On the April 5 edition of 60 Minutes, long-time correspondent Morley Safer opened his segment on Wikipedia by referring to it as “the greatest argument-settler wrought by man.” That’s April 5, 2015. Really? We’re still saying and hearing phrases like “known to man” or “mankind has always . . .”? And even on a TV show with some claim to intellectual respectability like 60 Minutes? [Read more…]
“Sexual Paranoia” and Intellectual Integrity (Part 1)
In her essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education on “Sexual Paranoia” (6 March 2015), Laura Kipnis takes codes of sexual conduct to task for creating paranoia among college students toward what she sees as natural sexuality. As part of her evidence for her thesis, Kipnis invokes an ongoing case at her home institution, Northwestern University, where two students have filed separate complaints of sexual assault against the same philosophy professor. But, as I discussed in a letter to the editor, published in The Chronicle a month later (6 April 2015), Kipnis got the facts about those complaints so wrong as to undermine her thesis. [Read more…]
Talk about Ambiguity
“Next year sees the publication of A Wilderness of Monkeys, Howard Jacbson’s literary re-imagining of Merchant [Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice]. Writing post-Holocaust gives him the chance to exploit the ambivalence in Shakespeare’s text. ‘Who is the hero of this play and who is the villain?’ Jacobson said when the book was announced.”
–Preti Taneja, in an article for The Conversation about censoring Shakespeare
Recognizing Abuse of Power
In her recent opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis complains that codes governing professor-student relationships on college and university campuses have created paranoia among students. She cites a specific case on her own campus, Northwestern University, in which an undergraduate filed a complaint against a philosophy professor for sexual assault. When Northwestern officials didn’t discipline the professor as seriously as they might have, the student sued the university under Title IX and the professor for violation of the Gender Violence Act. In discussing this case, Kipnis adopts a tone of demeaning superiority toward this student that echoes the abuse of professorial power in instances of professor-on-student sexual harassment. In both cases, a professor with more stature and power wields it so as to humiliate and intimidate a student. [Read more…]
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