RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m a student at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s liberal-arts school, which last weekend hosted the 2018 Women of Color Trailblazers Leadership Conference. Keynote speakers included National Women’s March founders Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour.

As president of the Mount Holyoke College Republicans, I was looking forward to this event, billed as a “discussion.” I was excited to engage the ideas presented by these far-left figures and cover the event on my online publication, Lone Conservative.

But outside the conference venue, I was greeted by signs prohibiting photography and recording. Audience members weren’t permitted to ask questions directly to the speakers. Instead, we had to write them on note cards, and only preapproved questions would be answered during the 15 minutes dedicated to Q&A. Some discussion.

As I walked in, I could feel my peers glaring at me—a familiar enough experience for an outspoken Republican on a campus full of leftist women. But I was surprised that only about 75 people showed up, in a room that can hold up to a thousand.

Amid a national debate about due process and fairness in campus Title IX adjudications, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently observed, “there’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know: everyone deserves a fair hearing.” Few academics have more powerfully made these criticisms than Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education essay lambasting Title IX’s application to campus sexual-assault and harassment allegations prompted a university Title IX investigation—against Kipnis herself. Though Kipnis was exonerated, the investigation was a form of punishment, since professors normally aren’t questioned by lawyers hired by their school as the result of publishing in their area of expertise. The experience prompted Kipnis to write Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores how Title IX has come to threaten the rights not only of accused students but also of faculty.

One chapter of Unwanted Advances took readers inside a Northwestern University sexual-assault and harassment hearing against philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. Though the university cleared Ludlow of his sexual-assault charges, it found him guilty of sexual harassment, and he resigned. Kipnis lawfully obtained the university’s investigative file and about 1,000 text messages between Ludlow and one of his accusers, a female graduate student.

The graduate student, Lauren Ledyon-Hardy, was a Kipnis critic before the book appeared, twice criticizing her in op-eds in which she charged Kipnis with violating the Northwestern faculty handbook by writing an “alarmingly inaccurate” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She further denounced Kipnis’s “repugnant moral and political views” and hailed the parties who filed Title IX complaints against the professor as “pretty reasonable”—without revealing that she was speaking of herself. Ledyon-Hardy’s conduct exemplifies Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen’s concern that “Title IX is too often conscripted to serve purposes antithetical to the education of citizens in a democracy, in which disagreement, dissent, or disapproval should lead to argument, not to an infinite loop of institutional investigation.”

After Unwanted Advances appeared, Ledyon-Hardy turned to the courts, alleging that Kipnis’s book was defamatory and improperly disclosed private facts. Her complaint faulted Kipnis for falsely portraying her as excessively “litigious”—a complaint that Ledyon-Hardy ironically sees as remediable through a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit’s core, which focused on Ledyon-Hardy’s disagreement with how Kipnis presented evidence, threatens both academic freedom and investigative work about Title IX. Yet U.S. District Court Judge Jack Blakey has greenlighted the suit. The judge tipped his hand when he allowed Ledyon-Hardy to litigate under a pseudonym—despite her previous op-eds, signed with her real name, criticizing Kipnis. (Kipnis and her publisher, HarperCollins, have filed a response to the complaint, and discovery has commenced in the case. The next stage, absent a settlement, would be motions for summary judgment before the district court.)

Springtime means rebirth, baseball, and . . . new stories about how 99.89 percent of college-graduation speakers are certified lefties. Those of us with opposing viewpoints are left with few options; most of us just suck it up, grin, and sit there — although the grinning part is becoming more of a challenge. You see, our side of the aisle is not so easily agitated into social-protest mode. Still, it would be refreshing to hear at least one college president come clean in his commencement remarks. Just put it all out there for (progressive) mass consumption. To wit:

Hello, everyone . . . Happy Graduation!

Four years of relentless indoctrination is now complete. Most of you no longer trust markets, capitalism, or your parents. You are now officially social-justice warriors; you truly “Feel the Bern.” Accordingly, our job is done. But before you leave for the real world — a hate-filled place without safe spaces, speech codes, Play-Doh, warm cookies, and coloring books to help you “recuperate” from dissenting points of view — a few words of review, and caution.

In the good-news department, our annual giving goal of $1 billion was easily surpassed last year. The school’s endowment is now $59 billion, which means only a 6.5 percent tuition-rate increase for next year! For this good fortune, I can only thank the deity that I am forbidden to mention by name under threat of ACLU lawsuit. So thanks to this unnamed deity for maintaining such high demand for our elite degree among so many of your status-seeking but naïve parents.

More good news: We are excited to announce the construction of what our faculty are calling “Fascist City.” This complex will consist of a number of poorly constructed buildings that our students will be encouraged to destroy whenever a conservative speaker arrives on campus. In this way, our young activists can meet and riot at a central location with no fear of police brutality. Further, our faculty have agreed to purchase and supply bricks (for throwing) free of charge. I also want to thank the newly salaried student government of our very own campus political party, “Bernie’s Young Socialists,” for contributing fire-resistant protest signs (so they may be repurposed). One can never be too environmentally conscious when protesting “the man”!