At #MeToo U, the Faculty Loses Its Ideological Immunity A ‘down’ Marxist prof is accused of harassing ‘young women and gender nonconforming people.’ By Allen C. Guelzo
https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-metoo-u-the-faculty-loses-its-ideological-immunity-1517007716
The Pennsylvania Gazette, my alma mater’s glossy alumni magazine, doesn’t stray far from institutional self-admiration. Or it didn’t, until this month’s issue.
The letters column featured the frank narrative of a class of 1973 undergraduate who says she was sexually harassed by a long-affiliated, greatly honored (and deceased) chairman of the Graduate School of Fine Art. Women in the program called him “the Silver Fox,” the correspondent reports.
She managed to evade an invitation to his island retreat to “model” for him: “Somehow I knew I would avoid him sleeping with me, and I was successful at that,” she writes. But one-on-one sessions to discuss her work were 90 minutes of navigating sexual advances and innuendo.
Sexual harassment has been the official term for this since before Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas in 1991. But in the 1990s, that decade of third-wave feminism, it was assumed that sexual harassment was something conservatives visited upon women to punish them for straying from traditional roles. When Bill Clinton was caught in the act, progressives from Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi and Ms. Hill herself rushed to confer ideological immunity upon him.
That immunity ended with Hillary Clinton’s political career, as Harvey Weinstein and a host of figures in entertainment, the news media, politics and the arts have learned. The Gazette letter is a sign that progressive immunity is disappearing from an even more politicized zone: higher education.
Not that colleges and universities haven’t come under scrutiny for sexual harassment before. The Obama Education Department’s notorious 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter insisted that Title IX, which prohibits schools receiving federal money from engaging in sex discrimination, required them to abandon due process in adjudicating accusations of sexual misconduct. CONTINUE AT SITE
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