RUTHFULLY YOURS

College campuses in contemporary America are rough places.

At any rate, it is of this that SJWs (“Social Justice Warriors”), i.e. “progressive” activists, have been assuring the country for quite some time.

“Racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “ageism,” “ableism,” “classism”—all of the “isms” and “phobias” that the left insists are endemic to Western civilization generally and America specifically have not only infected academia. To judge from the tireless rhetoric of both leftist student activists and their ideological ilk in the professoriate, these secular sins may be even more ensconced in colleges and universities than they are in the larger society.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go!” Nearly 30 years ago, Jesse Jackson led hordes of students at Stanford University with this chant as they succeeded in pressuring the school to jettison required courses in Western civilization. The Western Civilization curriculum, so went the thinking at the time, is ridden with “European and Western male bias,” biases that privilege white men over and against historically “marginalized” groups.

This line of thinking (or unthinking) dominates academia to the present day.

To put it bluntly: Unless one is white, heterosexual, Christian, and deviates from the hegemon of Political Correctness (PC) that rules academia, the current climate on college campuses promises to be oppressive.

This is the version of reality advanced by SJWs. Reality itself, however, is quite otherwise.

In reality, it is true that college campuses have indeed become oppressive. The disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge; the free marketplace of ideas; the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues—these goods that have traditionally been the university’s raison d’ etre have largely given way to a new ideal: activism.

In 2012 I published a book entitled The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. In it, I deplored the increasing fixation on group identity in the humanities and social sciences departments of American universities. That fixation, I noted, was coupled with “a preoccupation with the historical grievances of certain groups” as well as “a virulent hostility to America, which is consistently cast as the prime villain in the histories of these groups.” I devoted the book’s first chapter to tracing the theoretical origins of this lamentable phenomenon, then spent a chapter apiece outlining four of the group-oriented “studies” that had become established parts of today’s academic curricula – Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. In an additional chapter, I presented a round-up of other “studies,” some of which were, at the time, relatively new and on the rise: Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Men’s Studies, Whiteness Studies.

My overall point was simple: none of this nonsense had anything to do with actual education. It was all about encouraging students to identify not as individuals who were at college to prepare themselves for a successful life but as members of one or more oppressed groups (the more, by the way, the better) and to see themselves, on that account, as victims of deep-seated prejudice on the part of a system that was determined to keep them down and prevent their success. And if you weren’t a member of any of those groups – if, in other words, you were a healthy heterosexual white male – the goal of all these pseudo-studies was to teach you that you were in possession of an undeserved privilege for which you were obliged to spend your life apologizing and making amends. Never mind if you’d grown up dirt-poor and had worked your toches off to get into college.

When The Victims’ Revolution came out, the New York Times Book Review assigned it to Andrew Delbanco, a humanities professor at Columbia University and one of the Times’s top go-to guys on education. The thrust of Delbanco’s review was that my picture of the academy today was (a) “mostly a caricature” and (b) “out of date,” because “this kind of thing is a shrinking sector of academic life.”

As to (a), well, given that my book was principally a work of reportage, all I could say in my defense was that if it read like a caricature, it was because the academy had, in fact, become a caricature. As to (b), just look around you. It’s now old news that, as a “sector of academic life,” identity studies haven’t shrunk – they’ve ballooned. The stunted mentality disseminated in these courses has spread beyond the humanities and social studies departments and taken over the campuses as a whole (not to mention the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and whole swaths of the popular culture). On American campuses, to a staggering extent, group identity has supplanted traditional morality and critical thinking.

Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, took to these pages last October to affirm that “we adhere to exceptionally strong principles of free expression.” He invoked Yale’s exemplary 1974 Woodward Report, which states that the university’s educational mission is inextricably bound up with “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

A February lawsuit tells a different story. Tucked inside the amended complaint, Doe v. Yale, is the extraordinary claim that Yale punished the anonymous male plaintiff for writing a class essay in which he condemned rape.

Like dozens of lawsuits now working their way through state and federal courts, Doe v. Yale alleges that university officials grossly mishandled sexual-assault allegations. According to the complaint, a university panel found in spring 2014 that Doe had engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent. He alleges that the woman expressly consented and on that evening she harassed him. He adds that Yale’s disciplinary procedures were stacked against him and administered by biased officials who presumed his guilt.

This case is unusual in several respects. Doe advances one relatively new and one completely novel legal theory. The relatively new one revolves around Title IX, the 1972 federal law that provides that “no person” may be discriminated against based on sex in educational programs that receive federal assistance.

In April 2011, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that Title IX imposed a duty on colleges and universities receiving federal funding—as virtually all do—to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate sexual-assault allegations and impose punishments where appropriate. The letter also directed schools to reduce due-process protections for the accused, typically men.

Doe insists that Title IX must protect men as well as women. In punishing him for sexual assault on the basis of allegations that were either unfounded or refuted by facts to which both sides of the dispute agreed, the lawsuit argues, Yale discriminated against him on the basis of his sex in violation of Title IX. CONTINUE AT SITE