people know the process well enough, from the Lewinsky Affair, or maybe what’s going on currently with Hastert. In some political subcultures, the Benghazi business has traction. I’m not coming up with great examples (and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace is such a great example — really it is!)

Anyway, my point is that the fiction is what counts here. Culture and meaning are what is in play. Supposedly relating the straight facts is just the trance induction: it’s the fictionalizing, the assigning of meaning and emotional associations (note: attach outrage, here and here) in the suggestions to the unconscious in the stories that follow the trance induction — that’s what counts.

I think you can be very, very good at shouting, “wake up, people!” interrupting the trance to point out creeping authoritarianism in the narrative, isolating and highlighting the little “errors” and omissions that creep in.

There’s great value in that skill that requires talent and purpose. Pay no attention to geo (or pay attention because he’s frequently brilliant); you are never going to be as good at being nice as you are at being an anti-authoritarian polemicist. geo is good at being nice; let him do it. Your talents lie elsewhere.

Val @ 277: It is a problem with liberal individualism, which inappropriately applies notions of injury between two (theoretically equal) individuals to issues of systemic injustice.

Hierarchy, and accountability in hierarchy, is a problem. And, it’s a problem with liberal individualism that the ideology frequently operates without a practical account or acknowledgement of hierarchy, even though facilitating and legitimating functional hierarchy is its main job.

Liberalism says two individuals are morally equal. But, their economic and political relationship is profoundly unequal, for practical reasons. A student is subordinate to the professor; the professor is authorized to teach. They are cooperating in a hierarchical relationship, in which both have power but not symmetric power, a relationship in which they have inherently conflicting interests as well as a stake in benefits each receives from the relationship.

Issues of system injustice have to be pursued in that context of a working hierarchy, and it can be genuinely problematic to empower the subordinate against the superior without upending the hierarchy, just as it is problematic to find ways to hold leaders and superiors accountable.

mcmanus
Has Michael Harrington been forgotten? Sad.

That’s funny, bob. As if you ever cared a whit about Michael Harrington. It was pretty obvious from the context that bianca meant someone else, as she has now confirmed.

@281
Hands up all the feminists who are trying to oppress bob by identity politics ✋

Sorry last was meant for bob @281 again, not 282.

Anyway since it’s ending – why do I get the feeling everyone who commented on this thread has been trolled by John Holbo?

Half-read half-skimmed the Mulholland review of that Davidson book linked by mcmanus. Mulholland rhapsodizes about how well-read Davidson is, how erudite, etc. Then toward the end there is this:

Davidson – not very convincingly – sees all communist seizures of power (except Russia 1917) as instances of bourgeois revolution. The last bourgeois revolutions, therefore, were in 1973–5: the Communist ‘Derg’ coup in Ethiopia, US defeat in Indochina, and decolonisation of the Portuguese Empire (p. 621).

This surely stretches the concept of bourgeois revolution far beyond breaking point. Such ideologically disparate movements cannot be grouped in this way.

Um, yes.

(p.s. The reason Skocpol is worth reading, IMHO, however much it’s been criticized for excessive ‘structuralism’ and various other perceived flaws, is that combines an attention to the role of classes (incl the peasantry and the dominant classes) with a focus on the state (and its apparatus and officials) as a partly autonomous actor, caught between domestic pressures of various kinds and outside pressures generated by geopolitical competition. [McManus might actually like (?), for a change, reading something not wrapped in the theoretical clothes of Trotsky, Kautsky, Lenin, plus Losurdo or whatever other post-something Marxists he is currently favoring.])

JH: “I don’t have time to contribute today, but I must confess a more than passing curiosity on this point myself.”

Look, with all due respect to geo and everyone — Bruce Wilder’s “you’ve been discussing things with human beings again. Haven’t you been warned about that?” cheered me up slightly — this is a misreading of what I wrote. I didn’t write that other people don’t feel strongly about injustice. I most especially didn’t write that academic injustice isn’t important because of greater injustice elsewhere, especially since I specifically wrote that I didn’t mean that in my initial comment about it and in every one after that. In fairness to geo, he did write “why scold people for not seeing the whole picture” which comes much closer.

What did I ask people to accept because of this argument? I wrote this: “If the problematic justice of Title IX is the same kind of problematic justice that we see everywhere, then what’s unusual about it? Don’t we then have to accept that our system, whatever its ideals are, in actuality produces this kind of “justice” everywhere?”

I also wrote this: “But it’s a profound agreement with Dreher [treating filing the complaint as ammo against liberalism] even if you don’t think that you’re ceding anything but acknowledgement of what is. You may be acknowledging what is, but you’re hiding from all sorts of other things that also exist.”

That’s saying that the injustices within Title IX are a *typical* result of our system. The reason why I brought up the drone assassinations and the black people shot by police and all the rest wasn’t to derail concern from supposedly less important to more important things, it was to say that obvious infringements of what we think of as basic justice happen systematically in every area from the top to the bottom.

Now, once again, I’m not saying that there’s necessarily anything wrong with being concerned about academia. But when the same kinds of injustices are happening everywhere, and when you go out of our way to find the one that’s caused by the least powerful person capable of them, that’s a conservative mode of thought. Not liberal. When you say “You stole the bread!” that’s a true statement if you point at someone who just stole some bread, as Holbo has written over and over now. If they stole the bread because their family had been systematically starved and there was nothing else they could do, and you don’t want to look at that, then that truth becomes something very like falsehood.

differentiate between in spoken language by saying big L liberalism and small l liberalism.

One day I will learn to proofread.

The “weaponized law” concept is a lot like the “militarized police” concept: they both describe real things, and they both seem to me to be substitute topics that are adopted as concerns largely because the underlying problems are even more intractable. For militarized police, it’s scary for the middle class to imagine cops with military weapons, but none of the recent numerous incidents of black people killed by police with impunity had anything to do with it. Instead they have to do with American society being based around being able to kill black people with impunity. With weaponized law, it’s scary for the middle class to imagine new categories of law that empower the _Fatal Attraction_ stalker that lives in their heads, but the old laws that were not voted in by any living legislature work in the same way,, and pretty much always have. The only difference is that there were “regular informal checks” that protected white male people, and now those are in question.

I also question whether these acts can be defined as “illiberal”. They are against liberal ideals, certainly, but the point I was making above is that they are universal in liberal practice.

Rich@303 I also question whether these acts can be defined as “illiberal”. They are against liberal ideals, certainly, but the point I was making above is that they are universal in liberal practice.

Do you mean universal in liberal practice in the US or in the world? Militarized police are substntially less of a problem in the UK (although there is movement along the same path towards some militarization). “Weaponized law” is a technique that has always existed in Britain (such as the charge of behaviour liable to commit a breach of the peace) or the use of ASBOs; British liberals have generally opposed such measures.

kidneystones: “to suggest that Americans as a society believe that killing anybody with impunity is the norm is so grotesque a distortion to render your initial observation re: cops virtually meaningless”

Textbook case of aggressive inability to read.

The other one could be a problem with pronoun mismatch, though. I’ll rewrite it:

“If someone still can’t understand what I plainly wrote above, it’s that person’s problem not mine.”

s.b. “itself the problem” though some feminist philosophy might have something to say about it too, I suppose

AcademicLurker: “If the graduate student had responded to the first CHE piece by firebombing Kipnis’ house, it would still be the case that the graduate student holds less institutional power than a tenured professor, it would also be the case that more powerful actors elsewhere are also doing bad things, but I don’t think we would therefore conclude that we shouldn’t condemn the student’s action.”

If all the post was about was whether to condemn the individual student’s action or not, then sure, all we’d have to do is consider that action. Then it would be a matter of acknowledging that the student was trying to get the op-ed to include her side of the story, not trying to get someone fired, and considering whether this was a good thing to do.

But the post isn’t just about that. It’s also about Enlightenment liberalism and about what counts as ammo against liberalism. In that case, it’s really very relevant to point that police are firebombing people’s houses all the time (if they are). If the police firebombed 1000 houses and some student firebombed one, that doesn’t make an individual firebombing a good thing, but it does mean that if you’re looking for general social causes of problems, you are purposefully looking to blame them on less powerful people rather than more powerful people, even when the evidence indicates otherwise.

311: Fair enough. I confess I skipped the Enlightenment Liberalism part of the thread and just skimmed over the excerpts from Dreher, because I generally don’t think that that sort of “Gosh, isn’t it a shame that modernity happened?” wankery deserves the time of day.*

If we step down from those lofty philosophical heights, it is unquestionably the case that “The left will ride roughshod over due process to suppress speech they don’t like” has been one of the right’s most durable talking points. It’s in a much more robust state of health than other old standbys like “We really hate gay people and so should you”, which isn’t doing too well these days. To the extent that this whole thing may lead otherwise reasonable people to think that the right’s talking point has a basis in reality, that’s bad. I think the blame falls on the media framing (and, of course, the calvinball manner in which universities conduct these kind of investigations) rather than on the student.

*I’m not complaining that Holbo chooses to argue against it, it’s just not my thing.

“An individual brought a case under Title IX, and that decision to pursue the case provided ammo against liberalism” is true in this case.”

Admonishing people may not be wrong, but choosing to admonish them, choosing to pick on the weak as the ones that should change their behavior, says something about your point of view, your priorities and eventually your “side”.

Rich is right.

I wanted to talk about the case because I thought that you were not representing the facts of the case adequately. Since you’d brought it up, I thought it was worthwhile to get those facts correct.

But the difference between my dismissal of the overall importance of the case and yours in the reason why your argument doesn’t work. You wrote this in the OP: “If the very very worst were true about the Kipnis case – namely, enforced orthodoxy, to rule out ‘wrongthink’ – then the best would be achieved, by Dreher’s lights: orthodoxy, keeping out wrong-thinking!” Then you say that Dreher would presumably explain that the difference is that his orthodoxy is right and liberal orthodoxy is wrong. Then there’s some confused rhetoric about why that isn’t a perfectly good answer, from his point of view — at least, I don’t see any reason why it isn’t a perfectly good answer. It’s not like there’s only one orthodoxy in the world and if you support one you’ve got to support them all.

So you are hinging your argument around the Kipnis case. But if you read his original post about it, it’s not about orthodoxy. It’s about power reversal:

Better not to teach it at all than to risk blowing up your career by offending a kid. A kid!

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… a horrible overturning of the natural order. Parents tell kids what to do so of course this grad student should just shut up. There’s a reason why I’ve gone on and on about picking the least powerful person to blame for a problem.

ZM@300: big L liberalism and small l liberalism

Do you sneaky Australians also try to distinguish between big C Communism and small c communism? You do? Well then, you’re apologists for mass murder!

Sebastian H @ 302

Excellent comment and excellent questions.

Liberalism has been remarkably successful in selling ideals as standards, by wrapping up seemingly simple principles in shiny bon mots, but once the bow is untied and the wrapping paper comes off, what’s in the box can be like the toy that breaks on Xmas morning the first time your kid plays with it. And, no one seems to be willing to honor a warranty on boxing day.

In real life, institutions of control and arbitration have to be able to hold up, at least for a good while, under the wear and tear of being used strategically in the contest of opposed interests. Criminals will conceal their crimes, and will do so with a mastery of the same technologies available to law enforcement. It’s not ultimately satisfactory, if the only criminals you can catch and punish are the poor and stupid ones, though that does tend to be the bias. Any rights you accord to the target of investigation or prosecution become barriers to expedience, and the temptation will be to introduce new expedience. In principle, equitable arbitration must be a public good, but public goods cost real resources and must be financed even if they are offered without price; disputes can easily be contrived to continue and expand without limit, particularly with the connivance of paid advocates. Even if the ideal system doesn’t break down by boxing day, it will wear down, as the contestants adapt and innovate, and make no mistake, all the contestants will be inventive, the police and prosecutors, and very often they will carry the judges and legislators with them.

Rich has been making the point that the great array of liberal ideals strewn about the landscape of American law are mostly worn and broken, and “believing in” liberal ideals serves mostly the cause of hiding from one’s self the knowledge of actual practice, of not hearing while we listen involuntarily to the dull roar of routine cruelty and injustice.

In my view, modern liberalism is very weak, because it lacks the resources to do the job of intelligent criticism and practical innovation, to enable periodic reform and renovation of a powerful state. Deeply troubling to me is how little consciousness there is that this is a problem.

@ 318
You didn’t just say the right wing would make hay of it. You said this as well
“Dreher finds all this ‘chilling’, stunning’ and ‘scary as hell’. I agree that it was very, very bad…”

Young women make complaint about op-ed! The world (as Rich says) is falling to pieces. Middle aged professors can’t sleep in their beds at night for fear.

@318
Also I’d like to support and extend what ZM said above. Students are expected to write to certain standards and if they don’t, professors can fail them. But these students couldn’t even get Kipnis to write accurately about an issue that concerned one of them directly, and yet a journal published her work. Don’t you think there’s a power imbalance there?

WHY do think these students got frustrated? Do you think that in the great order of things, young women should know their place, but these young women were unnatural? Or might it be that they get sick of people with more power, like Kipnis and your very self, sounding off publicly about how terrible they are without even knowing the facts of the case?

Engels @330
I don’t – obviously – understand exactly what people here, like bob McManus, are talking about when they use the term “identity politics”, however I don’t think the term refers, or was originally meant to refer, to nationalism, does it? I thought it was a new term for what used to be called liberation politics – ie liberation of oppressed groups like women, people of colour and colonised peoples.

Sorry my last comment was following up my reply to engels – cross posted with JH.

JH @ 333 – my point was that you quoted the ridiculously over-hyped comments from Dreher and then said “I agree it was very, very bad”. So maybe you are suggesting ‘well it’s maybe not “scary as hell” but it is very, very bad’. That’s reading you charitably. It’s an endorsement, whatever way you look at it.

And as the later more careful discussion has shown, this is an argument about complex issues of injury, power and redress. It is not simply about a “very, very bad” act by young female students, or even by university administrators. Why you – apparently – would think it is ok for university professors to write inaccurate articles slagging off identifiable students escapes me.

i do get the feeling you say those things partly to provoke a reaction, but you could be encouraging the right wing feeding frenzy yourself, don’t you think? I enjoy these discussions but I do wonder if they serve any purpose sometimes :)

Bob @ 336
I think if you had read my definition of patriarchy, you would have realised that”s not what I’m saying. I would like to see much more egalitarian societies and my study is intended to contribute to that. However in existing structures, I would like to see more women in positions of power. There is research showing that societies with more women in public positions have made more progress on environmental issues, for example. You don’t have to essentialist to believe women will make a difference, you can do it on empirical grounds (as above) or on historical grounds – patriarchy relegated caring work to a subordinate sphere, to be done by women and subordinate/slave peoples, but it actually that caring work which provides the basis for more egalitarian and sustainable societies.

I seriously suggest do some reading of contemporary ecofeminist theory – the discussion has moved on beyond those ‘feminism vs marxism’ or ‘essentialism vs social theory’ debates, which are pretty simplistic really.

That Zizek quote at 324 is … pretty bad, imo. (Ok, carry on.)

Val, plenty of people feel wronged seeing the Nazis march through Skokie, or a crucifix inverted in a jar of urine. But the price of living in a free society is hearing things that might upset you. (Apparently once upon a time this was a leftist position) And that’s why this case, and the Brandon Eich case before it, and the controversy over Ovid at Columbia, and the complaints at my alma mater over inviting a surviving member of the Charlie Hebdo massacre to speak are so worrying. They point to a new order of society in which comfort is valued above all, as Laura Kipnis was complaining about.

> But the price of living in a free society is hearing things that might upset you.

But not all things that upset you are necessary for a free society, unless you’re going to question-beg. Since noone’s interested in banning everything your existence proof for “things that shouldn’t be banned” is kind of irrelevant.

What you actually need here is a non-existence proof for “things it’s OK to ban”. You don’t have that.

John Holbo

“Now there is something rather ironic here, insofar as Kipnis says the same. She is only concerned about feminism! And Amanda Marcotte laughs at her. Well, what can I say? Sometimes people make phoney ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ criticisms of what feminists do, and sometimes real ones. If you simply must believe than I am one of the phoney ones, fine ”

But as bob mcmanus points out, there are different feminisms.

Like I mentioned about Helen Garner who wrote The First Stone about a sexual harassment case at the residential colleges of The University of Melbourne in the 1990s her feminist view in that book is that young women should slap men who harass them not take disciplinary or legal action, so like Kipnis she attacked the young women complaining of harassment. According to Wikipedia she also courted controversy by giving an impromptu sex ed class to her class of 13 year olds in 1972 which as it happened resulted in disciplinary action against herself which resulted in the Victorian department of education sacking her. However, other, notably third wave, feminists wrote in support of the young women taking formal action against harassment.

Different feminisms.

‘over the course’

Watson @ 345
I think there is a problem here in that you (and maybe others) are conflating two different things under the name of freedom of speech. One is the right to express unpopular ideas and opinions. That is legitimate as freedom of speech, even though, as magistra has explained, there need to be some limits on this, for example if it’s hate speech.

The other thing is the supposed right to say distorted or untrue things about other identifiable individuals with the intention of discrediting them or making them look bad. That isn’t freedom of speech and nor is it a right.

The question is, which did Kipnis do? She expressed ideas that are unpopular in some circles, although popular in others – and arguably they are popular in more powerful circles. So it wasn’t a particularly brave thing to do anyway. But she also presented distorted information with the apparent intent of making identifiable individuals – less powerful individuals in this context – look bad. Whether or not that falls within Title IX provisions, it isn’t really a freedom of speech issue in the way you’re suggesting.

Put it this way: if I disagree with your opinions, I should have a ‘freedom of speech’ type right to say so – I think we would both agree on that. But do I therefore also have a right to publish distorted and misleading information about you in tomorrow’s newspaper? I don’t think so.

Oops. Had no idea the video would turn up, rather than just the link. Apologies.

Engels @330 I don’t – obviously – understand exactly what people here, like bob McManus, are talking about when they use the term “identity politics”, however I don’t think the term refers, or was originally meant to refer, to nationalism, does it?

I don’t use it this way either. It seems that Hobsbawm does. I don’t think this affects his point, which is that a socialist should be critical of identity politics for the same reason she is critical of nationalism.

Kipnis was on NPR the other day. She now has a national platform to argue her side of the story as well as her broader argument.

Regardless of what you think of the motives and/or merit to the complaint, we can at least all agree that this is a complete failure from a tactics/strategy standpoint, right?

gianni: “Regardless of what you think of the motives and/or merit to the complaint, we can at least all agree that this is a complete failure from a tactics/strategy standpoint, right?”

I don’t expect John Holbo to understand this stuff — he pretty much substitutes the “silly things” part of “Rich is saying a lot of silly things, I think, but I try to learn from him when he takes a break from that and makes intermittent sense” for anything I write that he doesn’t understand — but really, is it too much to ask that people get the basic narrative correct?

The complainant was not a liberal activist trying to carry out strategy or tactics. Or maybe she is in other contexts, who knows, but not really in this one. She believes she was raped: she was trying to get on op-ed corrected that would present the alleged rapist’s version of events and leave out hers, in the context of mocking these kinds of claims of rape. Is that a great time to consider strategy and tactics? Maybe so, if you have very little power and are rightly considering whether you’re going to be facing a system that puts any powerful person who you disagree with on NPR.

But it shouldn’t *have to be* a time when you consider strategy and tactics. When you go to the police and report a rape, should you have to game that out beforehand? “Hmm, I got raped by a powerful person, maybe I shouldn’t report it because if I do he’ll deny it and then his defenders will get a slot on NPR to bad-mouth me.” Sure, practicality makes people go through this calculation quite often. But that isn’t activist “strategy” or “tactics”, it’s just survival.

magistera, the Battle Of Cable Street was not the state repressing the Nazis, but actors in civil society counterorganizing. As for medival Europe, there is no civil society or ability to organize in defense of communities targeted by the mob. Were Jewish communities equal citizens of a state, endowed with the right to bear arms, and able to organize politically against opponents, the story looks different.

Val, Kipnis’s errors didn’t harm anyone’s repution. They are so minor (miscounting four days, referring to a lawsuit by the accusations contained) that the reputation of the student would be unchanged if corrected. But what does this have to do with sexual harssment, which Title IX is intended to fight?

John Holbo,

Why do you allow these savages to comment on your blog when they personally insult you?

If I were you, I’d temporarily ban Val, Lynne and whoever the imbecile is who’s complaining about medieval Europe. Quid licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

gianni: “Val we have libel and slander laws to take care of those situations. Why appeal to the Title 9 process when one’s argument is clearly operating on the terrain of libel?”

For a libel case, you need to hire a lawyer: for a Title IX complaint, you don’t. Also, a libel suit wouldn’t do what you seem to think it does. The remedies that the grad student was pursuing are, as far as I know, basically not available through a libel suit. (I am not a lawyer.)

AcademicLurker: “Small correction: I believe the student who brought the complaint against Kipnis isn’t one of the parties involved in the original case involving Ludlow, but a third party who was acting on their behalf.”

Your belief is not true. Two people filed the complaint. One was the grad student, and one was a third party showing support. Since as far as I know they were essentially the same complaint, the third party seems rather immaterial in this case.

I’m a bit over this. Have it your own way guys (not including Rich obviously). It’s obviously terribly important that you should be right, and Kipnis should be right (except for some very minor errors which don’t count and only silly hysterical melodramatic young women would be upset about them – and yes, Kipnis did use the word ‘melodrama’ though I added the silly hysterical part) and even though I have actually been through an anti-discrimination case (admittedly in another country, but I think I’m the only one on this thread who has) my opinions obviously don’t count for anything, because you’re the ones who really know and What Matters is They Gamed the System and Their Motives were Bad and You Know That For a Fact and you cannot possibly try to understand that there might be other, human, fallible, confused reasons for all this, because It’s Very Very Bad and The End of Free Speech as We Know It. So obviously no point discussing it further, and it’s past my bedtime anyway.

Rich@367: Ah, OK. One student was a third party.

I agree that “How will this play when it becomes a culture wars football?” strategizing is not something anyone should be expected to do when dealing with sexual assault or harassment. I guess the only qualifying factor here is that it was already a culture wars football before the complaint was filed, thanks to Kipnis making it one.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear that the only bonafide losers here are the students. In terms of bad effects from the whole episode re: people’s thinking about Title IX, “Students who brought a Title IX complaint in the context of a sexual harassment case were very publicly stomped on for it” is by far the bigger evil compared to “People will think that Title IX overreached and it’s another case of PC gone mad”. Especially since, for a certain segment of the population, PC has always already gone mad.

It is interesting that this got so much more attention, then Ludlow’s defamation suit against one of his students, which was clearly an abuse of the legal process to get her to shut-up about the fact he sexually assaulted her.

I’m not a huge fan of liberals adopting the conservative tendency to find the least powerful person in the room, and concentrate on how they must be up to no good.

@Z Before I go, thanks for the compliment.

I’m aware of my guest status here and having spoken as bluntly as I have feels too close to rudeness for comfort, so this will be my last contribution to this thread. If JH responds, he can have the last word.

You’re right, Bloix, you can believe any stupid thing you want.

You’re right stupidity is not what you’re accused of.

Maybe too late, but after a good nights sleep and feeling a bit less embattled:

What these students (and/or those acting on their behalf) did was try to use Title IX provisions to get redress for an injury that they felt Kipnis had done to them. Now whatever the legal technicalities, trying to get redress for a personal injury is not, and never should have been treated as, an attempt to end Freedom of Speech.

If John Holbo had simply dismissed that argument as reactionary nonsense, it’s likely that none of this long distraction from what he sees as the main point of his post would have happened. JH, if you’re still reading, I really wish that you had done that, and will do that in future if a similar situation occurs.

I will make a separate comment about my own experience that hopefully will illustrate the point I am making (although I still think that some here will never get it, because basically they are anti-feminist).

Lynne by the way I don’t think you were rude. I think you were very direct, and that your later qualifications about seriousness and feminism were relevant, but I don’t think you were rude and I also hope (and think likely) that JH doesn’t either.

My case study: at an early point my discrimination claim was declined, but later a higher Tribunal found it to have substance.

(Cautionary note: if anyone looks this case up on AustLi, I think they will find wording to the effect that the case was ‘dismissed by consent’. That does not mean the case was heard and found against my claim. It means that it was settled before hearing by consent and therefore did not go to hearing.)

So the counterfactual is if I had given up at the point where the discrimination complaint was declined, and a female colleague of the respondents to my claim had somehow found out about this, and written an article in a prominent publication suggesting that I was being “melodramatic” and that my case was an abuse of process. Hopefully the problems with this are made clearer in this example by the fact that my case was in ‘real life’ later found to have substance.

It’s not exactly equivalent of course, but the point is that all this stuff is contingent. It depends on the way the law is written and interpreted. It’s like the discussion in other threads at present about how scandal depends on social perceptions rather than ‘facts’. If your retaliation law had been written differently, the students’ (or their supporters’) case might have had merit under it. But either way, what they were trying to do was get redress for injury* rather than suppress freedom of speech.

*Possibly they may also have been in part responding to Kipnis’ attacks on Title IX and anti-discrimination provisions in general, because she did also make those. But that doesn’t change what I’m saying.

Val, disagreeing with the merits of claims isn’t an injury. You can keep insisting it is, but it isn’t. If antidiscrimination law insists it is, antidiscrimination law needs to be changed.

Val, of course Laura Kipnis is going to use pejorative terms! She disagrees with the merits of the Title IX actions brought. Why shouldn’t she be allowed to use words to convey her feelings about the matter, even emotionally charged ones? Maybe you can provide for us a list of words she can use safely without injuring the student.

Mayors accused of corruption are slimy. The pompous, grandiose politician is a gasbag, the expensive project a boondoggle and a sight of featherbedding. Pork barrels, smoke-filled rooms, tired and emotional: these all dot the pages of the paper. Evocative language is how we talk about issues all the time.

Misrepresenting? We all make mistakes: some big, some small. De minimis non curat lex. I don’t see any way in which a reader reading the corrected article will think differently about some of the cases than others, even if they now know the grad student contests the claim.

And the accusation of abusing due process? Well, of course disagreeing with the Title IX claim and saying it’s not the sort of thing we should force schools to adjudicate, but can instead deal with by slapping the brazen would be Don Juan amounts isn’t accusing someone of abusing due process. But is it now Professor Kipnis’s public defense and denunciation of the which hunt from her previous article to which you object? Having been subject to a Star Chamber worthy process because of words she said, should she now be forbidden from telling us that this happened?

But now let’s consider the real pain felt by a devote Muslim on seeing Charlie Hebdo.Should that translate into some social recognition that this is a harm that must be addressed? Of course not!

What I find interesting is how you refuse to distinguish the case of hostile environment or quid pro quo sexual harassment, or retaliation where tangible things like work assignments or grades are manipulated from public commentary on a major news item. It’s not an unworkable distinction. Nor is the notion of harm in Mill that foreign to our shores.

The price of agreeing with you is that anyone criticising Title IX by looking at a particular case must look of their shoulder, fearful that some phrase might be too evocative, or some fact misstated, in a way that will bring down the weight of antidiscrimination law upon them. And why? Because they disagreed with what was popular. Do you think for a moment that if Kipnis had supported the student’s claim, and made similar misstatements, she would be facing this sort of reaction?

The thread has been full of argument via “I don’t understand this, so how could it be true?” (I forget what the formal fallacy name is for that.) But the specific speech that the complainants were concerned about was was saying that someone who’d claimed she’d been raped hadn’t really been raped (that’s what “she’d been dating her accuser” really comes down to in this context). The specific speech act was made by what the law considers to be a representative of the organization for whom the complainant works — at least, that’s how Title IX treats faculty: they can act as agents of the university in terms of retaliation.

So people can burble on about free speech, but they’re clueless. I can easily understand a principled free speech defender defending this as a free speech act, but those people understand what they’re doing first. If an IRS agent wanted to reveal the income of a politician in order to make that politician look bad, I might tell them to go ahead, “free speech”, but I would be very conscious that in fact what they were doing was illegal or at least not protected and that I was supporting it anyways. Faculty writing that a student at their school is making a fake rape claim in an active case falls into that inherently problematic category whether you like it or not.

@ 389
I’m not talking about “proper bounds”. My comments are mainly in the context of anti- discrimination law, but I have noticed that some commenters here do talk as if “freedom of speech” means ‘Person A can say whatever s/he likes about Person B, in any forum, and Person B just has to put up with it’. Clearly, that’s about privilege rather than freedom of speech.

Person B has a right to say ‘that’s not true and is injurious to me and I want you to correct it’ and to seek legal remedy if necessary. The fact that the kind of speech they wanted changed was held not to fall under Title IX retaliation provisions doesn’t change that. That is not an attempt to limit “freedom of speech” and by agreeing with Dreher et al that it is, I think you were making a mistake.

A’s right to freedom of speech does not have priority over B’s right not to have false and derogatory statements made about her in public.

Rich, you write: “Imagine that a high-level administrator at the university called a press conference and said “There’s a grad student here who has been making our great school look bad by saying she was raped and that we haven’t done anything about it. Well if she keeps going we’ll make sure that everyone knows what a lying gold-digger she is. Good luck for her getting an academic job after that: who’s going to hire someone who makes fake rape claims?””

What would make this retaliation is that it references a specific person and is clearly trying to get her to shut up (and threatening further retaliation). The statement is clearly *about* her.

You then write: “So instead the administrator calls up a professor: “Hey, could you put something about this in your article?””

The problem is that you have accidentally sidestepped into something else, or you’re not talking about anything close to the Kipnis case. “Something” about the case isn’t retaliation. Threats and specificity are what made your example retaliation. If the administrator asked for a statement like your example, we would want to investigate how that statement got there. Kipnis wrote nothing like that though. And her article clearly isn’t an attempt to intimidate or retaliate against the Ludlow complainant. Right or wrong (mostly wrong I’d think) she is attacking something else entirely–something like a culture where women stand up for themselves at the wrong times (or something, frankly it is rather confusing). But whatever muddle it was, it didn’t look like a retaliatory attack or an attempt to silence the Ludlow complainant.

The complaint against Eisenman (which seems to get swept under the rug in this discussion) looks even less like retaliation and even more like an attempt to discuss how the Title IX process is going to impact faculty.

In both cases, the authors allude to the Ludlow complainant anonymously and as part of their attempt to illustrate something else. If no one has any reason to believe that there was an administrative call to set up the Ludlow complainant with retaliation in either of those cases, there shouldn’t be a nasty Title IX investigation. The alternative you propose is unworkable because it is *always true* that in theory someone in the administration could have tried to set up *any* discussion. Since you also back the ‘any witness’ reporting concept, your standard means that any time any school member alludes to any sexual harassment claim, anyone who reads it can start a Title IX investigation. I know that is a lot of *any*, but that is what we are talking about.

Val. You write “When there is a complex social problem, blaming it on the least powerful person involved is about maintaining hierarchy and privilege, rather than trying to resolve the problem.”

This isn’t what I’m doing. I have a lot of sympathy for the Ludlow complainant. She was put through a wringer that she didn’t want, and picked up a nearby legal weapon to fight back. It is perfectly understandable that people who get bruised in the legal system want to do that. People who get sued for reasons they think are unjust almost always ask “can we sue them for unfairly dragging us through this?” and it is the lawyer’s job to say “Usually, no.” (In fact Ludlow’s lawyers should have said this, and I’ve suggested that under the facts as I know them, HIS libel lawsuit looks like retaliation under Title IX.) I’m saying that Title IX either is not the weapon that the administrators think it is (i.e. “retaliation” isn’t as free form as the investigators seem to think) or that if it is such a weapon, we darn well better fix it.

Sebastian H: “If no one has any reason to believe that there was an administrative call to set up the Ludlow complainant with retaliation in either of those cases, there shouldn’t be a nasty Title IX investigation.”

This is the one that keeps getting me. Here we have motive, means, and opportunity for retaliation. But it isn’t retaliation unless we know about the phone call between the administrator and the professor. How are we supposed to know about this phone call? Would the administrator announce “By the way, I just made a sinister phone call”?

“your standard means that any time any school member alludes to any sexual harassment claim, anyone who reads it can start a Title IX investigation. ”

Maybe, just maybe, faculty should not opine about the guilt or otherwise of people concerned in active sexual harassment cases at their school. If that’s where you want to defend free speech, go ahead. But no newspaper would get away with saying “Joe Blow isn’t an alleged criminal, we think he really did it” prior to Joe Blow being convicted. What makes faculty free speech extra-special-super-duper free in a way that newspapers don’t get? This isn’t academic research: some kind of sociological study about rates of false claims. It’s gossip about a particular case, and for some purposes like this one faculty are considered to be acting for the university.

Yes, “alludes” is nicely sanitized. And we’re not even talking about alluding in a way that is construed as negative. If an administrator made a retaliatory speech act like the imaginary one I outlined in #392, then yes I think that they did something wrong. If they concealed that threat from the public (but not from the person threatened) by passing it off to a third party, they still did something wrong.

But what about all the people who weren’t passing on retaliatory threats, but who were just innocently claiming that someone was lying about being raped? What about those poor people? In my ideal society those wouldn’t be investigated, but we’re not living in my ideal society. We’re living in a society in which those people took positions of relative power and, I’d think, should have learned about the limits and responsibilities of that power.

I will choose 4) : I am rather confused about 1) the facts of the case as I have only read about it on this thread. With regards to 2) we don’t have TitleIX here so I am a bit confused about that as well.

I do not think it has been established Kipnis’ article was in fact written in retaliation, however I do think the student was right to complain about it being inaccurate and biased and improper for Kipnis to have written; that is why I suggested if it was published by an academic in regards to an internal university dispute here the student union would probably advise the student to contact the office of ethics and research integrity to discuss the grievance.* But I am not familiar at all with Kipnis’ university and how it is structured or the internal university statutes and protocols and ethics standards, yet I would expect there to be something similar.

*I only know this as I was disappointed some subject material wasn’t sustainable enough and addressing climate change adequately, I was then advised to contact the Dean first, but I didn’t get around to it and now I don’t think I need to as academics worked on a charter of sustainability and climate which the university council met to discuss adopting yesterday and then there will be a consultation process that students can be involved in.

I’d be interested I replying to all this, but it looks like it requires a bit of thought, and I really have other things I have to do. However it does seem a bit as if both Rich and I, because we expressed opinions, now are asked to devise rules for an ideal society or something, which doesn’t seem a completely reasonable request.

“But I don’t really know how to institutionally operationalize “if you sound like you’re retaliating against a particular student …” ”

That would come under other more general internal regulations

Eg:

“2.1 Like all rights, the right to academic freedom of expression carries responsibilities. Scholars may hold their own views and speak freely on all topics, even outside their expertise, and even identifying themselves as members of the University. However, if they speak in public on topics outside their expertise, they should consider whether it is reasonable in the circumstances to link their comments to their association with the University.

2 .2 Academic freedom of expression is subject to the following principles:

All discourse must be undertaken reasonably and in good faith.

All discourse should accord with principles of academic and research ethics, where applicable. For example, reasons should be given for an argument so that those who wish to respond have a basis to do so and speakers may need to state affiliations (including speciality), sources, funding and potential conflicts of interest. The University recognises that these principles may vary according to the context in which the discourse occurs.”

“Research workers should, in all aspects of their research –
demonstrate integrity and professionalism;
observe fairness and equity;
demonstrate intellectual honesty;
effectively and transparently manage conflicts of interest or potential conflicts of interest; and ensure the safety and well being of those associated with the research”

Val, plenty of commentators on this website went ahead and claimed that George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in cold blood, and should have been convicted. Of course, a jury disagreed. Bernie Goetz was widely reported to have said “you don’t look too bad, have another” while on the subway, a lie which made him seem far more bloodthirsty than he actually was. One of the unfortunate facts of modern society is that even after winning a libel case, there is no office to get your reputation back. I have a great deal of sympathy for those whose reputations are unjustly tarnished, but very little for those who attempt to silence those they disagree with ruinous lawsuits.

But the harm in libel is to your reputation, not your feelings. Lawsuits are public, and the fact of these lawsuits, and the accusations in them, were widely reported in Chicago. I’m not seeing how Laura Kipnis’s summary of the situation makes us think worse of the graduate student vs the correction: rape within intimate relationships does not befall only the unworthy. I’m just not seeing the harm that has to be part of any retaliation claim. That’s on top of it only being mentioned in passing. And indeed, from the Daily Nous article above, neither does the complainant: they don’t talk about how the reputation of the student involved was harmed, merely the inaccuracies involved.

Sebastian, Kipnis is attacking a culture which presumes that women aren’t capable of pushing back against advances they find unwelcome. Think back to those black and white comedies where the response to a would be Lothario is a slap in the face. The basic idea is that women and students, far from being powerless and in need of protection, are capable of protecting themselves and interacting with men on the same terms as men.

ZM, writing an op-ed isn’t academic. The fact is there is something outside of work, where you can express yourself freely, called civil society. And the loss of that ideal is a real problem. McCarthyism used to be a horror, not a model.

magistra, there’s no requirement that we all agree with a sentence. I can say right now that Charles Manson is innocent and should be released, or that George Zimmerman should have been thrown in prison because of what he did, and neither of those statements has anything to do with whether they actually were held guilty or not.

JH: “What would be the best way to frame and implement the norm so it affects only the people you mean to hit? Professors but not students? People can write some things but not other things? I don’t really see what you have in mind, for achieving that.”

By saying that you want me to ignore the facts of this case, and ignore how the law is currently set up, you’re asking me to re-specifiy all a whole lot of stuff, which makes for a long comment. And keep in mind that I’m not setting out my ideal — my ideal would be that the whole system of power relationships is remade, etc.

But what are some of the characteristics involved that “frame and implement” this norm?
1. Professors, not students. In the real world Title IX, students can’t retaliate for the university. Only professors or university employees can.
2. Causal link.

the prohibition against retaliation begins (1) upon the school’s receipt of a formal or informal complaint of a potential civil rights violation, or (2) when an individual participates in an OCR investigation or proceeding. Under the law, retaliation includes any form of intimidation, threat, coercion or any other type of discrimination because of the individual’s complaint or participation.

3. Seriousness. This isn’t a formal part of Title IX — maybe it is, but I’m not a lawyer — but the norm for speech should involve something more than mere allusion. In this case, an op-ed that would be widely read and for which the author apparently did something that could be interpreted as “So you’d like me to not write that you were dating the guy who you say raped you, huh, since it’s his word against yours? Ha ha I’m not going to.”

So if a professor writes something serious about a particular sexual harassment or sexual assault case at their university that has a causal link to a complaint and that appears that it may involve retaliation, they should expect that if the person complains, they are going to be investigated to see whether this was university-sponsored retaliation. This seems to me that it is not an unworkable norm.

she is attacking something else entirely–something like a culture where women stand up for themselves at the wrong times (or something, frankly it is rather confusing).

I suggest that the core thesis of her essay is “God, I was hot 30 years ago.” The male version is common, but the female version turned out just about equally interesting.

(Fwiw that isn’t a defence of Kipnis, whom I haven’t read, and apologies if it seems snarky or OT but some of the opinions about libel law and litigation in general on this thread seem incredibly naive.)

I wonder why nobody on the thread is discussing Dreher. Or Crawford. I just got up to the point where he laments the demise of the hair band. Good stuff! It’s all Harry Shearer’s fault, of course, or we’d still have earnest young men wanting to give their whole souls for real rock and roll. Seriously, it raises the question whether DFW’s lament that his generation of dudes could never write a “Rabbit, Run” was equally silly. (No offense, John, but I think Crawford is better on Wallace than Dreyfus is.)

The administration just sent out an email explaining that Title IX training is now required annually, as opposed to just doing it once when you first arrive on campus. We’ve got 30 days to go through the little online training course.

From hell’s heart I stab at thee, Kipnis!

Good advice, gianni, but come on, have you read her essay?

“For myself, I don’t much want to date students these days, but it’s not like I don’t understand the appeal. […] [A much younger man and myself] had been at some sort of event and sat next to each other. He said he thought we’d been flirting. In fact, he was sure we’d been flirting.”

Z:
Some may think it is problematic, your snarky dismissal of her argument as nothing more than an older woman musing about how hot she is/was. They might contend that the punchy humor you are aiming for relies on a certain stereotype where women are obsessively concerned with their appearance, to the point where they don’t really care about/are not fully equipped for proper intellectual activity.

“have you read her essay”
Yes, I have, and my opinion is that – if you are serious – you are being willfully stupid in interpreting her argument in the way you do.

More broadly though, I am not about to argue the merits (or coherence) of the essay’s broader argument. This is because I believe this question to be 1) wholly irrelevant to the question addressed here; and 2) actively inviting a conflation between one’s opinion of the Kipnis case as regards the complaints & proceedings, with one’s opinion of her general argument about ‘sexual panic’ or whatsohaveyou. Because there are some who see this sort of conflation present in the grad student’s piece from Nous explaining (one of) the complaint(s), it is worth going a bit out of our way to maintain the distinction between the two questions.

I understand that some people will want to clearly announce that they are ‘against’ her essay (I’m not sure if there are any explicit ‘for the Kipnis essay’ positions in this thread). There are probably better ways to signal this position other than attacking her in the manner you chose.

I don’t see the “I was hot” thing, myself. I mean, it’s a fair snark. But there’s an old idea out there among many women that presenting an attractive appearance, and engaging men as men, in the sexual sense, is an obligation, not a privilege. A norm, where the others are slobs or at best prudes. I’ve known quite conservative Jews and Christians both who take this attitude, which the superficially observing male might be surprised, from his evaluation of their appearance.

So, gianni (I believe those were my words you quoted), read the book and let us know. Or look up Dissent and Bookforum for the reviews I’m summarizing.

“Attractive” refers to behavior. This is why the Internet sucks. Now I’m apparently reduced to vocabsplaining English idiom to someone who probably knows perfectly well already, and looking like a pedant.

bianca I am not arguing that you called her ugly. I am arguing that there may be a connection between the manner of criticism you were willing to relay about her book and your use (calling-to-mind really) of that specific adjective, with its multiple meanings. You could have called it ‘insubstantial’, or ‘not a serious intellectual work’. These would have been consonant with the view that her book was nothing more than personal anecdotes, without the more problematic trappings.

I know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Especially when you are the one smoking it.

gianni,

I get it. You’re saying that “attractive” is unfeminist because lookism, I think, though “infantile” is okay despite the history of viewing women as inherently childish. Or else you’re just grasping for anything that will make you one-up in the discussion.

mdc@422: Crawford’s stuff on Kant is terrible

Bianca@424: Oh anyone can see it’s superficial

I can’t, though perhaps that’s because I don’t know Kant very well. What Crawford needs to develop his own notion of the situated self is a contrast with Kant’s notion of the transcendental self, “abstracted from all objects” and “independent of all properties of the objects of volition” (which seems to bear a significant resemblance to the individual laborer/consumer of rational choice theory). Crawford argues that, on the contrary, our choices are path-dependent and our cognitions embedded in a point of view that we cannot completely transcend.

This is how Kant figures in Crawford’s overall argument:

The creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions.

I found his exposition persuasive, even masterly. What’s wrong with it?

I should say that I, myself, found it clear. I recognize that opinions on the clarity and cohesion of the Kipnis essay do widely differ.

Vigorous golf clap for Engels @ 418&419.

I think that means you didn’t agree? Useful.to know….

Picture
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali#/media/File:Kali_by_Raja_Ravi_Varma.jpg

” Vigorous golf clap for Engels @ 418&419.

I think that means you didn’t agree? Useful.to know….” –engles @443

No, actually it meant I politely, if still somewhat forcefully, agreed with your points. No sarcasm; a genuine golf clap.

Fucking internet is useless for communication…

Not trying to stay in the argument, but wanted to say, for the sake of both Rich and John Holbo, I don’t read Rich the way JH does. I did have a disagreement with Rich in a recent thread where I might have leaned a little more that way, but as a general rule, I really don’t see Rich as over-weaningly arrogant in the way JH seems to be suggesting.

I find that both Rich and Plume, who also comments here sometimes, seem to be treated as arrogant by some people on CT. I wonder if that’s because they have strong moral convictions about social justice? I think it’s a shame they are treated that way.

Although actually, let me step back for a moment. Some people were writing that they didn’t even understand how this could legitimately appear to be a case of Title IX retaliation (before the investigation) and so I was providing a narrative that showed how it could. But maybe we should discuss what liberal proceduralism is really about.

A lot of it is just about appearing to be fair. Giving people a legal avenue of redress that can in theory work to let less powerful people prevail against more powerful people even though in practice it rarely does. It’s a social control method. Does having a jury trial (to take a random example) really make much difference if the lawyers on one side are wealthy and know the judge and the one on the other side is penniless and doesn’t have those contacts? No, it really doesn’t. But people piously say that it does and that certain basic rights are being respected. Like the right to complain to the legal system when you think someone has done something wrong and get an investigation, even though the “investigation” in this case consists of asking the professor “Did someone representing the university discuses this with you beforehand? No? OK I guess we’ll take your word for it, there can’t be retaliation under the Title IX definition then.”

The point is that when left-liberals start chipping away even at this BS level of public protection against abuse of authority, how are they really different from conservatives? Conservatives and left-liberals are all Enlightenment liberals, in some sense. Conservatives just don’t want the fig leaf that, in a longer term view, inconveniences the people in power sometimes but lets the system go on. When you start agreeing with the conservatives that this was bad strategy for the powerless person to file a doomed complaint or whatever, there’s no particular reason for anyone to value left-liberalism. It’s like the social democrats who wonder why they lose to conservatives when the social democrats were careful to claim that we need austerity so that they wouldn’t scare anyone off by being too left economically.

I’m going to sound like a broken record with this, but yesterday I was reading a hobby related site that has nothing at all to do with academia, and the Kipnis story was being discussed (not sure how that started). There was no doubt in anyone’s mind over there that the Title IX investigation had been initiated because the students objected to the general “What’s the matter with the kids these days? They’re so oversensitive!” drift of Kipnis’ piece, and that this was an outrageous example of misusing Title IX to punish the expression of an opinion someone didn’t like.

In other words, as Rich said upthread, they were outraged about a fiction.

I guess I’m harping on this because I think the “But is it bad for liberalism?” aspect of this thread may be missing the point by focusing on what actually happened (the students complained because the piece made specific false claims about them with respect to the Ludlow case) and whether it was a justifiable Title IX complaint.

To the extent that anything resulting from this case is bad for liberalism, it’s because people are responding to an imaginary version of what happened. And that has less to do with counter-enlightenment gotchas and more to do with mundane media politics. Conservatives were, as they often are, better at controlling the narrative. So much so that even the liberal New York Times Amanda Marcotte was eventually denouncing the students for their imagined sins.

Rich,
For the little that it’s worth, your persistence has changed my mind quite a bit since I first read the two pieces by Kipnis. Especially, I know essentially agree with your 21.

Rich, the problem with your proposed mechanism is that in the hands of anyone with the slightest shred of vindictiveness it becomes wholly weaponized. You seem to want anything that could possibly construed as negative against a complainant to be investigated because in theory there might have been administration meddling. I’m sure you expect the bounds to be rational, but they won’t be. And remember you are allowing third parties to trigger these investigations. So the actually operating standard will be: any statement which any university third party might choose to construe as insufficiently supportive of Title IX or any complainant.

This isn’t theoretical. It has already happened. Eisenman, was brought up on a Title IX complaint which you havent talked about. Upthread, there is talk of his statement being a breach of confidentiality, but in reality we are just back to an allusion to the case which could be dechiphered by people who already know (a standard you believe is sufficient). He talked in an academic senate setting about his belief that the Title IX investigation process as shown against Kipnis was a threat to academic freedom. He didn’t mention Ludlow’s complainant by name, and at the time no outsider knew for sure that she was involved in the Kipnis complaint. (Remember third parties). He talked about the threshold of investigation for Kipnis-like complaints as being to low. (I.e. The discussion Holbo is having.). So, unlike Kipnis, he wasn’t attacking the Title IX sexual misconduct requirements, but was rather raising issues about the threshold for retaliation investigations.

The reason he was talking about it was because the Kipnis case got huge amounts of press, but as far as construably negative allusions attempting to retaliate against sexual misconduct complainanst the link is rather tenuous.

Nevertheless, a third party (now known to NOT be the underlying Ludlow complainant) successfully started a Title IX investigation of retaliation against Eisenman which was only dropped because she withdrew it (citing lack of trust in the system, rather than citing ridiculousness of the complaint).

Is being able to force Eisenman-like investigations a good outcome? A necessary one?

So as soon as I point out that the original retaliation claim against Kipnis plausibly merited an investigation, you ask me to look up a related but different one. Nope, at comment #468 I’m not going to develop a whole new argument around facts. I’ll just say what should be obvious: Eisenman was Kipnis’ support person during the Title IX investigation, and maybe being the support person during the investigation made it a bad idea to go in front of a public meeting of the faculty and tell them that this was like something out of Stalin’s Russia. That sort of looks like … retaliation, doesn’t it? People who have official roles in court cases have rules about how they can and can’t speak out to the public that override their normal free speech rights.

Wait. In your opinion what does “support person” mean?

“How did anything wrong for reasons related to liberal bias” should read “Who did anything wrong…”

The best illustration of what I’m talking about is now JH’s trolling at 299: “But I accept that anything illiberal done in the name of ‘liberalism’ will tend to drag the name of ‘liberalism’ into disrepute.” Nobody would disagree with that (another strawman) – except that nothing done in the Kipnis case was “done in the name of ‘liberalism’”. Which is what I’ve been saying (and Rich and AcademicLurker 459 and others) from the beginning. JH and his followers are engaging in very straightforward right-wing propaganda parroting and they are oh so shocked that anybody might find fault with that.

TM@472: geo at 259, have you really not noticed that Rich specifically distanced himself from the view you impute to him?

Do you mean @271? In any case, if I imputed a view to Rich, then no, I guess I hadn’t noticed that he’d specifically distanced himself from it.

In general, TM, “very clear statements” rarely get misread so persistently, by so many intelligent commenters, as you allege here. Maybe they weren’t very clear. And since you’ve expended far less breath in this “fruitless” thread than Rich, you might have troubled to restate his very clear position rather than simply deploring everyone else’s failures of reading comprehension.

geo, you are right, it’s 271. And here’s from your statement (imputing Rich’s position): ““OK, we can all agree that there are some objectionable features of the situation, but by the same reasoning, there are far graver and more extensive injustices happening all around us, which demand our attention even more urgently.”

And here’s Rich at 252, which is what you were directly responding to:
“I really wasn’t trying to make an Oppression Olympics argument — an argument that says “Why should anyone care about injustice towards academics when there is so much worse going on.”“

Do I have to spell it out: Rich states the position that he does NOT wish to take, and you respond by imputing almost verbatim the position he just said he does NOT take.

TM, you may be tired but you aren’t very accurate. You pointedly didn’t mention the only thing that he was required to be confidential about–the identity of the complainant. Which of course you couldn’t mention because he didn’t violate it.

This is similar to newspaper reporting in states with certain types of shield laws. They aren’t banned from talking about rape allegations, identifying the accused party, the details of the allegations, or their judgment about the likelihood of the charges being poorly grounded. They are banned from giving the name of the complainant (and address, and certain other identifying information). You are trying to create some sort of blanket rule against talking about charges AT ALL, which just doesn’t exist. The investigation was confidential as to the identity of the complainant. Not generally confidential.

He was the president of the faculty senate, talking TO the faculty senate about business clearly pertinent to the faculty senate.

‘Support person’ just means “witness because the administration refused to allow an attorney for Kipnis to be present”. It isn’t nefarious.

Sebastian H is providing more argument from personal incredulity. Here’s what’s supposed to be the text of a joint statement from Northwestern’s Department of Philosophy (it’s from here, in case anyone wants to challenge my source):

We (the faculty members of Northwestern’s Philosophy Department) call upon Baron Reed, the Philosophy Department’s representative to the Faculty Senate, to join together with other Faculty Senators to inquire into whether Stephen Eisenman, in his role as President of the Northwestern Faculty Senate, violated his obligations by discussing details of an ongoing confidential university investigation on the senate floor, and so therefore should step down from office. Our students deserve to be treated in full accordance with the university’s rules.

Now, is that the irresponsible complaint of a nameless third party who just doesn’t know university rules? Or is that the entire department that the grad student is in publicly saying that Eisenman potentially did something very wrong and should be investigated?

I don’t think that academic departments are in the habit of issuing statements like this about the presidents of their senates merely because they didn’t know that only the identity of the complainant was confidential.

According to the Title IX Legal Manual, section on “Retaliation”:

“Four elements must be established to make out a prima facie case of retaliation:

1. The complainant engaged in activities or asserted rights protected under Title IX;

2. The recipient knew of the protected activity;

3. The recipient thereafter subjected the person to adverse action, treatment or conditions; and

4. There is a causal connection between the protected activity and the adverse action, treatment or conditions.”

These are prima facie conditions, not matters to be investigated. This would seem to tell against Rich’s contention that the mere possibility of #4 is grounds for investigation.

“Adverse action” in #3 is defined elsewhere in the section: “[n]o recipient or other person shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or discriminate against any individual for the purpose of interfering with any right or privilege secured by [Title VI], or because he has made a complaint, testified, assisted, or participated in any manner in an investigation, proceeding or hearing under this subpart.” Which of these — “intimidate, threaten, coerce, or discriminate against” — is Kipnis’s essay alleged to have done.

Finally, just noticed this by Kipnis in the comments section (#123) of the DailyNous post Rich cites (which has a link to the Title IX Legal Manual):

Some of the commentators are going to enormous lengths to contest my arguments, lengths that put them on intellectually ludicrous ground. As to the validity of my using the word “dating” in my Chronicle essay regarding the relationship between Ludlow and a graduate student: to be even clearer than I was previously, Ludlow’s suit quotes the graduate student’s prior complaint as having acknowledged a consensual romantic relationship and consensual sex between the two of them. (This obviously has nothing to do with whether or not there was also non-consensual sex at some point.) So are commentators asserting that Ludlow lied in his court filings about easily disprovable matters, that is, the graduate student’s statements in her earlier complaint? Are commentators asserting there wasn’t a prior consensual relationship? I don’t think anyone has said that; nevertheless my “journalistic” credentials are under attack for supposedly mistaking assertions in a court filing for facts. The dispute is whether this is a distinction that makes a difference in this case. (And additionally, whether using the word “dating” as a synonym for “consensual romantic relationship” is actionable under Title IX.) Though I see Justin has posted a proviso disallowing posts that address whether relevant events took place, or speculation about the veracity of the parties involved, as some commentators have pointed out, the underlying facts are indeed what’s being argued about. And so is my veracity. Regarding which, I’m going to once again say that a 72-day Title IX investigation established that the use of the term “dating” in the essay was perfectly legitimate, and so was relying on the court documents for the underlying facts of the case.

If Kipnis indeed was relying on a court document (ie, the student’s statement acknowledging previous consensual sex), as she alleges, would this absolve her of the repeated (in this thread) claim that she was “lying”?

“SH, you make many unsupported claims, either provide evidence or leave it. Repeating the same claim for the tenth time doesn’t make it more convincing.”

TM, that is what the cited report says. That is also what Title IX says. If you don’t want to believe it that is your own blindness. You repeating your interpretation doesn’t make it any more correct.

Rich, the complaint against Eisenman was withdrawn so we won’t be getting any more clarity on the issue. If the student thought it had more merit than the claim against Kipnis (which was found to not to meet even preponderance of the evidence standard) she certainly could have continued it.

“Rich, the complaint against Eisenman was withdrawn so we won’t be getting any more clarity on the issue. If the student thought it had more merit than the claim against Kipnis (which was found to not to meet even preponderance of the evidence standard) she certainly could have continued it.”

Have the faculty withdrawn their joint statement? That is what I quoted, after all.

geo 485: You are really surprising me. The causal connection is always in such cases a matter of dispute because nobody who engages in retaliation will admit to doing so (also see 200). So naturally in every such investigation, whether there is a causal connection or not is precisely what the investigation will have to investigate. It seems to me that you misunderstand the meaning of prima facie. A complainant must provide a plausible prima facie case to be taken seriously. That is not the same as a water tight proof.

geo @ 485: Actually Kipnis’ comment is on the article that afeman linked to, here. In the body of that post, she write “The only account I had access to was the professor’s. ” So she didn’t rely on “court documents” except insofar as Ludlow’s version of events was presented as a court document. There is an ensuing argument about how Ludlow’s court filing characterizes the student’s court filing, which Kipnis says she hasn’t read. So she relied on Ludlow’s version of events.

I view her comment as upholding my point. Remember, I didn’t write that Kipnis was retaliating and should have been found guilty. I wrote what I wrote all the way up at #21. And what does Kipnis write? “Regarding which, I’m going to once again say that a 72-day Title IX investigation established that the use of the term “dating” in the essay was perfectly legitimate, and so was relying on the court documents for the underlying facts of the case.” For the sake of argument, let’s take her at her word about what the investigation established. So, taking her at her word, it was highly relevant to the investigation whether that word “dating” was legitimate. Why? Because that’s what the claim of retaliation hinges on. If it wasn’t credible that mischaracterizing the relationship could have been retaliation, then it wouldn’t have been important to figure out whether this characterization turned out to be legitimate or not.

As for the rest, I’ll just repeat what I wrote earlier — “adverse action” can be a threat to someone’s reputation, since a reputation as someone who makes false rape claims would be the end of an academic career. “Causal connection”: without the scandal of back-and-forth Title IX complaints, Kipnis would never have written about the grad student.

JH: “Maybe that explains why Rich finds it so interesting.”

I’ve often observed that once I’ve written the huge number of words that it takes to finally begin to convince people to change their minds about a case like this, people start to write about how uninteresting it all is and why do I bother.

Rich@495: The passage I quoted was from the comments section, #123. She claims Ludlow quoted the student’s previous complaint, acknowledging that they dated. She then asks: “Was it reasonable to suppose that he (and his lawyer) lied in a court document about something so easily checked, i.e., the contents of another court document?” The answer seems obvious to me: no. What would you say?

RP: “If it wasn’t credible that mischaracterizing the relationship could have been retaliation, then it wouldn’t have been important to figure out whether this characterization turned out to be legitimate or not.”

That it wasn’t credible that mischaracterizing the relationship could have been retaliation, and that the complaint should therefore never have been pursued, was Holbo’s point in the OP. Here you’re simply saying that because that’s what was investigated, it must be that it was right to investigate it.

TM@491: It seems to me that you misunderstand the meaning of prima facie. A complainant must provide a plausible prima facie case to be taken seriously.

According to my dictionary, “prima facie” means “evidence that if uncontested would establish a fact or the presumption of a fact.” Evidence, not supposition or hypothesis. Neither you nor Rich has mentioned any evidence of retaliation cited by the complainant, only a supposition.

TM: “You never cite one side’s court claims as fact without clarifying that this is one side’s version.”

You don’t in a reported piece. This was an opinion piece. The difference is fundamental to judging a piece’s use of evidence.

TM@

geo; “Here you’re simply saying that because that’s what was investigated, it must be that it was right to investigate it.”

And we’ve back to the loop of incredulity: the investigation must have been ridiculous because the complaint was ridiculous, and the complaint must have been ridiculous because the investigation was ridiculous. It was investigated because that was a key element of what could have made this retaliation. JH thinks that I’m the only one who has thought of this theory, but that’s because he seems to prefer to think that this was an investigation into something other than a Title IX retaliation complaint.

geo: ““Was it reasonable to suppose that he (and his lawyer) lied in a court document about something so easily checked, i.e., the contents of another court document?” The answer seems obvious to me: no.”

Did you read those documents? No. Did Kipnis? No. Is Kipnis notably very careful about details, such as the details of what implies what in a case that involves reading one person’s court filing to figure out from it what an opposing filing must have said? No. If you read the following discussion you’ll see that the claim that Ludlow quoted the grad student’s court filing has already been backed off from: it was some kind of more indirect reference.

I don’t really have any idea why anyone would think that I’m on either Team The System Worked or Team The System Didn’t Work.

I’m on Team This Is Symptomatic of Liberalism. This system works as it works everywhere in our society. That is not an endorsement of it. Part of that system is that people bitterly complain on the rare occasions when the system inconveniences a more powerful rather than a less powerful person. That is not an endorsement of blaming the less powerful person.

Ok I’ll state my case. I won’t say ‘the system worked’ because that’s not the point.

The system is difficult and often does not work well for either side. It is about major social change and legislation is a blunt instrument for that.

Creating a prejudicial atmosphere is not greatly different from the more direct actions which JH and others seem to accept as retaliation. Consider this (the details are sketchy because I don’t have time to look them up, but the gist is right):) a very bright female med student makes some complaint about behaviour from a senior specialist during her training. She has since completed but now apparently can’t get a job in a major hospital. A senior female specialist in exasperation says in a public forum that young women in that position would be better off giving the guy a blow job and keeping quiet about it, because otherwise their career will not recover. Queue howls of outrage from all and sundry.

If you even just make a complaint – regardless of how strong it is – it is likely that your career will never fully recover. It is likely – not just in medicine – that you will be labelled as a trouble maker and some people will always see you that way.

I speak as one who has used the system. Deal with JH and all who sail with you.

I need to clarify “deal with” in my comment at 505, I guess ( apart from having left out the “that” in my indignation). I don’t mean to be hostile – because of course women being angry or hostile is a terrible thing anyway (that’s sarcasm) – but I do get fed up with all this apparent nit-picking. Sexism and patriarchy really are problems you know. It would be great if CT could focus a bit more on that.

> Sexism never fucking lets up.

Sexists care more about sexism than you do.

[like I keep saying, I really think we’ll have better luck treating this as a medical, a public-health problem rather than a political one. Sort of like the campaigns against TB and spitting: “Don’t ask your intern for a blowjob, it spread dismemes!”. End abstinence-only sexism education, or something, shift towards a “Don’t have unprotected sexism, or if you do only in stable relationships and use protection”, or something]

‘Wasn’t being completely honest’ I mean. On the mobile, rushing etc

BW: “Law is a weapon, and it properly maintains the boundaries. In the ordinary routine of life, “good behavior” is bounded, not by the operation of law, but by the operation of norms and conventions, the latter being much more efficient in every sense than the former.”

Not much has been said about the antecedents to this, and the real norm and convention that Kipnis broke, which really has nothing that I can see to do with sexuality. The relevant norm is one that I thought was pretty firmly established in every large American organization by now, and has to do with not writing about personnel decisions publicly.

If you read into Title IX guidance at all, you’ll quickly see that the Title IX rules are based on Title VI, and what is Title VI? It’s Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So, like everything else in the U.S., our political conflicts are still about the fossilized and forever existing structures of racism and response to racism. Title IX is itself from 1972, but seems to have been implemented in this way far more recently, and when it was implemented that was done based on a long-existing legal framework. As far as I can tell, any new implementation has to be done this way because we’re no longer really capable of passing major laws. (Somewhere in some CT thread I made a list of U.S. environmental laws and when they were passed: I should bookmark it.)

At any rate, it was a regular feature of institutional life that some manager would inadvertently write the truth about firing someone because the manager was appallingly racist or sexist, and then the gaffe would have to be buried under a pile of lawyers. As far as I know the “Human Resources Department” pretty much existed in order to monitor the arcane processes that produced the pile of lawyers on command. Kipnis’ essay looks very much like the classic “Hey, what’s so bad about me sleeping with the shop girls? Have you seen ’em he ha they look great!” that would have to be turned into some kind of principled statement of something or other or just paid off.

So the norm pretty quickly was created that, look, you just don’t write about this stuff, because that entangles you in a mass of legal depositions. dsquared @ #130 mentions this early on.

Rich @501: And we’re back to the loop of incredulity: the investigation must have been ridiculous because the complaint was ridiculous, and the complaint must have been ridiculous because the investigation was ridiculous. It was investigated because that was a key element of what could have made this retaliation.

As far as I can tell (the syntax is a bit obscure here), what this says is that an investigation of the complaint had to be opened in order to determine whether it was worth opening an investigation of the complaint. On the contrary, it has to be determined (according to the four prima facie conditions that I quoted earlier) that a complaint is worth investigating before an investigation is opened.

Since Master Holbo has decreed (wisely) that it’s time for summing up, I’ll first enter a demurrer to the consensus view that we’ve expended an appalling amount of time and verbiage to little purpose. These things have to be argued out, for as long as it takes. That’s democracy, God love it.

My overall take: it was a highly debatable but not by no means worthless opinion piece with a small factual error, neither negligent nor malicious nor substantially harmful. It should have been vigorously debated on its own merits and should never have gotten within a country mile of triggering government intervention.

“the problem” being “the rape and sexual assault problem”

Watson,

Do you really think I’m going to answer a “question” without a verb from someone who hasn’t ever argued in good faith in the past?

As for the Ovid guy at Columbia, which I’ll take advantage of your mentioning (it wasn’t on the required list when I was there, but they change those up every so often), maybe he should put a video of his lecture online so we can see what he was doing. Because Ovid is pretty darn dry and I can’t imagine someone being offended just by the text or by an academic discussion of it, unless it was way out of the ordinary. Maybe you can’t imagine an out-of-the ordinary discussion of Ovid that might possibly be excessive.

Or maybe you can, and you’re just arguing in bad faith as usual, pretending to support liberal neutrality toward opinion while actually spraying nuisance arguments in the direction of people whose opinions you don’t like, or who complain about illiberalism in defense of opinions you do like.

If we can rise to the challenge of #520, we will surely reach 1000 comments!

bob mcmanus: “So the “ruling ideas of the ruling class” largely belong to the 99%, who rule without realizing it, because they are conditioned and comfortable with being powerless.”

I’ll nitpick that “conditioned” usually implies a conditioner. The ruling ideas of the ruling class prevail because they are functional for large parts of the non-ruling class, who don’t really need to be conditioned into them. For instance, this thread has seen a lot of defense of professorial rights as opposed to non-professorial rights. Were people conditioned into that, or is it just unadmitted self-interest?

Liberal neutrality does not mean all ideas are equal. Naturally some idea are correct and others are not. Rather it means that everyone has equal right to express them, and decide between them. The idea I don’t like is that some ideas shouldn’t be tolerated. You’re saying that universities have certain core values which people should be forced to sign onto. And I don’t think that’s right, or if it’s right, it actually runs counter to your sympathy for those complaining against the article, because the core values of any university are freedom to talk about ideas others might disagree with.

Calls to censor research or sanction researchers who reach the wrong conclusion are not exceptional. Calls to exclude speakers who protestors disagree with are not exceptional. It’s not me who’s arguing in bad faith: it’s hard to have a debate with those who will, if it runs against them, disrupt the forum or demand the cancellation of opportunities to speak.

As for Ovid, you can read the complaint right here. Is it about one professor? No, it’s about Ovid.

Yes, Watson, I read that too.

Val, I think it’s clear you think something should be done to her. But what ideally would be done? Forget your unfamiliarity: it clearly hasn’t stopped you from defending this attempt to shut someone up because what they say is unwelcome. (Kipnis after all never named either student: hard to see how this contributes to the reputation as a troublemaker either of them could have) Is all criticism of Title IX, or claims which are ridiculous and out of line, now verboten, on the grounds that it contributes to a climate that makes people fearful to use it?

The whole point is that what we think of the content Kipnis’s article shouldn’t be confused with her right to write it. I support the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to say “God Hates Fags” along with the right of the counterpotestors to say “God Hates Bigots”.

I agree with Val that it would be very unusual for an Australian professor to write an article like the Kipnis article, especially about a harassment case at their own university. I would expect they could face disciplinary action if they did, or at the very least a reminder of the university’s academic conduct rules or similar things.

I also find the jokes and belittling of triggers in the article and the thread unfunny. They show a lack of understanding and also a refusal to try to understand.

If people suffer a traumatic event it is quite common for them to be vulnerable to triggers that cause them to relive the event in their minds. Their are various psychological strategies for this such as reminding yourself of your surroundings by paying active attention to physical things around you rather than to your thoughts. I was unable to finish my BA honours year and eventually moved into a different discipline.

Watson Ladd,

“As for Ovid, you can read the complaint right here. Is it about one professor? No, it’s about Ovid.”

I am entirely unsurprised by you misrepresenting the article you link to. The complaint is about how Ovid was being taught — with a focus on the aesthetics rather than the content of the text which dealt with rape:

“During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.”

This is due entirely to faulty teaching of Ovid. I studied Ovid too for a class on Myth, Epic, and Romance. I did not pass because I failed to finish an assignment. However I have already pointed out on another thread that in Hesiod’s Greek mythology Epic heroes are born through the rape of women by Gods, in Ovid women are raped and metamorphise into plants, men, birds, etc. You can quite easily analyse Ovid in terms of Ovid’s representation of gender etc and any decent professor would be capable of either addressing these matters in class or in a student consultation. My reading of Ovid is that he does not glamourise rape but portrays takes a critical approach.

Watson Ladd,

You appear to be confused about what you think universities are for:

A: Universities are supposed to protect unpopular ideas
“Universities are supposed to protect unpopular ideas” and you give the example of holocaust denial — I must say I quibble with your choice of phrasing here as I do not think holocaust denial should be called an “unpopular idea” nor should universities protect assertions of holocaust denial by professorial staff. I doubt this would happen in Australia — when a holocaust denier wanted to visit from overseas he was denied a visa.

B: Universities are supposed to educate students
“if the complaint was about teaching Ovid but not through the lense of gender, that’s clearly an attempt to decide what professors can and cannot teach. But students don’t know what they should be taught, or they wouldn’t need to be educated.” Well most students know enough to know they should not be being taught holocaust denial as in your first example of protected ideas. Universities in Australia happen to take feedback from students about classes — this would include feedback on Ovid being taught poorly due the professor only taking an aesthetic approach and not critically evaluating the content of Ovid’s work which some might say is crucial to an understanding of the text. You are quite correct that students are not responsible for what the university professors teach — because as everybody who watches The Gilmore Girls would know the Provost is the university officer responsible for what the professors teach.

Finally by writing “A student who can’t read Ovid needs psychological care, not trigger warnings” you seem to be suggesting that students needing psychological help be excluded from universities. It is quite likely the student may be seeing a psychologist but that they also might wish to study at university before the psychological issue is resolved. In that case the student may request equitable adjustments such as not having to study particular texts like Ovid that trigger memories of the trauma, or to be able to speak with professors about concerns with these texts and thus work on how to engage with the texts from their own perspective. When I tried to return to my Honours year I wrote an essay on the Nouveau Roman and Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits, then there was another final essay and I wasn’t stable enough to complete it after the previous essay. The professor sent me a card saying I could do it — but with my health I was not able to do it. As I said, I ended up changing disciplines, and what I am studying now is very interesting and important, but I have found changing disciplines at the graduate level challenging as I lack some foundational knowledge always having been interested in art and literature and history before, rather than geography and economics and science and architecture etc.

Academic freedom of the instructor wasn’t an issue in the case, because the syllabus is decided by an administrative committee and most of the material is outside of the instructors’ expertise. Since my time they’ve removed Rabelais and Apuleius, and they can remove Ovid, who likely was there on the theory that undergraduates like to talk about sex. Watson is actually trying to tell the department how they should run the course, hardly supportive of academic freedom.

Rich Puchalsky:

I shouldn’t have implied that I find your contributions indigestible. Or even unenjoyable! (Though enjoyability may well be the least of your concerns.) I agree with Bruce Wilder far upthread: it takes all sorts, Parnassus has many mansions, etc. Certainly I can only admire your diligence and stamina.

But do you really mean to say that cloying sweetness is “the essential ingredient” of JH’s posts? There is such a thing as a happy medium between a diet of brown rice and lentils and one of Pringles and Baked Alaska.

Of course you are perfectly within your rights to do your utmost to obtain complete agreement with you in every particular about complaints procedures in relation to Title IX — because you believe that otherwise any discussion of the wider philosophical questions about Dreher’s position(s) will start off on the wrong footing. But after well over 500 comments, and with what feels like a general air of lassitude having set in by now (unsurprisingly), that discussion looks unlikely to start off on any footing.

And I wonder if you don’t mind too much if it doesn’t, because (going by what you’ve said about Dreher in other threads) you don’t believe such discussions can ever be worthwhile.

Here again there is perhaps a fundamental disagreement about the nature of discussion or conversation. If Dreher is just-obviously stupid or disingenuous or blatantly arguing in bad faith, why waste any time on him?

I have to admit to being too stupid to see — unerringly, every time, immediately — everything he says as just-obviously stupid. And I also have to admit that this isn’t straightforward modesty on my part. Because I think there’s a deep interconnectedness between your willingness (if you have any) to admit to being swayed (even a little, at least when you’re off your guard) by the arguments of somebody you know you just-obviously shouldn’t respect — and your curiosity (if you have any) about why he or she thinks the way he or she does.

It’s possible to argue “eristically” (in R.G. Collingwood’s sense) that scientism, reductionism and materialism are just-obviously-wrong, in a rapidly turned-out blog post. (Dreher himself does this sort of thing insouciantly all the time, of course.) Or it’s possible to spend 25 or so years thinking “dialectically” (also in RGC’s sense) about how it came to be that we are so susceptible to these, yes, mistakes, as Wittgenstein did. I know which of those two approaches I find more illuminating. But I also wonder (admittedly in a Chou-En-Lai vis a vis the French Revolution kind of way!) if the latter may not turn out to be the more practically effective one in the end, as well.

“We have a dilemma. Either he’s basically on board with the Enlightenment or he isn’t. If he is, he’s on the hook for same-sex marriage, by his own lights. If he isn’t, then why the hell is he so bothered about the Kipnis case?”

I’m puzzled that Dreher’s being pegged as the Counter-Enlightenment vs assorted Enlightened social justicars.

There was nothing remotely resembling a gay rights movement during the Enlightenment. Freedom of speech and religion are right there in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; which in my opinion gives a very strong steer on the Enlightenment position on op-eds, gay cakes, etc. On the other side, the most you can say is there were some philosophes who didn’t think sodomites should be punished.

As to the rest of it, homosexual identity didn’t exist until the late c19th. Anti-discrimination law is a c20th invention. The ‘right to marry’ is too, civil marriage as an institution was only introduced in France the year before the Declaration. The entire concepts people are arguing with were alien to the Enlightenment. The most pro-sodomy voice at the time was De Sade, whose main pre-occupation was trolling Enlightenment thought.

Due to his religion Dreher obviously has mild Counter-Enlightenment sympathies, but he’s batting for the Enlightenment on this one. The Anti-Enlightenment team here are the motley crew of critical theorists, poststructuralists and feminists outraged over a professor sharing her opinion with people. That’s the ideological dividing line.

Abbe Faria @ 541: I’m puzzled that Dreher’s being pegged as the Counter-Enlightenment vs assorted Enlightened social justicars.

As you say, “Dreher obviously has mild Counter-Enlightenment sympathies”, so I’m not sure why you are puzzled. Clearly, you understand as well that the the so-called Social Justice Warriors, with their focus on identity and the “rights” of the subjective experience of the Self are definitely post-Enlightenment and possibly anti-Enlightenment. Dreher sees an opportunity to troll the Enlightenment liberals (case-in-point being our host), by casting his own patriarchal authoritarianism (“a kid!”) as aligned with liberal principle in the privilege of academic freedom. Holbo took Dreher’s bait and Rich pointed that out. Repeatedly. Whether Holbo, in taking Dreher’s bait, gained an ally for freedom or kicked egalitarianism in the gut is a judgment call.

Abbe Faria @ 541: There was nothing remotely resembling a gay rights movement during the Enlightenment.

No “movement” certainly, but one can certainly trace some elements of philosophic respect for human nature and personal autonomy as well as skepticism about religious claims that homosexuality should be considered immoral to the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment view, to the extent there was (or is) one, would have been hostile to religious justifications for regulating sexual behavior, opposed to savage punishments generally (and any sanction on consensual adult behavior for purely religious reasons) and inclined to base its own judgments on investigation of “human nature” by means of what we might call biology or anthropology. An Enlightened view would not have been pro-sodomy; it might have been, “tastes vary”. The Napoleonic Code dropped sodomy altogether in a nod to the liberal consensus on what constitutes rational law, and Bentham used homosexual relations as a prime example of rational philosophy of utilitarianism. So, there’s that pretty strong evidence from the lee side of the Enlightenment about how their worldview applied.

As anyone who calls himself Abbé ought to know, during the actual historical period of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and the 18th century up to the French Revolution, the philosophes who advocated the Enlightened world view were heavily outnumbered, and heavily out-published in France by Catholic teachers and writers. Peter Gay, the eminent historian of the Enlightenment, put the ratio at ranging up to close to 10 to 1 in favor of the traditionalist Catholic establishment. (In England and even more so in Scotland, the Enlightenment had a better establishment foothold, due in part to a weaker established Church and a religious settlement that offered a measured tolerance to Dissenters; they were still a minority relative to the Tory consensus in favor of conventionalism.)

History did not end with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789. If the liberal and scientific worldview gained a certain pre-eminence and intellectual hegemony, it certainly didn’t achieve a permanent triumph. Our present sense of what it means to be liberal or conservative is colored by subsequent struggles and developments. For Anglo-American ideas of what it means to be small-l liberal in political philosophy, the long struggle for civil rights and electoral democracy began in the 1820s, when Enlightenment ideas were recast as a reform program encompassing legal prohibitions on slavery, voting rights, women’s rights and so on.

So, there’s been a dialectic thru the more than 225 years since the historical Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution, between the heirs of the Enlightenment advocating for liberal and gradual social democratic reforms on the one hand and reactionary conservative interests, advocating for authoritarianism or traditionalism or simply vested economic interests. In the political back-and-forth, subversion of Enlightenment thinking by conservatives inventing ideologies that bastardize Enlightenment ideals in the service of reactionary social prejudices and reprehensible economic interests has been a perennially successful strategy. Dreher has many predecessors as conman, Holbo as mark.

In European politics, frustration with the iron-grip of reactionaries on hereditary claims to political power bred radical and militant movements in response. There’s a conservative tradition of libeling the Enlightenment as grandparent of totalitarianism; people have two sets of grandparents, and reactionary authoritarianism placed its seed in that monstrosity as well, in my view. But, I digress.

Regarding the politics of personal identity and social justice, I will admit to mixed feelings. This may be because I am an old guy, inclined to shout, “get off my lawn” to rude and uncouth youth. I have no problem supporting Rich’s position though, in favor of keeping open procedural opportunities for the less powerful to protest and contest the justice of privileged behavior. That’s seems Enlightened enough.

NickM: “If Dreher is just-obviously stupid or disingenuous or blatantly arguing in bad faith, why waste any time on him?”

I’m not arguing with Dreher. I’m arguing with Holbo. I think that Holbo can do better: otherwise I wouldn’t bother arguing with him.

BW@543: I have no problem supporting Rich’s position though, in favor of keeping open procedural opportunities for the less powerful to protest and contest the justice of privileged behavior.

So Holbo, Sebastian, et al are not “in favor of keeping open procedural opportunities for the less powerful to protest and contest the justice of privileged behavior.” This will be news to them, I suspect.

Just trying to work out how to use html for quotes because my quoting of AF and BW was so clumsy. Please ignore.

‘this is quite common …’ (On the phone screen again)

Ok Watson, I take that as a comment made in good faith and engaging with what I said (genuinely, I’m not being snarky) but I’m talking about something a bit different and in a way much more basic and everyday. I’ve said this before on CT I think but the area I looked at in particular in historical research was the construction of the first national Australian census, and it really was quite evident that the normative person of the census was the adult white male, head of the household (it’s what Pateman I think called fraternal patriarchy – all men are equal as heads of households). Everyone else was defined by their relationship to this normative person.

Obviously this has since been modified, but it’s very difficult to remove all such cultural assumptions.

This is what people talk about when they talk about social constructionism of course – the recognition that facts are made (if like me you studied Latin once you will know that fact comes from the Latin word to make). But it’s not a particularly obscure or fanciful analysis really, as some people seem to think.

Of course the ideal of the Enlightenment is that we are all equal as humans (although that ideal wasn’t exclusive to the enlightenment or modernity) and in a sense of course it’s right. But knowledge reflects power and assumptions based on lived experience are embedded in everyone’s ideology and world view. So if you never been in one of the oppressed or subordinate groups, it takes critical self-reflection and actual imaginative work to understand their perspectives. That was very clearly lacking in a lot of the comments made about the students in this thread. Moreover, on that case, your view, or John Holbo’s view, or anyone’s view, is not the view of a some ‘normal’ human being who is not involved in these relationships of power. It is the view of a man who is on the privileged side. You may like Kipnis’ view because it accords with your view, but that in itself does not make it right, or objective.

This is also what I am getting at by saying that everyone has an identity – it’s just that some of us explicitly acknowledge it, and some don’t.

JH: “To save time in future, preface each comment in response to one of my posts with “Ow, a bee stung me!””

As the post says, that’s for when you “just utterly failed to foresee a wildly foreseeable but minor injury.” If it’s wildly foreseeable that you’re going to think like Dreher, there’s no reason to comment on your posts — see my response to NickM above. You basically have the choice of having me expect you to do better, in which case I’m going to be exasperated when you don’t, or of having me accept that you’re going to be writing Dreher Lite, in which case why should I bother. If I wanted to argue with Dreher’s basic assumptions I could simply go to his site and cut out the middleman.

“The – at least formal (whatever the reality is)- protection of students with mental health issues in the Anglo Sphere is a great thing”

I agree. When the president of the Royal Institute of Surveyors spoke at uni a few weeks about diversity and inclusion she said it was important to recognise the contributions by people who are diverse in relation to gender, race, dis/ability, or who think differently. One thing I have found in my present course is that in group projects – which there are a lot of which I found quite daunting at first – having people with different interests and backgrounds and strengths improves the project as it becomes more holistic as everyone contributes different things. Best of luck with your studies!