RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/wellesleys-student-paper-mounts-a-barely-literate-defense-of-censorship/article/2007659

Three weeks after a coalition of professors publicly defended their right to censor Title IX naysayer and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, a Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of censorship in the name of sensitivity. All before the student paper’s server, and with it the editorial in question, went down Friday morning, that is.

“Many members of our community, including students, alumnae and faculty, have criticized the Wellesley community for becoming an environment where free speech is not allowed or is a violated right,” the editorial accurately observes. “Many outside sources have painted us as a bunch of hot house flowers who cannot exist in the real world.” True.

In their defense of the modern academy’s responsibility to assimilate the unenlightened, the students distinguish “free speech” from “hate speech.” But their failed experiments in sentence structure, as well as logical leaps none among the uninitiated could easily follow, backfire: “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.” The pronoun “it” floats free, unbound by any antecedent, after the semicolon. The editorialists may have meant the second half of the sentence as a coded message to the world outside their coddling cell: Shutting down rhetoric is hate speech, of course it is! Send help!

But, in a likelier reality, they’ve offered an object lesson in undergraduate groupthink. On your typical elite campus, divergence from the status quo merits hostile rebuke rather than debate: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” And no one seems to remember her—or, I’m sorry, their—elementary writing mechanics or American history.

“The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government,” they write. “The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.” The unthinking reflex to stay safe from dissent and foster intellectual sameness at the expense of rigorous debate has no particular precedent in actual history—or really anywhere off campus, or in any prior generation.

“Vindictive protectiveness” may be the fault of turn-of-the-millennium helicopter parents, Facebook’s fostering of oversensitivity, widespread political polarization, or an emphasis on emotional reasoning in soft sciences.

Whatever’s worsened the militant “tone policing”—a practice “We at The Wellesley News, are not interested in any type of,” the writers protest—it comes off quite snootily in the end. A supercilious magnanimity rounds out their argument that we should pity the unenlightened, for they know not what they say: “It is vital that we encourage people to correct and learn from their mistakes rather than berate them for a lack of education they could not control.”

Pitying people with a “lack of education” could be seen as an odd sentiment given that the campus paper’s editorial board has come to the defense of six professors’ condemnation of Laura Kipnis, a feminist scholar and intellectual, who spoke at Wellesley last month. “Those who invite speakers to campus should consider whether, in their zeal for promoting debate, they might, in fact, stifle productive debate by enabling the bullying of disempowered groups,” these professors cautioned.

The transgressions that triggered Kipnis’s battle against Northwestern’s Title IX office (read her essay “My Title IX Inquisition”) and the tenor and subjects of her writing fit the subversive humor and frankness that later “waves” would wash away from the liberal feminism she avows. Now, shrinking from debate undermines women’s liberation from whatever social constructs held us back.

I can’t think of a greater victory for the former women’s movement than a class of college-age women thinking for themselves, debating provocative ideas. What’s been lost in the many discussions about Wellesley and this latest editorial is that what actually happened at Wellesley, per Kipnis. “[T]he talk went fine and the students I met were great — tough-minded, super-articulate,” Kipnis wrote, referring to the talk that triggered outrage. “It was only later that I heard that other students had made a video denouncing me, ahead of my arrival, for being a white feminist (‘white feminism isn’t feminism’), among other crimes. Once home, I heard that some of my critics were threatening to file Title IX complaints against the professor who’d invited me and had started a letter-writing campaign to get him fired on account of my visit, or at least deny him a pay raise.”

“I find it absurd that six faculty members at Wellesley can call themselves defenders of free speech and also conflate my recent talk with bullying the disempowered,” she wrote to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization which promotes free speech on college campuses.

And it’s not just these professors: The women of today’s Wellesley News editorial board sense danger in a lively debate. They buttress their classmates’ and professors’ defense of protection from intellectual discomfort—the same sort of “protection,” Kipnis would point out, that the generations before them fought to tear down.