Good article, although I wonder if the authors have spent much time on campuses actually watching and listening to how these issues are handled daily, aside from the extreme cases cited. Maybe my institution is unusual, but I'm happy to say I see very little of this overactivism. By that I mean there are plenty of instances, but it is not institutionalized here, and that is the key (I suspect some of the examples in this article are similarly isolated from overall institutional values and policy). We want these issues to come up for discussion, and my institution generally provides appropriate space for that. It can be done without coddling, without restricting language, without punishing and marginalizing those whose minds you're trying to change.
The new Title IX rules have a lot to do with the increasing coverage of the title concept of this article, and perhaps also with the resurgence of efforts to erase words, images, smells, sounds and thoughts without replacing them with something better. Legislation was necessary, but what we got is imperfect and challenging to implement in ways that are not just (sometimes preemptively) accusatory, punitive and exclusionary. Media coverage tends to lack nuance. So does student activism. So do the mindsets that said activism is directed towards. A college's responsibility is to apply limited guidance to keep dialogue on
track towards the progressive and not the regressive. That's a fine
line. I just read an article about Greensboro College, where freshmen were required to attend a
play about sexual assault. They laced the program and promotional materials with trigger warnings, and had extra ushers in the aisles to help any students who might be overcome by the
play's content and need to evacuate. Meanwhile, college officials in attendance did nothing as some loudmouth boys in the audience catcalled and otherwise made asses of themselves throughout the performance. As a result, the college is now dealing with a Title IX investigation of those boys for sexual harassment during the very event that was intended to prevent it. Where did they go wrong? Not enough trigger warnings? Nope.
Last spring, we produced a
play with similar intent, written by our Playwright in Residence in collaboration with students and a range of academic departments, and with funding from a Department of Justice grant. Big difference in reception. We publicized it as a
play about sexual
misunderstanding and violence. Multiple story lines drew from interviews of students on campus to
address a range of issues around those themes. We addressed extreme cases-- a rape, a groping at a party, violence against a gay couple. We also addressed real students' confusion and anxiety about sex on campus-- inexperience with love and lust away from home for the first time, and with lots of alcohol. Interviews with students revealed tremendous confusion around the
line between regretting an encounter and feeling victimized. All sides of each issue were given time on
stage. We never explicitly said "rape is wrong" or similar. There was no editorializing-- just a presentation of real circumstances. The cast and artistic team came out for a talk-back following each performance, and that's where expression of opinions happened (so that opinions were part of a dialogue, not a lecture done "at" the audience). We did not give trigger warnings although the topics, actions, and language were certainly disturbing, sometimes violent. Nobody in the audience snickered or made rude comments through the show, nobody left early overcome with anxiety (although of course many assault survivors attended), and almost everyone stayed for surprisingly long and frank discussions in the talk-backs. The space we made was too complicated to allow the shallowness on display in Greensboro. We weren't giving orders to be decent humans, so there was nothing for a contrary personality to push against. Those people just had to sink into the situation and think their way out.
So while the Greensboro case looks like a (perhaps typically) thick attempt at following Title IX guidance, here's another college succeeding with a more nuanced angle and with the support of the DOJ. Inside of and beyond college politics, my observation has been that extreme opinions that don't mesh with most people's experiences tend to get sent back to the margins naturally. Other times, what may initially be perceived as an extreme opinion may come to be understood as a new standard of humanity. As the article's authors (and T Jefferson) argue, a completely open dialogue is necessary to vet the ideas on the margins. Explicitly intellectual settings are supposed to establish the context to allow all the good, bad and ugly to comingle for evaluation. It isn't supposed to be easy to establish that context, though. If it were, we wouldn't need it. So, this was a necessary article that pushes back at a trend to suppress intellectual process, but the trend is not new and it is not necessarily prevailing in the longer history of academia's engagement with social justice.
Here's to the medium of
theatre, which when skillfully wielded can do a better job than any other at inclusively socializing and humanizing content that other areas of study commonly mangle with catchphrases and exclusionary political correctness.
