It looks as if the blow-up at Northwestern University has made the liberals very uneasy.  A professor there, Laura Kipnis, who admits she herself is liberal and feminist, published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  From an article on the situation by Rod Dreher, in The American Conservative, on June 2, we read some of the essay (long excerpt):

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

In the post-Title IX landscape, sexual panic rules. Slippery slopes abound. Gropers become rapists and accusers become survivors, opening the door for another panicky conflation: teacher-student sex and incest. Recall that it was incest victims who earlier popularized the use of the term “survivor,” previously reserved for those who’d survived the Holocaust. The migration of the term itself is telling, exposing the core anxiety about teacher-student romances: that there’s a whiff of perversity about such couples, notwithstanding all the venerable married ones.

These are anxious times for officialdom, and students, too, are increasingly afflicted with the condition—after all, anxiety is contagious. Around the time the “survivor” email arrived, something happened that I’d never experienced in many decades of teaching, which was that two students—one male, one female—in two classes informed me, separately, that they were unable to watch assigned films because they “triggered” something for them. I was baffled by the congruence until the following week, when the Times ran a story titled “Trauma Warnings Move From the Internet to the Ivory Tower,” and the word “trigger” was suddenly all over the news.

I didn’t press the two students on the nature of these triggers. I knew them both pretty well from previous classes, and they’d always seemed well-adjusted enough, so I couldn’t help wondering. One of the films dealt with fascism and bigotry: The triggeree was a minority student, though not the minority targeted in the film. Still, I could see what might be upsetting. In the other case, the connection between the student and the film was obscure: no overlapping identity categories, and though there was some sexual content in the film, it wasn’t particularly explicit. We exchanged emails about whether she should sit out the discussion, too; I proposed that she attend and leave if it got uncomfortable. I was trying to be empathetic, though I was also convinced that I was impeding her education rather than contributing to it.

I teach in a film program. We’re supposed to be instilling critical skills in our students (at least that’s how I see it), even those who aspire to churn out formulaic dreck for Hollywood. Which is how I framed it to my student: If she hoped for a career in the industry, getting more critical distance on material she found upsetting would seem advisable, given the nature of even mainstream media. I had an image of her in a meeting with a bunch of execs, telling them that she couldn’t watch one of the company’s films because it was a trigger for her. She agreed this could be a problem, and sat in on the discussion with no discernable ill effects.

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life?

Now keep in mind that she wrote an essay in the Chronicle, which is a publication for educators.  She registered here disagreement with the current “paranoia, ” a term I think captures the environment. That is simple free speech, right?  Well, it turns out that a couple of students alleged they were “offended” and that the article had filed a Federal Title IX grievance against the professor.  Who came calling but the university’s Title IX corrdinator, who said an investigation would be forthcoming.  The charge was “retaliation” (for what?) but the specifics were pretty sparse and the investigation itself was anything but procedurally fair–as  most of these campus investigations go. It also turned out that all this was supposedly allowed by the Office of Civil Rights in the Justice Department.

The investigation (more like an inquisition) led to the Ms. Kipnis being cleared of all charges.  But to even have to endure this chilling process is almost unbelievable, if I didn’t know the current environment on college campuses today.  There is no good reason to have the present evidential rules (“preponderance of the evidence” for an alleged offense that is criminal, demanding “beyond a reasonable doubt”), the “kangaroo court” like procedures, and the lack of required involvement by the police and courts–not college administrators and unqualified faculty and students.

Besides all that, substantively, the sexual assault “rage” is paranoia.  But the Left found a way to ruin people in order to achieve its narrative.  And it persuaded the Justice Department to go along.  So we have what we have, a travesty.  The entire Title IX should be either rescinded or significantly modified, as it appears to present nothing more than an enticement for bureaucrats to oppress people and ideas they don’t like.

Christians, I know this kind of issue may seem a little far afield, especially at private Christian colleges, but remember, Title IX applies to all colleges and universities.  There is no guarantee that a disgruntled student won’t file a complaint against such an institution, and that the Feds won’t take it seriously.  But it should not deter faculty for taking a strong position on truth, regardless of the possible threats.