Sexual paranoia comes to campus

According to our student newspaper, the mattress carriers on my campus were marching to the university president’s office with a petition demanding “a swift, official condemnation” of my article. One student said she’d had a “very visceral reaction” to it; another called it “terrifying.” I’d argued that the new codes infantilized students and ramped up the climate of accusation, while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas—which seemed to prove my point.

The president announced that he’d consider the petition.

Maybe it was shortsighted, but I hadn’t actually thought about students reading the essay when I wrote it—who knew students read The Chronicle of Higher Education? I’d thought I was writing for other professors and administrators. Despite the petition, I assumed that academic freedom would prevail—for one thing, I’m tenured (thank god) at a research university. Also, I sensed the students weren’t going to come off well in the court of public opinion, which proved to be the case. Marching against a published article wasn’t a good optic—it smacked of book burning, something Americans generally oppose, while conveniently illustrating my observation in the essay that students’ assertions of vulnerability have been getting awfully aggressive in the past few years. Indeed, I was getting a lot of love on social media from all ends of the political spectrum, though one of the anti-PC brigade did email to tell me that, as a leftist, I should realize that these students were my own evil spawn. I was spending more time online than I should have—though, in fact, social media was my only source of information about the controversy: No one from the university had thought to let me know I was being marched on. (I wasn’t teaching that quarter and was trying not to be around much.) I first learned about the events on campus from a journalist in New York.