In the wake of Wellesley College’s “Censorship Awareness Week”––a week that would seem to symbolize a commitment to free and robust speech––controversial speaker Laura Kipnis inspired professors to pen a letter calling for something that looks a little like censorship.
Self-described feminist Laura Kipnis’s talk was entitled, “Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Intellectual Freedom Takes a Curtain Call).” According to the description furnished on Wellesley’s website, Kipnis’s talk centered on the idea that, “there has to be far more honesty about the complicated realities and ambivalences hidden beneath the notion of ‘rape culture.'” She asserted, too, that various aspects of college bureaucracy and campus adjudication actually reduce female empowerment.
