Dave Rubin and Laura Kipnis dissect the assault on free speech, tracing it to Obama-era Title IX guidelines that lowered the burden of proof for sexual misconduct cases. Kipnis details her 2015 "kangaroo court" investigation following her article "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe," where she faced opaque charges without legal counsel. While Betsy DeVos rescinded these mandates, administrators in California maintain strict policies, prompting Kipnis to argue that civil lawsuits are now the only check against this overreach. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how modern feminism's shift toward melodrama and regulation has stifled honest discourse and created a culture of self-censorship on campuses. [Automatically generated summary]
Obviously, we've spent a pretty good amount of time around here talking about the assault
on free speech on college campuses.
on college campuses.
As I've said before, I believe that this assault on free speech is one of the biggest problems we face today as we are breeding a generation of young people who won't be equipped to use logic and reason in their own arguments when they graduate to the real world.
The University's misguided use of safe spaces and trigger warnings coupled with violent protests and deplatforming or shouting down speakers is actually robbing many of these students of literally the most important thing they can learn in college, the ability to think for themselves.
Instead of graduating as fully equipped adults ready to fight for what they believe in because they know what they believe in, they are being coddled like children who might crumble at the mere hearing of an idea that challenges them.
This inability to debate ideas is leaking out of the universities and into society at large.
Celebrities spend all day on Twitter ranting and raving about topics they don't understand at all.
Comedians, some of whom I know personally and really like, have become the screeching lunatics they're supposed to be making fun of.
Politicians talk a lot, but don't actually do a lot, and the rest of us are left here trying to make some sense of what's going on.
A great example of this is the Title IX fiasco which took root on college campuses over the past few years.
Title IX is part of the Education Act of 1972 which states that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education, program, or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
Well that sounds pretty good, right?
What we should be going for here is an even playing field of equal opportunity.
Title IX doesn't guarantee equal outcome, which is where hard work, perseverance and sometimes luck come into play, but it does guarantee that whether you're a man or a woman, you won't be discriminated on because of your sex.
This straightforward law of equal opportunity changed under the Obama administration, which in 2011 and 2014 issued new guidelines on how schools should deal with cases of sexual assault on campus.
While I believe that Obama's intentions were good, the law in effect circumvented our system of due process.
The Obama administration's policy used the preponderance of evidence standard in cases of sexual assault, not the beyond a reasonable doubt standard, which reduces the burden of proof on anyone accused of sexual assault.
This was a subtle but powerful change in how we litigate these cases of sexual assault on campus, and some would argue an outright violation of the accused's constitutional rights.
Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary, recently rescinded these Obama mandates, and judging by the celebrity and comedian critics out there, Trump and DeVos were not only anti-woman, but suddenly pro-rape as well.
My friend and former guest Christina Hoff Summers wrote an excellent piece in the Journal of Higher Education explaining why removing the Obama guidelines was actually a win for due process and the Constitution, an article I shared with some of the famous people I saw ranting about Trump's pro-rape policy.
Of course, nobody responded.
We'll link to Christina's article below so that you can read that for yourself.
To unpack Title IX, I'll be talking to author and professor Laura Kipnis today, as we discuss her own story of how Title IX has affected her both personally and professionally.
Laura has been right in the middle of the Title IX firestorm, and our friends at Learn Liberty have sent her our way this week.
Knowing what you're talking about is a lot harder than just screaming about how you feel about something.
but a good education taught me that it's usually worth the effort.
We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week and joining me is author
of Unwanted Advances, Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, as well as a professor in the department
of radio, television and film at Northwestern University, Laura Kipnis.
I did my little direct message, my preamble, sort of giving a vague explanation of Title IX.
You sort of got in the mix on this thing when you wrote a piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education in 2015, which I want to get to that, and your whole story related to all of that.
But first I thought, could you just give me a basic explanation of what Title IX is, Okay, I should start out and say that it was never my goal in life to become an expert on Title IX, but as you might have said in the intro, I was brought up on Title IX complaints and at the time I had no idea what this was.
You know, I thought it had something to do with women's sports.
So the brief backstory is that in 2011, the Department of Education, under Obama, expanded Title IX, which had covered gender equity in higher education, meaning like equal funding for sports teams and that sort of thing.
And they expanded it to include sexual misconduct, because the idea was that you can't have gender equity
if students, particularly women students, are fearful for their safety, or are being assaulted,
or harassed, or that kind of thing.
So, it's a good goal.
But they issued these things called Dear Colleague letters that were guidance to institutions of higher learning
that got federal funding, and threatened that if the schools didn't comply
with these very vague guidelines, that their federal funding could be withdrawn.
And, you know, most schools get, you know, tons of their funding from the government and research grants and that kind of thing.
So all campuses were required to have Title IX offices and officers and implement this guidance.
And it had to do with creating processes for sexual misconduct complaints, but also dictated things like the standard of proof that would have to be used in these adjudications.
And the standard was what's called preponderance of evidence.
And that's a hugely controversial thing because what it basically means is 50-50 plus a feather.
And the process also has been, I mean, as I learned having gone through it, behind closed doors.
So none of this is out in the open or transparent, and so you have more and more people getting caught up in these sort of kangaroo court situations, both Undergrads, mostly male students who get accused of having non-consensual sex, usually in drunken, you know, sexual encounters that somebody later decides was not consensual, but also professors increasingly.
So what happened was after I got brought up on these complaints, I wrote a second article and I got brought up for writing an essay about the kind of increasing vulnerability of students,
and it was called "Sexual Paranoia Comes to Academe."
Well, the rationale is that they're following this federal guidance, but what happens- But the federal guidance seems to be in conflict with the Constitution, no?
Well, so one of the things I learned is you don't actually have constitutional rights at a private university.
So there's how this stuff is handled differs between public institutions and private schools.
And private schools can do what they want.
So they're in a more contractual relation with students.
And, you know, a lot of the information on this is only coming out because these cases are going to civil court.
So like students Students who've been accused
and think they've been railroaded are suing the schools.
I wrote an article called Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe for the Chronicle of Higher Education because they asked me to write something about campus sexual politics because I was known, I guess had been known as something of maybe a contrarian feminist and I've written about social politics a lot.
So I said, OK, and I kind of thought nobody read the Chronicle of Higher Education, you know, and so I wrote in a kind of ironic, maybe, you know, I had some fun with it and I do lean toward irony.
And so first there was a protest march on campus by students carrying mattresses and pillows, you know, like a reference to the Columbia student accusing me of fostering or supporting rape culture, I guess.
And then I found out I was brought up on these Title IX complaints, but...
So, I never found out precisely what I was charged with, because there isn't such a thing as due process in these situations.
Well, it should not have been, and so it is a question mark why the university allowed the case to go forward, because there is some sort of provision in the Dear Colleague letter that says nothing here should be construed to impinge on freedom of speech or academic freedom, but nevertheless, I mean, what does happen, what's happened is what you would call mission creep in these situations where the code has been stretched to include such things as writing an essay, and as I later found out, I mean, all sorts of kind of micro behaviors that somebody might take offense at.
So, in my case, I had written a couple paragraphs about another professor on the campus who I didn't know, but it was public information that he'd been accused of sexual misconduct.
So, I made reference to that case.
So, I was accused of retaliating, which is a big thing in Title IX.
You cannot Mostly people cannot speak about the charges against them because if they speak about them they might be brought up on more complaints for retaliating.
So I was charged with retaliation even though I wasn't the person who'd been involved in the sexual misconduct to begin with.
Right, and to be clear, so the person that was accused of this, who was a colleague of yours, although you did not know him, he was accused of having relations with a student, but consensual, if I'm not mistaken, right?
There were two sets of complaints, and one was that he'd gone out drinking with a student one night and ended up sleeping in this same bed but they didn't have sex. There was no indication
that they had sex but he was accused of possibly having come on to her, he bought her
drinks. And then there was a second situation which I actually did not write about where
he'd had a relationship with a student. So I wrote about seven or eight words about
that second relationship and that was I think the basis of the complaints that I'd
I guess you can, but I think we can surmise that that's what they thought that you were doing.
But your feelings on that specific matter, outside of Title IX, really, is that if they're consenting adults, whether he's a professor and she's a student, that you're okay with that, basically, right?
In the first essay, I was somewhat mocking these new regulations that govern professor-student dating.
They prohibited it, particularly in the case of undergrads.
It was sort of okay if you were a grad student, but frowned on.
And one of the things I was saying was that, you know, you can look around any campus on the country, you can barely throw a stone without hitting a couple, a married couple, often with children, that started out as a professor-student situation.
And it's widely known in academia that, you know, some percentage of your colleagues are married to former students.
So it seemed a bit hypocritical to suddenly enact these codes that would You know, I don't want to sound like some old geezer, but when I went to school, back in the good old days, we did all sorts of stuff.
We partied and drank with professors.
It was no big deal.
and that dating was ruled out.
And I don't want to sound like some old geezer, but when I went to school, back in the good old days,
we did all sorts of stuff.
We partied and drank with professors.
It was no big deal.
People were sleeping with professors all over the place.
So this new climate of regulation was something I wanted to write about
I mean the version of feminism that I would subscribe to would see this climate of regulation as not in the spirit of feminism and I think I've used the term feminist paternalism.
But I will say what happened was that, or maybe we'll get to this, I mean, I ended up learning more about the situation with this professor and writing more about it in this book.
So there's a couple of chapters about these two cases against the professor where I do a close reading of the Title IX reports, which I ended up having access to.
Yeah, well, from my institution, but you know, I mean, I was very much in the dark.
I knew nothing about Title IX, and they send you a letter with all these links to various informational websites, and every website has more links and more links, and it's like a rabbit hole of hyperlinks that you learn nothing from.
I did not learn how I could be charged with retaliation for writing about someone else's So it's very mystifying, the procedures, and what I've
learned in these cases, when you're accused of something, for the most part, you don't find out
what you're accused of, you don't know what the evidence is, you often don't know who
the accusers are.
In my case, the university hired a team of outside investigators, lawyers from another
city who flew in to conduct an investigation.
They would not give me the charges in writing.
I did finally learn who the accusers were.
We had a Skype session prior to me meeting with them.
But some of the procedures are very baffling, like why won't they give you the complaints in writing?
I mean, I get the sort of kangaroo court portion of this and how this is all done outside of our legal system makes, to me, it makes no sense whatsoever.
But when you're talking to these people, and then there's lawyers coming in from out of state, what are they talking to you about if they are not telling you what you're charged with?
They ask a lot of fishing expedition sort of questions.
And as I later talked to more people who've been through these procedures, that's the MO, is the fishing expedition question.
And then things that you say, particularly if you're a male professor charged with some kind of potential misconduct, anything you say can lead to another avenue of investigation.
And so people enter these situations, they don't know what their rights are.
You know, it's like when the investigator said to me that I could not record the session.
You don't know where these edicts are coming from.
You just know somebody who seems to be an authority is telling you what you can and can't do.
As I say, you don't know what your rights are, and you don't know what the consequences will be if you don't go along with it.
And when this is happening, is the entire administration just falling into line?
I mean, is there anyone at the administration that was like, you know, Laura, something seems wrong here, or you need a lawyer, or we should have someone defending you, or sitting with you, or counseling you, or anything?
Lawyers are spending tens of thousands of dollars when, you know, accused of something like having improper eye contact.
I mean, some of the charges are so out there.
But I've talked to people who have, I mean, just spent vast amounts of money consulting with lawyers because, of course, now there is a huge industry, legal industry, in defending people caught in these situations.
I met with these people who had flown in, the investigators, for three hours or so.
I was allowed to have a support person in the room with me, and I asked the guy who was the head of the Faculty Senate at the time to be my support person.
Which was not good for him because he later got brought up on Title IX complaints himself for speaking out at the Faculty Senate because he thought that what had happened was a violation of academic freedom.
Yeah, and then not only that, but then you have a colleague offering counsel and then he, so the chill effect around this thing, it's like why would anyone put their butt on the line to defend you or defend free speech or defend a professor's ability to teach the way they want if they know that they're gonna be the next one because the preponderance of evidence is so low that they're gonna be the next one caught.
See, in my situation, I did not feel like my job was at risk.
I didn't have enough paranoia about the situation to think that my university would actually fire me for writing an essay.
I thought that that would look very bad for them.
So I felt somewhat I didn't know what the outcome was going to be, but I didn't think it was going to be that I would lose my job.
Whereas if I was a guy, a male professor, or a student for short, but a male professor accused of something that veered more toward sexual misconduct, I would have been far more worried in this situation.
And I should just say that like male professors in teaching situations that involve more personal contact with students like say a dance instructor or drama people or even music where you might touch a student.
Those people are hugely at risk and I've heard about so many cases like that where something that once would have seemed innocuous is now being charged as sexual misconduct or creating a hostile environment for a student.
Putting the legal part of this aside for a second, what do you think this is doing to the professors?
So I get it if you're talking about a dance professor or an art teacher that may touch somebody as they lean over or whatever it is, but from those people all the way to just the regular professor that might fear that if there's a student that comes into their office and they say something the wrong way, or as you said, looks at them the wrong way, what do you think this is actually doing to academia in general right now?
No, they're hired as adjuncts or instructors on renewable contracts, sometimes one-year contracts.
And those people, if they get caught in a situation where a student says that professor said something in a class that makes them uncomfortable, those people are out.
Even if they're found not guilty, they are likely not going to be renewed.
Or if There was a case just recently in the School of the Chicago Art Institute with a guy who was an art history professor whose students accused him of, some students accused him of a textbook that he used they thought was racist.
It was a book about comic book history and the history of that period is about racial imagery.
So it was a book that was discussing racism in the history of comics.
So, you know, many, many professors, I think, just are so fearful of getting caught in these situations that they're becoming very self-censoring, not teaching controversial subjects, being very, very careful about interactions with students.
And I think also more and more male professors are really shying away from working closely with female students because the numbers of complaints about situations like that have risen.
And I should just say, look, I have said I believe any professor that harasses a student, that is in some, proposes some quid pro quo arrangement like, you know, a blowjob for a grade, I mean, those people should be fired.
You know, they should be out.
There should be no toleration for that.
But it's this sense of a student feeling uncomfortable in class about something somebody has said.
Those sorts of cases, I think, are really just growing incredibly.
Again, I mean, I feel like in my book, I sort of was breaking news about the extent of this, because until it goes to civil cases, there's just no knowledge about what's going on.
And it sounds like it would be almost impossible to get that knowledge out because of the ridiculous system where it seems like nobody's accountable and you're not allowed to talk to people, you don't know what you've been brought up on, how do you even get this information out?
And not every professor is gonna be as forward as you and okay with Still saying what they think and coming on shows like this and talking about it and all that.
Yeah, I think only two professors so far other than myself have gone public about cases against them because people are terrified of speaking out and in fact are threatened that if they speak out they'll be charged with retaliation.
And just in terms of Title IX, generally there's no aggregated, you know, set of data about these cases.
I think we have no knowledge of how many cases there are, what the content of them is, except for the cases that have gone to civil court or settlements paid by insurers.
There's some data about the cases by insurance companies.
I think that, I mean, I weirdly have become a kind of data central by the virtue of people emailing me about their cases.
So, I mean, I have an email inbox file of cases that I don't think there is other information about.
And I don't, I mean, I included some of them in Unwanted Advances.
I have a chapter called Fuck Confidentiality, or there's a little asterisk.
They are where I try to anonymize, is that how you say it?
But go into as much detail as I can about some of the bizarre cases people have written to me about.
Because after I did go public about my case, I'm not sure if I said, you know, I just got all of these emails from people about their cases.
And I just would say that When I got this email saying I was brought up on these complaints, I had no idea if there were other professors who'd been charged over an article.
I didn't know if this was a test case where, you know, it would expand the boundaries of Title IX.
So I was just in the dark, and I didn't know who to talk to or to ask about it.
It's so interesting to me, because I've had a series of guests on this show that have been in similar situations, either in academia or elsewhere, people that have been put in situations where they suddenly have to step into sort of a new light.
Brett Weinstein, who I'm sure you're familiar with from Evergreen State, of course, Jordan Peterson up in Canada dealing with this, even James Damore from Google.
I mean, just people that are just saying what they think and then suddenly are thrust into the spotlight in a different way.
So shifting a little bit, so then when Betsy DeVos last month basically said, we're gonna turn back these Obama-era regulations, you must have found this quite rewarding or vindicating or what's another adjective I should use there?
Well not, I mean, you know, I'm conflicted in that I am not a person who wants to have anything positive to say about the Trump administration.
I mean, I, you know, don't want anything to do with these people.
But I did think DeVos was doing what anybody would do in that situation, which was to turn back what had happened under the Obama guidelines.
I'm not sure it's going to make any difference on campus.
I mean, there's been many, many, you know, Presidents, Title IX officers, people in positions of power have already said nothing is going to change on our campus to reassure the Title IX activists.
So the government, you know, I'm not for all of these edicts that only the executive branch makes, but in effect that's what Obama did, now Trump reverses them, okay.
But you're saying that the schools now, because it's sort of like a hostage situation where they can't, you know, if they've made it sound like this is the way it's supposed to be and this is what's right, they can't kind of backtrack on it.
So they're going to keep in place, basically is what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah, to show that they're on the right side of things.
So I don't know.
One of the things that's happened is that there's been this incredible bloating of the administrative levels, layers, in universities.
And these people are running the place.
And there's such a vast infrastructure that's been put in place, you can't just dismantle that overnight.
I think part of the mission creep of all of this is that there are so many people whose jobs it is to weed out misconduct and prosecute it, to adjudicate it, that that's not going away.
So I'm not optimistic that the DeVos guidelines, even though they are saying they're going to have this advice and consent, or advice and notice, whatever it is, period, that Yeah, that's incredible.
So how could it?
under the Obama administration.
They're trying to do it more procedurally this time around.
But in any case, I don't see that it's gonna filter down to the campus level.
I actually think that I'm maybe a cynic that what's going to happen is that more and more cases go to civil court and will be decided against the universities and that the general counsel's office in the universities are going to start overseeing what's happening more than they are.
So it's civil court judges that are looking at these cases uh... and saying
are you kidding can i just briefly talk about a case that's a really interesting
one that came out of brandeis because
what was interesting most of these situations at the undergrad level are
heterosexual but this was two guys and
uh... two guys who were in a relationship and then broke up and sort of six months
later one of the guys said that the other guy had kissed him while he was sleeping
and that that was non-consensual sex because he hadn't consented to be kissed
while he was sleeping So, Brandeis appointed some sort of special examiner.
This was a Title IX charge.
And the special examiner said, yes, the kisser was guilty of non-consensual sex because the other person hadn't consented.
They kicked him out of school.
So these are the kinds of cases that are when, you know, talking about mission creeper overreach.
So the students sued, sued Brandeis.
And, you know, you have to have a lot of money to sue a university.
It costs something like A hundred grand and up to a million dollars if a case goes to trial.
So this went to a judge and the judge said, you know, are you kidding?
This is what you're calling sexual assault and found against Brandeis.
I may be getting some of the details wrong, whether it was simply dismissed or there was a judgment against Brandeis.
But so it's the judges that I think are going to be creating that level of oversight and turning back these cases and I think that might filter down Particularly as schools are starting to pay out settlements to accused students.
Yeah, that's incredible because for me personally, I'm not someone that would want to, you know, I think we have way too much over litigation here.
But in effect what you're saying is the only way to really combat this is you need students who've been improperly accused that have the resources to start bringing lawsuits because eventually the schools will realize we can't sustain this.
We're taking so many cases that actually don't hold water and we can't keep doing this.
And professors as well, and I think there are a few, I've heard about some cases that professors who've been dismissed are suing universities too, but they haven't gotten as much attention.
So I do think this is gonna be played out in the courts for quite some time.
So is there a piece of this that's sort of obvious that I'm missing here?
How does this not get to criminal court?
If there was a case where it really involved, not just a kiss when someone's sleeping, but if there was a case that really involved or being drugged or any of that.
How is that not automatically a criminal offense?
How does that even stay within the jurisdiction of this?
Yeah, I mean, at one point, I suppose, in my career, I would have called myself a Marxist feminist.
So, I mean, it means, for me...
You know, I believe in redistribution and I believe in a sort of feminism.
I mean, I guess I was steeped on what would have been called Marxist feminism or materialist feminism that took, and also, but that had a kind of emancipatory direction.
I mean, and I'm also somebody very interested in psychoanalysis, so I use psychoanalysis a lot.
So, I mean, it's a bit of a motley collection of influences.
But by left, I mean that I think the economic level is something that I want to factor in, issues about class.
I wrote a book about pornography a long time ago that I got interested in the subject because I had written about Hustler magazine.
That my point was that the feminist anti-pornography movement had not taken class into consideration at all and that Hustler was not just about gender, it was also about class and a sort of attack on elites.
So I'm kind of trying to factor those levels into the sort of, you know, thinking that I do.
Yeah, so I'm curious, so as a leftist feminist then, potentially, or a formerly Marxist feminist, I haven't heard that one before, but all right, there we go, do you find that your allies right now are coming from quarters that don't quite make sense to you?
Yes, the situation, I mean, I should just say the situation on campus makes no sense in terms of who, What groups think of themselves as on the left.
And I'm sort of dubious about whether a lot of the activism is what I would call left-wing, even though, you know, the right loves to hammer the left-leaning students.
But, I mean, the student activists are more and more acting like authoritarians, and you weirdly have the conservatives and libertarians acting like liberals and, you know, promoting free speech and that sort of thing.
Yeah, well, it's become my life story, too, in trying to, myself, make sense of this political moment.
And yes, finding myself getting a lot of invites from places like various libertarian and conservative-leaning foundations that I would not really have had much to say to previously.
I don't know that they want to let the poor people start, but they just don't want the government involved.
That's a whole other topic, but I just think it's interesting because as someone with those beliefs, which I fully respect, I think You're finding the allies that I've found lately.
Is anyone on the left defending you?
Has there been any outreach of leftist professors or anything?
Well, I get a lot of supportive email from people saying, I would be afraid to say what you're saying in public.
So I know that there's like an underground layer of support.
And I mean, I think that It's generational.
Some of the sort of older generation of leftists, somebody like Todd Gitlin, who was, you know, an SDS person, he teaches at Columbia, has written also about the free speech issues on campus.
So there's certain people out there, but it's, no, it's been a little, I'm not going to say lonely, but I feel somewhat on my own in trying to make sense of this situation and doing a better or worse job of it.
Do you think it's possible that what should be your allies, especially in the public space, that I see all these celebrities and comedians, that when DeVos did this stuff, and rescinded these Obama-era additions, that basically they were all tweeting about how DeVos and Trump are pro-rape, and they hate women, and all these.
Now, these are leftists, who you probably agree with on all the economic stuff, all the social stuff, all of that stuff, but they're doing you, actually, an incredible disservice, is what I would say.
And I looped you in on one tweet, when Chelsea Handler tweeted something about this, and I said, I'd love to have you on.
I have a sort of allergy to self-righteousness, and I mentioned having written about Hustler Magazine, and I suppose it's what drew me to somebody like Larry Flynn as an interesting figure.
I was kind of interested to sort of weave through the over-the-top outrageous stuff he said, and to try to make sense of some of the politics behind what he was saying.
And this sort of instant position-taking that people like that are engaged in, I mean, you're talking about Chelsea Handler.
I...
I'm not somebody who ever really wanted to be a pundit.
I wanted to sit and think about some of these issues and think about the contradictions and the complications, and that's what I've tried to do in my writing, and I think there's... Well, this maybe sounds self-congratulatory.
I think there's too little of that, and it may have something to do with Twitter and, you know, the sort of instantaneous opinion forming that is required of people who are on Twitter.
But I don't think it's interesting, and so I guess I kind of veered toward the people who are saying things that complicate the situation as opposed to simplify it.
I mean, I feel that in the current situation in relation to these questions about sexual assault or what's going on in campus in terms of sexual politics, I do feel that there's been too little self-scrutiny on the part of Women who regard themselves as feminists, as opposed to the scrutiny of like male sexuality, male aggressivity.
And it was one of the things, and this is probably one of the more controversial sections of the book, where I tried to write about how much drunken sex, binge drinking, you know, conditioned sex there is on campus, and how much You know, women are reluctant to analyze their own participation in these situations or our own conflicts about sexuality.
So, you know, that's something where, again, I was kind of trying to complicate the situation as opposed to just say, men are predators, you know, male sexuality is aggressive and bad, and women are these sort of violated innocents.
So, I feel like there's just too little, maybe I'm not saying this incredibly well, but too little introspection about our own sexual participation.
Right, so even though to write about that or talk about that, I know that there's going to be a certain amount of people who will say, well, you're victim-blaming, that they're already going to put the onus on you, even though you're really talking about personal accountability.
I mean, you know, if somebody's using force against you, that's not a situation where one needs to talk about personal accountability, but in terms of drinking and the kind of complicities that arise in those situations, and the ways that I think You know, I'm a teacher, and I think universities should be in the business of educating students and helping them figure out how to be more autonomous, how to be more self-examining, as opposed to this layer of regulation that, you know, has taken the place of education.
So, that's what I'd like to see more of, you know, and I think self-examination, honest discussions about what happens in these sexual situations and alcohol-fueled situations.
Yeah, I mean, speaking of pragmatic, how much do you think just social media in general has affected this whole conversation?
Because I would imagine that a lot of times some of these cases are brought up because the next day when they wake up hungover and everything, they suddenly realize there's five pictures of them doing crazy things.
And it's something, I spent a long time, I spent about a year trying to have conversations
with my own students about this issue of sexual assault and what was really happening.
And I found out a lot of distressing things.
I mean particularly distressing if you've been a feminist for quite some time and think by this point in the evolution of human history women should not have such a hard time saying no or knowing what they want in these in these situations and you know I found out I think that a lot of the drinking has to do with, particularly on the part of women, not really knowing what they want, and so drinking themselves blotto so as not to actually have to decide in situations, you know, yes or no.
I had an interesting conversation with Susie Bright, the sex activist, who said that she works with college students a lot, most of whom have never had sex sober and are appalled at the thought that you would even try to do that.
But what I was gonna say about the social media part, so in talking with students,
and I had a conversation with a class, one of my classes once,
and I repeat this in the book, where somebody said something like,
they were moralizing about a movie that I'd shown and about the sexual choices
one of the characters had made, and their moralizing just seemed,
I wanted to sort of puncture it a bit.
said something like, you know, when I was in school we all thought about, we talked
about liberation and, you know, sex is pleasurable. You guys seem to think about sex as just simply
a harm and a potentially destructive thing and I feel kind of sorry for you. And one
of the students said, well, yeah, sex can kill you. So I started thinking that, well,
this was the generation that was the first post-AIDS, post-HIV generation and they've
all had this, you know, god awful forms of sex education where the destructive, harmful
sides of sex have been emphasized to them.
When I talked to the student who said this, he graduated and we had an email conversation, and what he said was what I meant was social death.
That social media, like everybody knows what you did the night before and you can be sort of killed publicly because of these choices that you've made.
So I do think there's something about them feeling like they're in a kind of fishbowl that does change the tenor Or the sense of the experience of it.
And I think the regrets in the aftermath or the feeling that, you know, many months later, well, wait, I didn't actually consent to that.
I think social media does have something to do with the way these situations are construed later as harmful
were in the present, in the moment that they happened, it was just a sense of confusion.
So that all seems very consistent with something that I see on the left lately that we've talked a lot about here, that the left, at least right now, seems to really value victimhood.
They think that victimhood is virtue.
So it sort of makes sense.
You can't talk about sexuality in a way that's empowering.
You have to talk about it in a way that creates a victim situation for you because then you have sort of authority to talk about it.
I would step back from that a little bit and say that I think the attention to social justice on campus is a valuable thing.
I do want to say there have been people who are marginalized, who are victimized, whose identities have subjected them to various forms of violence.
So, I dislike the language of victimization, you know, getting as broad as that.
At the same time, there is a way that those positions, you know, and it comes under the rubric of identity politics, let's say, you know, the identities that have been marginalized, I mean, do attract A lot of attention, you know, both in the curriculum and not in the curriculum to some degree to rectify, you know, those sort of, you know, errors of history in the past.
But, you know, so that does play into all of these things sort of, I think, converge around this notion of sexual victimization at the moment, including, you know, then this this layer that comes down from the did come down from the federal government in the form of Title IX.
Well, I do hope that, you know, if this doesn't sound grandiose, that the book that I wrote will have some effect.
And, you know, what I was able to do was I got access to two Title IX reports about this professor.
And, I mean, I was in receipt of a lot of other actual Title IX reports.
From people who sent me, both professors and students, who sent me the documents from their cases.
So I went through, using all the critical skills that I've developed in my many years as a leftist feminist, and did a, you know, kind of close analysis of the sort of decisions that the Title IX officers were making in this case.
And I talked about how capricious the judgments were, how gender biased, you know, how steeped in stereotypes about male and female sexuality.
They were.
So, you know, that's something that there hasn't been an opportunity to do, to look at how these judgments are being made and to contest them.
Because, you know, I've said all of this has happened behind closed doors.
There's been no oversight, no daylight, no transparency.
So I think more transparency on this process, and I also think transparency or discussion about sex on campus, and particularly heterosexual relations generally, that needs to happen.
Yeah, but basically you're saying if you were a young professor these days you probably wouldn't want to teach in the California system knowing that they're gonna keep a lot of this stuff in place.
Yeah, I think I'm still kind of figuring out this, you know, having gotten caught up in this in this situation.
And, you know, here we are talking about policy issues.
I'm not somebody who ever saw myself as a policy person.
I mean, I'm very interested in writing and issues of style. And I've said that one of the
things that happened to me in writing this first chronicle essay was I have a lot of
envy of writers like somebody like Philip Roth who feels a lot of freedom on the page.
And I wrote a book a number of years ago called Against Love, a Polemic, which is a sort
of attack on monogamy and talking about the elephant in the room in long-term coupledom,
which is the fact that sexual desire often doesn't persist as long as a long-term
30-year marriage does.
So, and that was a book where I found myself feeling a lot of freedom on the page to, like, figure out all the metaphors about monogamy and, you know, it's like a premature grave.
And so, in fact, what interests me is that, like, figuring out a level of freedom stylistically in the stuff that I write about.
So policy discussions is not, does not really lend itself You're quite good at it.
I mean, you know, this has been an interesting experience for me because I did feel like
I was sort of called on to kind of step up and say things publicly that might be controversial
and risk whatever sort of repercussions might come.
But it did make me interested in issues about democracy, you know, and the American tradition.
And I've tried to learn more about stuff like due process and why it's important.
So something about the The voice of American writing, you know, from people like Melville or Twain and Huckleberry Finn and the sort of freedom on the page that American writers have felt, that I feel like I have borrowed from in my own work, there's some way that I think that has
My thinking about being a writer has changed somewhat by finding myself in this situation of being accused of things and having to take a public position about freedoms and rights.
I mean, it's interesting because as a professor, you should have the ability and the freedom to not only teach what you want in your class, I went to art school and started out as a visual artist and then a video artist so I'm not a traditional academic and I just the other night had the chance to speak at my alma mater San Francisco Art Institute and realized how much being part of or being
Schooled in a kind of avant-garde tradition that did have to do with pushing back against social proprieties and aesthetic norms, like how much that's influenced my work.
So even in writing about this wonky thing, Title IX, I find myself kind of wanting to take those liberties that are both part of this artistic tradition but also like this American The freedom, you know, something like Walt Whitman, I mean, who's the most known for expressing a kind of sense of America as a sense of personal possibility and liberty in terms of writing and voice, you know, so to incorporate all of those, that history and that tradition, you know, in my work.
Yeah, so I've only got one more for you, and I think it'll be a nice segue off that, which is what would you say to the other professors, students, administrators, all of the people that see some of the nonsense that you've had to deal with that are just afraid to talk?
I get so many emails from people, I'm afraid to post your Facebook clips, I'm afraid to say this, my brother won't talk to me anymore, all of that stuff, as someone that now is on the other side.
As so many of my guests have been, they've staked out some position and they were afraid, probably lost some friends, didn't get support in ways that they wanted, but then made it to the other side as someone that has done that, or at least is in the process of that.
What's the best thing that you could say to those people?
You know, there's the fear of social, you know, disapproval that happens on Twitter or social media, and that I would just, like, don't even think about that.
But there are real material fears, like the fear of losing your job and your health insurance and, you know, possibly your house when you can't meet your mortgage payment.
So I think what I tried to do in my own situation was to separate out the real fears from those other fears.
You know, the fear of people disapproving of what I would say.
So I did try to think very seriously about, was I likely to lose my job if I wrote about the Title IX process?
And I decided that no, it wasn't a realistic fear.
I did not think my university would fire me, and that turned out to be true.
And, you know, could I live with being disapproved of on Twitter?
Well, yes.
So I think that it's about not, you know, it's about avoiding paranoia and, you know, and being realistic and taking realistic risks.
So I do think that's what I did.
I tried to kind of separate out what was an acceptable level of risk and what wouldn't be an acceptable level of risk.
If I didn't have tenure and would be likely to lose my job, maybe that would be not an acceptable level of risk.
People that are having an honest conversation that sometimes get thrust into a conversation without having wanted it in the first place, but then use it for something else.
So I wish you luck on this adventure.
We should do this again, and we'll do it in, you know, maybe a year or so, or who knows what will happen in the next year.
But we should do it again and just sort of get an update on this and see if some of this stuff actually, if some of the brush has been cleared, and maybe people are thinking about this a little more.