Jihae Oh CMC ’24
Guest Writer
On Oct. 6, culture critic Laura Kipnis spoke at the Claremont McKenna College Athenaeum, producing backlash from the Claremont community.
Kipnis is a professor emerita in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. In 2015, she published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”.
In the article, she argues that the aftermath of Title IX has led college students to become melodramatic and overuse the term “survivor.”
“Wouldn’t the proper term be ‘accuser’?” Kipnis said. “How can someone be referred to as a survivor before a finding on the accusation—assuming we don’t want to predetermine the guilt of the accused, that is.” By neglecting to acknowledge the identity of a survivor as a survivor, Kipnis implies that all evidence must be presented in order to validate the experience and claims of a survivor.
Before Kipnis’s talk, an email went out to the CMC community from the CMC Advocates providing a trigger warning for the talk that evening. “We stand firmly against Kipnis’s work and critiques against the Title IX process,” said the CMC Advocates. “Advocates believes Kipnis’s work does in fact minimize the realities of sexual violence on college campuses and is counter productive to the efforts of those working to make the Title IX process more equitable and accessible.”
Advocates believe that Kipnis has a victim blaming mentality that has “no place on this campus.” Another email went out after the talk from CMC Advocates to reaffirm their stance against Kipnis and provide resources for any community member who needs a safe space to express themself. The CMC Advocates also immediately posted on their Instagram “Survivors, we believe you” with resources for hotline and contact information for confidential support.
Students across all 5Cs reposted this to their stories, combatting the judgements Kipnis made in her talk against survivors. A banner went up in front of Collins dining hall along with signs in the Cube to continue the support for survivors.
In 2017, The Daily Northwestern produced a statement by Kipnis in response to the negative response to her book “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus.” In the book, Kipnis writes that Northwestern professor, Peter Ludlow, was falsely accused of sexual assault by a graduate student.
Before publishing the book, Kipnis had already doubted the charges made against Ludlow. As a response, one of Ludlow’s accusers along with another graduate student at Northwestern filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis for opposing Northwestern’s sexual-misconduct policy. Northwestern then launched a formal Title IX investigation on Kipnis.
After Ludlow was fired, he gave Kipnis confidential records from the Title IX case against him along with thousands of texts and emails that had been exchanged between him and the student. “The more I learned about his situation, the more I saw his case as a lens through which the excesses and hypocrisies of the current campus hysteria came into focus,” said Kipnis in her book.
Our campuses are not the first to have been disappointed and frustrated with Kipnis’s opinions. In 2017, Kipnis spoke at Wellesley College and caused a similar reaction amongst the student population. The Sexual Assault Awareness for Everyone (SAAFE) at Wellesley produced a video in response to Kipnis titled “Shutting Down Bulls–t with SAAFE” which refuted the main points of Kipnis’s arguments.
Kipnis’s visit to both Wellesley and CMC caused students to question the process through which speakers are brought to campus. Diversity of thought is necessary for a high-functioning community, but at what point does controversy not have a place on a liberal arts campus?
Image Source: Claremont McKenna College
