'Hate speech' and college campuses

Article here. Excerpt:

'Feminists deserve some of the blame for normalizing the aggrieved fragility of students. Rape and sexual harassment are real problems on campus, as they are in the rest of the world. But just as there is a “rape culture,” there is also a campus rape victim culture that tends to treat all young women as “survivors.” Accusers who say they have endured any sort of unpleasant incident with a male—from having to turn down a date request to deciding, the morning after getting naked and in bed with a man, that they wished they had not—are deemed as deeply damaged as child pedophile victims, battered women and rape survivors.

Colleges and universities, and their fraternities and athletic departments, need to do a better job of monitoring and weeding out the men who are rapists or potential rapists. Instead of focusing on that, colleges and universities—encouraged by feminists and women’s studies departments, and in many cases ordered to do so by various Department of Education edicts—have inserted themselves as referees into the messiest and most emotionally complicated and intimate entanglements human beings are capable of creating. Their rulebook is called Title IX, the federal law requiring that colleges ensure women get an equal education. It was originally applied to sports teams and funding but has been expanded to cover how universities handle claims of sexual assault and harassment. Acting in loco parentis and under orders from the federal government, administrators form de facto star chambers that act as judge, jury and executioner, without adhering to legal rules of evidence or due process.

The rape victim services on many campuses, intended to protect young victims from further emotional and psychological damage, have evolved into cults of coddling in which no one dares question a “survivor’s” account. Good intentions have gone so awry that young men are routinely labeled rapists without due process.

The presumption of female victimhood inherent in many campus sexual harassment codes prompted Northwestern University feminist film and culture professor Laura Kipnis to pen an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education headlined “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” She ridiculed campus sexual harassment guidelines as “feminism hijacked by melodrama” and identified an “obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators” behind the new policy. “Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to impede their education.”'

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