How do you celebrate “Censorship Awareness Week”? If you’re at Wellesley College, apparently you call for more censorship.
In an open letter calling for more censorship, the faculty at the school is protesting the appearance earlier this month of Prof. Laura Kipnis. As we previously chronicled, Kipnis’s talk on campus sexual paranoia—a topic she’s written extensively about—was attacked by student groups with a pre-emptive video condemning her views.
Kipnis is a fierce critic of what she thinks is hysteria around the “rape culture” on college campuses, and the social justice movement that has been on the rise in recent years. She doesn’t believe that every male student is a walking rape machine, and she says campus adjudication can hurt, rather than help female empowerment through “feminist paternalism.”
Following the release of the video, six Wellesley professors released an open letter that called for her silence, all the while claiming to support free speech.
“We, the faculty in CERE, defend free speech and believe it is essential to a liberal arts education,” they wrote (via The Fire). “However, as historian W. Jelani Cobb notes, ‘The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.’”
In other words, they believe there should be a limit to free speech.
The faculty members followed up the quote with a statement that presenters must adhere to “standards of respect” to be granted invitations to speak at the campus. They called into question Kipnis’ credentials and her right to speak on her chosen subject, placing her views in the same realm as “pseudoscience.”
“Pseudoscience suggesting that men are more naturally equipped to excel in STEM fields than women, for example, has no place at Wellesley,” they wrote. “Similar arguments pertaining to race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and other identity markers are equally inappropriate.”
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
