Wellesley College was in the media recently for being the alma mater of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It’s in the spotlight again for the cold welcome it gave Northwestern University Prof. Laura Kipnis, who penned a controversial essay on college campuses and growing “sexual paranoia.”
Her 2015 essay, which was published on Review, earned her the ire of feminists who insist that sexual assaults are a nationwide epidemic in places of higher learning. Kipnis was cleared of wrongdoing in the subsequent Title IX investigation.
Social justice activists from a student organization calling themselves Sexual Assault Awareness for Everyone (SAAFE) attempted to “shut down” Kipnis’ lecture at Wellesley College, releasing a video titled “Shutting Down Bullshit With SAAFE” denouncing her just prior to her event.
Her lecture was intended for the Wellesley College Freedom Project, a group founded to promote the ideals of “tolerance, pluralism, intellectual diversity, and freedom of expression.”
The Wellesley students addressed Kipnis directly in the video, calling her work “bullshit.”
“The bullshit that we’ll be discussing today is the work of Laura Kipnis,” a pink-haired presenter states, before addressing five “myths” they attribute to Kipnis’ 2015 essay.
In her essay, Kipnis criticizes the “infantilizing” campus policies that prohibit professor-student relationships, the idea of women as helpless victims and men as predators. The group took the most offense from her critical stance towards “rape culture.”
“To put it simply, rape culture is the values, actions, and traditions maintained in a society which normalizes sexually aggressive and coercive behaviour,” says Katherine Hyslop, one of the students in the video identified by The College Fix.
“Which Laura would know if she was actually a feminist,” reply two other speakers—Molly Nyberg and Jalena Keane-Lee.
The video’s presenters refer to Kipnis as a “white feminist,” and state that “white feminism is not feminism.” They declare that their version of feminism is better for being “inclusive” and “actively fights against systems of inequality,” unlike hers.
The SAAFE video concludes with a statement about how the organization “shuts down patriarchal bullshit instead of adding to it.”
The creator of the Freedom Project, Wellesley Sociology Prof. Thomas Cushman told The College Fix that he made it to bring a diverse range of speakers to the campus, including those from conservative, libertarian and classical liberal backgrounds.
He said he welcomed the dissent from SAAFE, and respected “the emotions within it,” but says their claims against Kipnis were neither “accurate or fair.”
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
