A few weeks ago Wellesley College invited Laura Kipnis to give a talk. Kipnis is not an especially controversial figure. She is a professor of media studies at Northwestern who teaches film and seems to be generally in line with old-guard feminism. Her one deviation was a piece she wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education two years ago blaming modern feminism for creating a climate of sexual paranoia on college campuses.
Modern feminism did not take kindly to this heresy.
As a result, Kipnis has become, like Charles Murray before her, a pariah—an untouchable. When she spoke at Wellesley, the students and faculty did not take kindly to her presence. The students were very concerned about having her on campus. They proved just how concerned they were by crafting a video pre-buttal to Kipnis in which they showcased their nose-rings and used naughty words—can you even imagine how shocked and outraged the evil conservatives must have been by this vibrant display of nonconformity!
Alas, some of the Wellesley professors were concerned that their charges stopped short of going the full-Middlebury. In musing about what the Middlebury students got right, Wellesley political science professor Laura Grattan told the Boston NPR affiliate WBUR, “I think that the protests that are so loud and deafening and raucous as to try to stop a white-supremacist speaker before they start are not only the right of students, but also their effort to say this is the kind of campus and community that we want to have.”
The fact that Grattan thinks Charles Murray is a “white supremacist” tells you everything you need to know about the faculty at Wellesley.
Or rather, almost everything. Because the most important fact about the professors at Wellesley is that they were canny enough to use the Kipnis speech as cover to mau-mau all future speakers at the school.
The college’s Faculty on Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity (whatever that means) sent out an email after Kipnis’ visit to campus and put the administration on warning:
In case your eyes glazed over from all the social justice, here are the takeaways from Wellesley’s Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity:
1) Some speech is less free than the rest because it—or the speaker—is harmful to a privileged class of listeners.
2) The most privileged class is the student body, who must be allowed to determine which speakers are awarded the highest level of free speech and which speakers should be verboten because of the harm they cause.
3) If more than 24 students say they find a speaker harmful, their claim may not be questioned.
4) Anyone wanting to bring a speaker to campus should first consult the Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity and ask for their blessing. Because they speak for the students, somehow.
5) If another untouchable speaker appears on campus, Wellesley’s administration must side with the students against them.
And then, of course, there’s the unstated sixth item: Or else.
