2015 was the year campus culture wars broke out into mainstream consciousness—from Laura Kipnis’s Title IX witch trial to the Halloween costume crisis at Yale’s Silliman College, the dark side of trigger warnings and microaggressions met the harsh light of public debate.
But it was 2016 that kicked off that campus culture wars’ decadent period: In the annals of institutionalized identity politics, it will go down as a banner year for self-parody. Counting up every pet outrage, every trigger pulled with or without warning, would be an exhausting and depressing exercise. So, instead, here find a short but illustrative list of ridiculous censorious interventions via threat or full-blown investigation.
Each was carried out either in the spirit of the Obama administration’s Title IX guidances or under their vast and vague authority. (Starting in 2011, policy levers issued by the Department of Education weaponized the Nixon-era higher ed amendments’ gender-equity clause, aka Title IX, against a purportedly pervasive “rape culture.”) In the past year, the war against an amorphous and incalculable enemy—be it offensive speech or “rape culture”—has produced some pretty silly battles.
Harambe, May He Rest In Peace
At the South Carolinian stronghold Clemson University, a school that devotes considerable time and pious obsession to its two-time champion football team, cheekily-captioned images of Cincinnati’s tragically slain gorilla were torn from dorm walls. Harambe memes evoked rape culture, according to one dirty-minded residence administrator who warned students that posting memes of the late simian could trigger a Title IX investigation—because of course it could. “Harambe should not be displayed in a public place or a place that is viewed by the public,” wrote the administrator. “My hopes are that you are being inclusive in your words, whichever you choose to say, so that you are not reported to [the Office of Community and Ethical Standards] or Title IX for using bias [sic] language against someone.” Clemson’s president later walked back the warning but couldn’t undo the heady revelation that, in fact, Title IX killed Harambe.
The “Free Speech Ball”
For the more loud-mouthed members of their student bodies, some schools offer “free speech zones,” designated areas protected for planned and pre-registered protests. At the University of Delaware, it was not a demilitarized zone but a good ole pally beachball that first-amendment-curious college kids scrawled unfiltered (read: dirty) thoughts and images on. The ball, a student group’s effort to promote free expression by inevitable way of crude college humor, caught the eye of a campus police officer who considered one particular doodle a potential violation of the school’s sexual misconduct policy. The officer, who was himself caught on video, warned the students that “everything that people say may be, you know, offensive to other people.” He was well-trained.
All Single-Sex Societies
Harvard’s socially competitive finals clubs promote an exclusionary old world ethos. But the iniquity imposed by these clubby pockets of privilege, the world learned last May, is that they’re segregated by gender. Wherever women mainly mingle with women or men alone hold the key to the clubhouse, there persists the inevitable fact of all things always being, to some degree, unequal. A new policy announced in May by Harvard president Drew Faust would bar young men and women who join secretive single-sex societies from receiving grants, fellowships or leadership positions. The controversial policy, slated to take effect in the fall of 2017, followed Harvard’s Title IX implementation and the crisis-level results of a campus-wide sexual assault survey. We’ll have to wait for the next survey to see whether the mandatory creation of more coed social spaces helps curtail the problem.
The April Fool’s Day Edition of the University of Wisconsin-Superior’s Daily Promethean
The campus daily’s yearly gag edition was condemned for sexist and otherwise demeaning language by college administrators and placed under “active investigation” after a graduate student complained—and appeared to admit in her formal grievance that she can’t take a joke. According to the Duluth News Tribune, “[A] UWS graduate student and student program manager at the UWS Gender Equity Resource Center, states in her grievance that the April 1 edition didn’t have a disclaimer that it was satire.” The satirical paper is an annual tradition on many campuses and the Promethean’s 2016 attempt featured joke names and a gag title at the top of the fold. They showed the regular name sloppily and obviously crossed out above the paper’s title for the day, “The Pessimist,” and the date: “March 32, 2016.” (Among the most maligned gags: The students’ deeply insensitive back page dispensing relationship advice.) After an onslaught of public attention, and a public letter to the university chancellor from the good folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the investigation was dropped.
The Beach Boys?
A professor’s rendition of a Beach Boys song caught him a sexual misconduct charge last year. University of Kentucky journalism prof Buck Ryan came under fire for his performance—a riff on the 1960s pop song intended “to teach the many differences in Chinese and American culture”—at the end of an exchange trip to China’s Jilin University. A largely private case of he-said-she-said has played out between the administration and the professor, who has been charged and sanctioned under Title IX, apparently for some aspect of his performance of the song. “UK’s Title IX coordinator ruled that the song, ‘California Girls,’ included ‘language of a sexual nature’ and was somehow offensive, though no victims were identified,” Ryan wrote in an op-ed for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The claims reportedly originated with colleagues and not students—whom Title IX is intended to protect. The full circumstances of the claim are sealed, but nevertheless: In 2016, invoking the gender-parity law against a professor’s cringe-y performance of a pop song, with lyrics far from racy by today’s standards, is peak Title IX.
