Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
In 2000 Francine Prose wrote a hilarious and sometimes sad novel called Blue Angel (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006...), which is worth reading both for its own sake and because its story and themes are compatible with Kipnis's. Decades of academic satires seem to have had near zero effect on campus politics.
(I taught as a grad student at the University of Arizona and have been teaching as an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College.)
A similar phenomenon exists with respect to abortion and infanticide. Once upon a time, we would have been fairly merciful toward young mothers troubled enough to kill their own children. Now, however, our harridan-in-chief Nancy Grace leads the popular crusade to crucify the poor mothers. The reason is that many people feel very uncomfortable about abortion, but have no other acceptable outlet for that discomfort.
I'd really like to see some statistical evidence that the academic thought-police are louder, more prominent, or more powerful than in previous times before I start panicking over it.
If there's any increase in oversensitiveness in universities, for me it would make sense as an indicator that the universities are becoming increasingly out of reach for people who haven't had a life privileged enough to sustain the idea that one might be able to go through life without feeling bad or sad without the person who made you feel that way being expelled from the community.
Basically, they expect proper customer service, and they're used to it from the people that serve them from behind retail counters and fast food cash registers every day. With the prices they're paying, I'm not sure that they don't deserve it. If you're a tutor to royalty, there's no academic freedom; if you can't figure out that the customer is always right, you lose your head.
Anyway, aren't most people who teach at universities making less than minimum wage with no health insurance? Do we really want their 'truth' to endanger the incomes of the administrators? If it looks like a temp, swims like a temp, and quacks like a temp, you can fire it like a temp.
There's no doubt that there's been an increase of immediately firing anyone who generates any controversy anywhere, unless they're the ones bringing in the revenue.
Think about it...assuming that you (like most HNers) are male, you'd be at a distinct disadvantage -- especially in engineering and CS -- if your (presumably male and heterosexual) professors felt OK to pursue sexual relationships with the relatively few women in their classes...while the males have no chance to boost their grade with such favoritism. Even in a more egalitarian scenario, where the professor is bisexual and has no problem with being intimate with anyone in the class...well, the students who are less attractive, or choose to pursue a monogamous relationship with a non-professor...again, they're going to get screwed by the curve.
The OP comes off as a self-involved brat who has been tenured so long that she doesn't remember what it's like to have to spend $20,000 to $80,000 a year (obviously, she doesn't...that kind of money for tuition is a recent phenomenon) for a college education. The rules against professor-student relationships aren't there to baby the students, they're there to protect against incentives and dynamic that fuck everyone else over, not just the student who manages to score with their professor.
edit: In the rare chance that your true love coincidentally happens to be in a class you teach...OK, stranger things have happened in life. So do the adult thing: quit your job, then continue the relationship. True love should be stronger than the benefits of a tenured position. Don't screw it up for all the other poor students whom the gods did not make to be your soulmate.
Fellow academic here. I'm shocked a member of faculty would suggest that is a realistic option. You of all people know how difficult it is to find a tenure-track position. Yet you are suggesting voluntary career suicide for a consensual relationship between two adults? This is both unrealistic and complete overkill.
You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion. I think anyone who is unable to do so not only is a poor faculty member, they would be a poor spouse and a terrible scientist.
That is to say nothing of the edge case we are discussing. Unless students/faculty are gotten much more frisky, this is a negligable fraction of the interactions between students and faculty, and is lost in the noise of much more pressing academic grievances, such a treating grad students like human beings, or giving increased consideration to the role of teaching in promotion, instead of the pure emphasis on research at tier-1 institutions.
Absolutely I believe that. Humans are host to a smorgasbord of cognitive biases and capable of the most astounding of rationalizations. The rules should acknowledge this.
Fellow human being here...I'm shocked you think that true love is so easy to find :). I was being half-facetious...but yes, if you do happen to find your one-and-only, you should do the mature thing and pursue the relationship in a way that doesn't damage the academic potential of all the other students. Or at least wait until the student has graduated.
> You seem to believe that an adult is not able to differentiate between romantic feelings and objective grading criterion.
Sorry but this is a serious LOL to me. At many medical schools, staff doctors are forbidden to take even a $50 dinner from a pharmaceutical company. Much of that policy is grounded in the desire to avoid the appearance of impropriety...but you have to think of it from the perspective of the pharma company. They have up-to-the-day data on prescribing habits of doctors. They have the analytics that show that even casual visits by an attractive/charismatic pharma salesperson has a direct impact on the doctor's prescribing habits. I doubt that the pharma companies have data on what happens if such visits turn into sexual relationships, but I'm going to guess that the correlation only gets stronger.
So let's assume that grading policy is more objective, more sanctified than the process of objectively prescribing life-saving drugs...even if that were the case, the problem is not just about meting out grades, but priorities. You must have experienced the phenomenon in which students who take the time to go to office hours often do better than students who don't...because they've spent hours picking your brain about the right way to think about things. Well, when you've chosen a student (or even several) to have intimate relationships...the hours that you have to freely conduct your duties with non-significant-others is reduced. Maybe you're objective enough to give your lover a B instead of bumping him/her up to an A...but are you really going to ignore them when they ask for help on their papers and homework?
And again, the problem is not just the practical reduction in time that you have to carry out your duties, or the impact on your objectivity...the problem is also the appearance of impropriety. Maybe you are the stone-cold objective professor who manages to keep love and work completely separate (keep in mind that now we're really in fantasy land at this point)...but your students do not have a window to your soul. Their guess is that you are in the 99% of human beings that can't be objective in that situation, and their trust in the academic process is going to be somewhat jaded. And a university does not benefit from a reputation of faculty who freely pursue relationships with students; you can imagine that many parents do not see such relationships as a bonding between consenting, free-willed adults.
Reducing negative effects of human nature is hard as it is, but it becomes pretty much impossible when there are people with malicious intentions looking for you to do a single wrong step.
Not that it cannot be regulated. However, any attempt to do so that falls under the naive but popular category of "BAN IT" creates negative blowback in the form of what the author of this piece elucidated, while the complexity space and sum of possibilities to give one's self an unfair edge remains high.
G.K. Chesterton said it best [1]:
And then, last but the reverse of least, there plunged in
all the people who think they can solve a problem they
cannot understand by abolishing everything that has
contributed to it. We all know these people.
If a barber has cut his customer's throat because
the girl has changed her partner for a dance or donkey
ride on Hampstead Heath, there are always people
to protest against the mere institutions that led up to
it.
This would not have happened if barbers were abolished,
or if cutlery were abolished, or if the objection felt
by girls to imperfectly grown beards were abolished,
or if the girls were abolished, or if heaths and open
spaces were abolished, or if dancing were abolished,
or if donkeys were abolished.
But donkeys, I fear, will never be abolished.
It doesn't even need to be that extreme. I don't think a student and professor can't be on the same campus, the only thing that would need to happen is the student to drop the class.
That trivial, that simple, that easy. If you are screwing a college teacher, you can't be in that class. In the RARE case were the class is absolutely essential and only taught by a single person, then yeah, might need to quit for true love... or find a way to get that credit elsewhere.
What was a bit more infuriating, that hardest ever topic was advanced electric circuit calculus, toughest course we ever had, solely because of professor (even though I studied purely software engineering, this couldn't be avoided). This course went far beyond what was taught on Math courses itself btw. He disliked women ("they shouldn't be in engineering"), he disliked people with hungarian-sounding names, he disliked people with long hairs, heck the list of types he disliked would be long. He was the greatest filter in out faculty (end of second or third year at uni), throwing people out of school completely for literally lacking a single point (ie circle) above one variable in exam (didn't matter that in next line it was there). Seen it first hand. Nobody liked him, he was perfect example of somebody knowledgable but in the same time somebody who shouldn't be a teacher, ever.
World isn't fair, never was, and never will be. Some things get sorted out, some new pop up as things change. So, who got killed?
The situation we see on campuses now is the result of the collision of gender feminism with the emotional state of young adults raised by helicopter parents.
No need to plead that this generation is doing something every generation has done for different reasons.
EDIT: OP probably meant it academically. In which case the post is still absurd, but for different reason - the professor doesn't need to rate everyone else lower to rate one person higher, unless people are graded on a curve, but that's a problem with grading system and not a professor.
Not to mention if the women aren't involved with every professor simultaneously, only a few of them will get a benefit by having sex.
The same thing happens at the workplace all the time and often ends badly. It's ill advised for anyone but it's not illegal.
Seriously though... Unless there is an evidentiary, demonstrable long-term negative/harm to any given voluntary adult human interaction (say, to an institution, or to society at large, or to the educational process)... I think we need to live and let live.
Distaste and offense are not rational arguments against something
Did she pass just because she did a sexual favor? Is she being lenient on the argumentation of this paper just because she is dating the student?
These are legitimate arguments and concerns, and while I think the rules set up to stop these problems are stepping well over their bounds, let's not try and act like there wasn't a problem to being with.
You saying that there's evidence, is not the same as citing even a single instance of said evidence. :P I haven't seen anything that is actual evidence, other than people shouting angrily in text that things simply should be so (which seems to be almost what you're doing). Do you have a chip on your shoulder about this? (i.e., is there someone in your past who you feel took advantage of you via a power differential?) I think full disclosure is necessary.
> We therefore don't treat volition as binary, but as a point on a spectrum, signifying how much duress, influence -- the technical term is "power" -- was involved.
Fair enough, but you're conflating 2 things here, people who are together because of a power differential and people who are together because of an overridden will. I don't think these are the same thing. I think a person can be drawn to another's power even as that power may wrap around them. To an outsider it may look like an overridden will but to the person on the inside it does not look the same, it looks like a form of seduction. And I think this happens, and HAS happened, all the time.
There are millions of stable marriages that are based on a power differential of some sort, whether it's a beautiful woman, a wealthy man, a more intelligent spouse, or some other combination. Usually people are trading one power for another, such as beauty for intelligence. Are you suggesting we mark all of those as invalid?
And the author wonders why things are like they are.
As an aside: did anyone else immediately think of acid baths rather than hormone pills back when they first read the phrase "chemically castrated"?
Mustn't it?
Maybe you wanna keep that one on the inside . . .
Boys have it so much easier in this respect - yes, the downside for them is they are often the victim of trumped up "rape" charges, but at least they don't have to contend with the mental health aspects of being simultaneously told that they are both all powerful (you go girl, you can do anything) and a perpetual victim (misogyny everywhere, all the time, etc).
Adolescence and young adulthood is confusing enough without experiencing it as if in a house of mirrors.
How often? I've seen little evidence that this is very common.
Google is your friend this happens a lot more than you realize.
If 90% of rape allegations resulted in convictions then the existence of an accusation would usually be meaningful. If only 10% of accusations result in convictions, the existence of an accusation would not be very meaningful statistically for the guilt or innocence of any one alleged perpetrator.
What makes the situation even more difficult is that there's often little hard evidence of a crime. There can be evidence of sexual contact, but that doesn't ipso facto make the accusation true, because statistically sexual contact in overwhelmingly consensual.
When police find a body that's been shot or stabbed that's generally hard evidence that a crime has taken place. There's often no question as to the existence of the crime (except when suicide is a possibility) and it's their job to figure out who did it and bring them to justice.
But many rape cases start with the identity of the perpetrator known, and the objective is to figure out who is telling the truth in a situation with no hard evidence to back up either party. It's very different from a murder, but with just as much import. And since prosecutors don't like to lose cases (their job is to win them, and they are judged on their conviction rate) they often don't prosecute unless they have a strong case.
So what happens is that it's very difficult to tell if most accusations are false, or merely not provable-enough to win in court. And because there are conflicting motivations by a number of parties in the legal process it's very difficult to suss out the actual truth and then measure the error from the actual truth that the legal system achieves, and then use that to reform the process.
Because of all this, it's entirely possible that people who are accused are "often" the victims of trumped up charges while at the same time, only a very few people are accused.
You describe the problems of obtaining a conviction - proving lack of consent beyond a reasonable doubt such that jurors will return a guilty verdict. But you start with
> If 90% of rape allegations resulted in convictions then the existence of an accusation would usually be meaningful. If only 10% of accusations result in convictions, the existence of an accusation would not be very meaningful statistically for the guilt or innocence of any one alleged perpetrator.
Which seems to miss the obvious point that "not guilty" sometimes means "not guilty - didn't do it" and sometimes means "not guilty - not proven beyond reasonable doubt". (Obviously all not guilty verdicts should be interpreted as "Not guilty - didn't do it". It's important to protect that legal principle.)
1. the actual truth (rape or not rape)
2. what a prosecutor decides to prosecute (reasonably provable case versus not provable case)
3. what is claimed by the accuser (this is always rape, else there is no accusation)
4. what is not claimed by a could-be accuser (a person who gets raped but doesn't report it)
In order to get a conviction you need someone from set 3 and set 2. That completely neglects set 4 and should have some correlation with set 1, but this correlation probably isn't going to be amazing because there are both false positives (people who claim to have been raped, but were not) and false negatives (rapes which did happen, but that go unreported or unprosecuted).
What really sucks about everything surrounding this particular category of crime is that unlike many other crimes, there's a lot of possibility (not necessarily probability though!) for false accusations. I don't honestly know what the underlying probabilities are, and in fact they might well be unknowable.
As an engineer the idea that you can't even measure the error to figure out how well the system is performing at its job is deeply troubling. I certainly HOPE that the error rate is low and that innocents are being jailed and criminals aren't walking freely. But keeping up with the news certainly causes me to have some doubt that the error rate is truly low. I'm not saying that there's a pandemic of false accusations or a pandemic of unprosecuted criminals. But it's hard to hear about a few high profile accusations gone wrong (Duke, mattress girl, etc) and not wonder.
Anyhow thanks for pointing out the contradiction in my post!
(the first part was sarcasm, obviously)
I could also point to countless papers. What about boys being left behind in education, men dying years earlier, more men being homeless and in shitty, dangerous jobs, men having less children and less time with their family and so on.
What you say also goes for yourself. Your opinion won't be swayed, presumably because you feel safe and comfy in the feminist camp and don't want to risk losing your faith.
Nope (unless they are papers of the sort I found on a Christian website "proving" the creation of life contradicts the second law of thermodynamics).
> What about boys being left behind in education, men dying ...
What does that have to do with anything? The reality of heart disease doesn't take away from that of cancer.
> Your opinion won't be swayed...
Probably. Except my opinion is actually backed by science while yours is plain-and-simple science denial, just as there's no symmetry between people who know evolution to be true and those who deny it -- these are not two opinions, but truth and fantasy. Your personal beliefs won't make the reality of our sexist society disappear, just as they can't make the sun and the stars revolve around the earth (though in this case, I wish they could). In your case -- as in that of geocentrists -- the false belief stems from a very powerful subjective feeling that the scientific findings are wrong (the earth doesn't feel to be moving), but that doesn't make it any less false.
Of course, you can go on and on as science denialists do ("but where is the evidence?", "why, it's right here", "but where?" etc.), but I'll leave you there.
You'd expect women to be worse off than men if they are being suppressed. That's the relation. You know, stuff you can verify.
Honestly, I think you are using the word "science" too loosely. You can't just go "because... science". That's exactly not science.
Good bye.
Women are worse off in nearly every culture on earth (that, of course, doesn't mean that men don't suffer too). And don't worry, it's been verified over and over. You can, of course, look at the vast collected body of research, but you won't so you'll continue to deny reality with conviction kept strong by your gut feeling and anecdotes. The measure that concerns the feminist struggle in Western societies is called power. You can read about it, but you won't.
I'd be curious how they measure power in your papers.
But it's a common tactic of (western) feminism to pick arbitrary aspects which make women look bad seen out of context. For example why measure the wage gap, and not the family gap (time spent with loved ones), or the real income (which is usually split among married couples) and spending power? And also not measure income per hour worked and so on.
Maybe you can find a measure of power in which women are worse off. So what? You can also define other measurements in which men are worse off, including "power to reproduce".
And you have no idea what I did and didn't read about feminism. You are just living in your own little bubble.
I do not know a single person that is the victim of trumped rape charges but do know several girls who were victims of actual rape (and many more of sexual abuse).
If fake rape charges is a downside for boys then it's not an actual downside, it's a trumped up downside.
That says more about you than anything else. I know two guys who were accused of rape, separate incidents, in both cases the guy had an air tight alibi - one was out of town and the other was at church. The churchgoing fellow didn't even know the woman, the only point of overlap for the accuser and the accused was the fact that they went to the same high school ten years prior.
> If fake rape charges is a downside for boys ...
You have no idea, by your own admission, how incredibly destructive the event can be.
Where does the logic not follow? False rape accusations disproportionately affect men, and it is a negative experience. So it isn't a generalization, it is a statement of fact.
> ...is utterly offensive.
That sounds like a personal problem, don't worry - men won't be included in any kind of protected class over this.
I'd probably reflect on the 'offense as a human' bit as well, leave yourself some spectrum of offense as a buffer - or else you'll be left unable to describe your emotions for the real offenses to humanity. Like how one time I saw a pack of feral dogs tear a human corpse apart after it had been left on the street for a few days, that was offensive to me as a human. Luckily for me I had reserved that category of offense, otherwise my brain might have popped out like a jack in the box upon having my prior threshold of inhumanity, a stale candy apple served to me at the county fair, surpassed.
That's long been held to be obviously true. But a recent study shows that it may not be correct.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_...
Note: It's really hard to collect good population statistics, as victims often don't report things. And non-victims sometimes do.
My (abandoned) dissertation was on academic novels, and one thing I found interesting is the way feminists in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s fought relentlessly to argue that women were adults who could make their own choices, sexual and otherwise, and didn't need institutions to act like their parents. Lynn Peril's book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now has an okay but not great account of this.
Sometime in the 80s or 90s, though, the script flipped, and now there is a small but loud minority calling for colleges to do the thing a lot of women wanted colleges not to do! For those of us with a sense of history, the results are entertaining.
> "Somehow I don’t see the publishing industry instituting codes banning unhappily married editors from going goopy over authors,"
but from my perspective, the story she relayed showed exactly why publishers should (and, I think, often do) fire or strongly sanction any editor who abuses his or her position in that way. Part of the author's point seems to be, "We need to prepare students for the dangers of the world out there," which I think is entirely sensible. But her proposed solution appears to be, "Make sure that college provides practice fending off unwanted advances by people with power over you," while I'd much prefer, "Make sure that college teaches them those advances aren't acceptable."
Don't get me wrong: I think sex can be awesome, and I think a whole lot of people are way too eager to make rules about what other consenting adults ought to be able to do. But the thought of a professor putting a student in a position where they fear the consequences of saying no (when they might be counting on that professor for a good grade or a recommendation letter) just horrifies me. Professors: if you want to get it on at work, you've got plenty of colleagues to choose from. And if there's some student you're convinced is your soulmate, just cross your damned legs for a couple years.
So back then when you hooked up with a professor, people probably thought you were stupid, but you were an adult and you owned your stupidity.
Today colleges totally infantilize their students and it has become more like extended high school (lots of homework, attendance taken, strict rules of social conduct, etc.) than what the author experienced 35 years ago. But to be fair, it is not just colleges, what society expects out of an 18 year old has changed dramatically as well - so the way power dynamics are looked at on campus today sort of makes sense.
Not possible.
A less vulnerable sense of self runs dangerously close to the idea that students are accountable for their actions, which is directly antithetical to the culture of adolescence that is being dragged into ever-higher age groups.
Other than that, carry on. Happy moral panic, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
I agree with the author that it's wrong to use "survivor" instead of "accuser" when the guilt has not been established, but you can not reserve such a generic word as "survivor". It simply means somebody who survived something life-threatening.
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This is the time we got the various unsavory elements like lesbianism as a political identity, the idea that male homosexuality is a result of misogyny (espoused by the Redstockings, for example), separatist feminism, "womyn born womyn" and the radical feminist transphobia espoused by Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer and I think even Gloria Steinem at one point.
The problem is that the feminist ideology, the movement, and the principle are all different things. In common discourse, however, the feminist principle (gender equality) is equivocated to give legitimacy to feminist political theory, which is often in conflict with it.
I think that is a very big part of the problem. Feminism was once an emancipatory movement, that eveolved into an ideology. With all the bad sideeffects ideologies bear with them. I genrally do agree on what you call 'the feminist principle', while I strongly denounce the political corsett wich it evolved into.
Then, the movement sufficiently de-legitimized due to this, more and more unaffiliated people turn against it, and some of their gains are lost.
The media loves to write about a damsel-in-distress, especially it the story sexually titillates, e.g. the UVA rape hoax or the Columbia U mattress-girl hoax. It sells copy / drives clicks.
Narratives of victimhood open doors. For example Rachel Dolezal was on some police committees. I would surprised if coin wasn't involved. Mattress-girl was invited to the state-of-the-union address. Highly monetisable fame.