Conservative columnist George Will is still facing a backlash from his June column on campus rape in which he dared to criticize activists for making victimhood a “coveted status.”
Close to 1,000 students and faculty members at Miami University are currently protesting an upcoming speech by Will at their campus. A few weeks ago Will was disinvited from speaking at Scripps College.
Miami University, to its credit, says it will not follow suit and disinvite him, since “As an institution of higher education, we stress the importance of engaging in open, respectful, intellectual dialogue about the challenges facing our campuses and our country.”
The protesters are currently planning to ambush the question and answer session following Will’s speech and pepper him with questions about campus rape.
“He doubts the legitimate struggle of rape and sexual assault — this is extremely harmful to survivors,” claims a statement from Miami University’s department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Facebook page. “His column amounts to the sort of vitriol that potentially encourages violence toward women in particular,” says another post.
Like most of Will’s critics, Miami University’s crusaders seem to have read only headlines about Will’s columns, if they even got that far. Far from doubting the “legitimate struggle” of any actual rape victims, Will continues to direct attention to the fact that many campus activists inflate rape statistics and qualify even the slightest offenses, or “micro-aggressions,” as sexual assault, ultimately defining down the horror that is actual rape.
Will has also argued that he takes rape much more seriously than the activists that decry him, since he calls for pursuing rape accusations within the legal system rather than “jerry-built campus processes.”
