“The Hunting Ground:” Agitprop in the Service of a Moral Panic

Student Government and Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies to Show Discredited Film on Campus Rape

A story in the Marquette Tribune includes this short note at the end:

The CGSS (Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies) and MUSG (Marquette University Student Government) will show “The Hunting Ground” on April 25, followed by a panel of faculty and staff who will discuss campus sexual assault.

In fact, “The Hunting Ground” has been widely discredited in liberal and mainstream media outlets for its distortion of facts, and its attempt to convict for rape two fellows who are almost certainly innocent. See for example:

• Slate
• Harvard Law Record
• Reason
• New York
• The Harvard Crimson
• (And the conservative) National Review.

Are people who got to see the film going to be told about the controversy, or if so, will all the critics be dismissed as “rape apologists?”

When supposed scholars become activists, nothing good comes of it. And intellectual honesty is always the loser.  That’s the story of academic feminism.

Campus Rape: Scholars Accused of Misconduct for Politically Incorrect Findings

Of course, the claim of “misconduct” will eventually be found to be baseless. But until that happens, the authors will have to endure a tedious “investigation.” The process is the punishment.

Ironically, Mary Koss is one of the people responsible for the current hysteria about campus sexual assault. Her pioneering study in the 1980s, financed by Ms. Magazine, claimed that one in four college women have been victims of date rape. The number was entirely bogus.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

So one could view her current troubles as poetic justice. We think this would be unfair, and credit her with being honest about the data in spite of the current politically correct dogmatism.

More Bogus Campus Date Rape Statistics

Actually Addressing Sexual Assault on Campuses

From Commentary Magazine, some data on how to actually reduce the number of campus sexual assaults.

Any successful approach to reducing sexual assault on campus will require the reconsideration of these very notions. We have completed a study of more than 1,300 colleges and universities and have found that far fewer accusations of sexual assault are levied at the schools that ban alcohol and prohibit opposite-sex overnight guests in residence halls. Our findings suggest that students are not so much victims of a “rape culture” as they are victims of faulty institutional policies that contribute to a higher risk of sexual assault.

Not surprisingly, religious schools and single sex schools also have lower levels of sexual assault.

Stated so simply, one might raise a bunch of caveats and methodological objections. But the authors of the article (Bradford Richardson and Jon A. Shields) are well-trained social scientists who understand the objections and have dealt with them well.

By all means read the whole thing.

Of course, the people who are most vocal about campus sexual assault are also the most adamant about absolute sexual freedom. That there might be a conflict between these two values will take a long time to penetrate their minds. Until then, they will double down on things like teal ribbons and telling male students they are all guilty of rape since they are part of a rape culture and stripping due process protections from males accused of sexual assault. Those things serve their ideological biases and bureaucratic interests.

Marquette Climate Survey: Debunking Bogus Sexual Assault Hype

It’s just out (in the form of an Executive Summary): Marquette’s much touted “Climate Survey.” Given that it was mounted by an LGBT activist, we expected it to be rather politically correct, and claim that the climate on the Marquette campus is really horrid for each and every politically correct victim group.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Which is not to say that we don’t have some quibbles with parts of it, for example the low participation rate (only 31% for undergraduate students) and the fact that the report sometimes offers generalizations based on very few respondents.

One key part involves the issue of “sexual violence” on campus. An outright hysteria has surrounded this issue during the last few years, fueled by feminist activists, a mainstream media that is both liberal and ignorant of social science, and the Obama Administration. Vastly, absurdly inflated figures about the number of college women who have been victimized have been uncritically accepted.

The report starts out citing a bogus White House document:

In 2014, Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault indicated that sexual assault is a significant issue for colleges and universities nationwide, affecting the physical health, mental health, and academic success of students. The report highlights that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college. One section of the Marquette University survey requested information regarding sexual assault.

But it then goes on to note:

4% (n = 186) of respondents indicated that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact while at Marquette University.

Of course, for the demographic to whom this is stereotypically applicable, the incidence is a bit higher:

A higher percentage of Women respondents (6%, n = 164) than Men respondents (1%, n = 19) reported having experienced unwanted sexual contact.

This, of course, is radically below the “one in five” figure widely touted. Further, “unwanted sexual contact” is a broad category including a lot of things far short of forcible rape.

Oddly, the report doesn’t reveal what percentage of women who experienced unwanted sexual contact reported it to authorities or university officials. But it does reveal:

Respondents were offered the opportunity to elaborate on why they did not report unwanted sexual contact. Sixty-eight respondents provided written responses. Common themes included: (1) Not that serious, 60 respondents indicated that they did not report the unwanted sexual contact because for them it was not that serious.

There are a lot of things a guy could do that are “out of bounds,” but it’s hard to believe that actual rape would not be considered “serious.” And remember, this is 60 out of 68 women who volunteered a reason for not reporting to authorities.  It’s not 60 out of a larger number who failed to report the incident to authorities.

Universities (and the media, and the Obama Administration) need to quit lying about the incidence of campus sexual violence. Social Justice Warriors who pride themselves on being opposed to sexual violence and use bogus statistics to bolster their case deserve to lose credibility as the truth slowly seeps into public consciousness. The implosion of the University of Virginia tall tale of “Jackie,” and the exposure of “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, have put the sexual violence hustlers on the defensive. That’s a good thing.

Sexual Hysteria on Campus: Absurdly Broad Definition of “Sexual Assault”

From Reason.com:

A new survey of Rutgers University students reinforces the idea that one in four college women will be victims of sexual assault... but only if you don’t look at the study too closely. Zoom in and you’ll find the same problems that plague so much research about sex crimes on college campuses, from defining violence to include rude comments to failing to differentiate between an unwanted kiss and forcible rape.

The Rutgers survey—conducted by the school’s Center on Violence Against Women and Children at the request of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the Department of Justice—was carried out last academic year at the state school’s New Brunswick campus, attended by about 42,000 students. Around 10,800 students completed the online survey; the majority were undergraduates (80 percent) and women (64 percent).

Rutgers used definitions of sexual violence and sexual assault based on material from the White House task force. “‘Sexual assault’ and ‘sexual violence’ refer to a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient,” notes a school summary of survey findings, “and include remarks about physical appearance, persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient, threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behavior, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.”

Survey respondents were presented with that definition, then asked whether they had experienced sexual violence prior to starting school at Rutgers. Nineteen percent of all respondents and 24 percent of undergraduate women said they had.

That’s right. “Remarks about physical appearance” could constitute “sexual assault.” So could “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient.” The latter are a form of harassment, and somebody in authority might need to tell the dork who does it to back off, but it’s absurd to call it violence.

Surveys like this are virtually always conducted by people with an agenda. Often, they are feminists who want to promote a narrative of men as evil oppressors. But often they come from campus bureaucrats who want an excuse for more programs and initiatives to justify more staff, a larger budget, and more power.

And of course, the two groups overlap.

Further, participation in these studies is typically entirely voluntary, and in this study fewer than 30 percent of the student population took the survey. Thus there may be a skew toward those who have been sexually assaulted (or have some grievance about some sexual encounter).

Things like this may explain why the very best survey of victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey, shows a radically lower level of campus sexual assault, and campus rape. It mostly limits the definition of “sexual assault” to things that people in the real world (outside college campuses) consider an assault, and the response rate is quite high (88%).

This survey shows the rate of sexual assault among college women as 4.3 victimizations per thousand.

Yes, per thousand. That is the rate for six months, so for a college career, one might need to multiply it by eight. But it’s a little more complicated since college women are apparently less likely to be assaulted in the summer (when they are likely away from the party atmosphere of campus). On the other hand, some women take five years to graduate. But there is no way to get anywhere near the scary statistics the rape activists use.

Click on image to enlarge

Where actual rape is concerned, the rate is two per thousand, and the rate for attempted rape is 1.5 per thousand (see Table 1 here).

Further, rather than there being a rape crisis, the rate of campus sexual assault has been declining.

So what we have here is yet another case of college campuses being a Wonderland were hard empirical facts don’t matter, and the proper politically correct attitudes are all that counts.

Is Marquette Finally Going to Tell the Truth About Campus Date Rape?

Sent out last fall by Marquette: a “Teal Poster” about sexual violence.

It touts the following statistics:

Believe...
“1 in 5 women and 1 in 70 men will experience rape in their lifetime.”
(National Crime Victims Survey, 2007)
“7 out of 10 rape survivors knew their attacker.”
(National Crime Victims Survey, 2007)
“People between the ages of 18 to 24 experience the highest prevalence of stalking, sexual assault an dating violence.”
U.S. Department of Justice (Revised, 2012)
“1 in 4 Stalking victims are cyberstalked”
U.S. Bureau of Justice, 2009

What is missing? Bogus statistics about the incidence of campus date rape.

We have found that our students have been told that 20% of college women are victims of date rape. And indeed, one “training” module that was mandated for all University employees last fall used a somewhat scarier statistic, claiming that 25% of college women are victims of “some sort of sexual assault.”

Click on Image to Enlarge

We called Susannah Bartlow, director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, which was responsible for the poster. We wanted to ask her whether Marquette is backing off inflated claims about date rape.  We left voice mail, but she never got back to us.

Instead, Brian Dorrington, head public relations guy at Marquette, responded.

(It’s significant that nobody in the Provost’s office will talk to us, but rather gives Dorrington the task of framing an evasive response.)

Dorrington said:

Hi John,

Susannah Bartlow shared your inquiry with me and I’m writing to provide context. This year’s sexual violence prevention poster offers new information and statistics to expand the knowledge base of our university community on this important topic. The information from both posters is accurate and includes widely accepted statistics. We have worked diligently to educate our entire campus community about preventing sexual misconduct. This includes sexual violence prevention and bystander intervention during the past four years and mandatory training for all first-year students.

Dorrington, of course, has completely and entirely avoided our query, which was whether Marquette is backing off of the bogus statistics it has been giving students.  Perhaps he did not understand our query, or perhaps he simply was unwilling to admit that Marquette is backing off something it has been (falsely) telling students.

That colleges (following feminist activists) have been trafficking in bogus, grossly inflated statistics about date rape is not new information.

The first widely noticed article questioning inflated date rape statistics appeared in 1991, written by Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert.

And of course, we have repeatedly blogged on the issue.

Why Inflate the Problem?

The chronic inflation of the problem of sexual assault on campus is the result of the confluence of two forces.

The first is feminism, which casts men as the evil oppressor class. What better metaphor for male evil than the notion that lots of men are raping women. Indeed, why not go beyond that and say that all men are responsible for the prevalence of rape, or that a “rape culture” encompasses all men?

Thus, a certain R. Clifton Spargo from the English Department, in a campus program on sexual violence. . .

. . . rejected the notion that rape is “merely aberrant, deviant behavior,” and told the male members of the audience “you are living in the rape culture.” Where? “On Campus. In the bars.”

The other force is the interests of campus bureaucrats. Hyping “sexual violence” is a justification for programs, and initiatives, workshops, and indoctrination sessions. All which have the effect of inflating the budgets and staffs of campus bureaucrats.

There are a few things that students should be told about rape. The “Teal Poster” is pretty good in this regard. Women should be told that, if a victim of rape, they should not shower, not change their clothes, but go immediately to an Emergency Room. Women should be told to be careful about ever taking a drink if it might possibly contain a date rape drug.

And women ought to be strongly encouraged to report rape. The entire student body should encourage women to report rape and support those who do. This is more likely to happen if Marquette can (honestly) tell students that reports of rape will be dealt with in a sensitive and professional manner.

But it doesn’t help when Marquette makes stupid statements about rape.

This page, for example, says that a women has not consented to sex if she is “Giving in or going along with someone to gain approval.” A lot of women have sex to gain approval. A guy who makes his “approval” continent on getting sex is not a gentleman, but he’s not a rapist either (at least if that’s all he does).

Another stupid statement coming from Marquette was in the “training” module required of all employees and faculty. It flatly asserts that rape is “not about sex, it’s about power.” If that’s true, why is it “sexual assault” rather than “power assault?”

Check on Image to Enlarge

Another stupid statement is found in the “Teal Poster.” It tells students:

Consent. If you want to have sexual contact with someone, it is your responsibility to make sure they consent...enthusiastically!

No, grudging consent will do. A guy who gets only grudging consent from his date really ought to back off. But he’s not rapist if he fails to.

Making stupid statements about rape encourages students to blow off the “training” that Marquette offers as politically correct indoctrination, rather than good advice and information.

Marquette Compromised

Then there is the fact that Marquette is badly compromised in dealing with campus rape, having covered up two serious cases of sexual assault during the 2011 school year. Both were reported by the Chicago Tribune. Here is one report. And here is the other.

Conclusion

If Marquette is backing off of bogus claims about campus date rape, good. But it would be better if the University admitted that the numbers it has been giving students are badly inflated, and that a sober view of the situation requires good data.

Debunking Myths About Campus Sexual Assault

Hypocrisy: Marquette on Sexual Assault Awareness

It’s now “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” at Marquette, and here is the video that talks about it:


As is always the case on college campuses, the issue is framed in terms of needing to “raise awareness.” Presumably, if everybody is “aware” that some guys would like to rape (or otherwise sexually assault) a woman, the problem will go away.

The people promoting this campaign, of course, continue to simply lie about the incidence of campus rape. For example, they cite a 2000 Department of Justice Report to support the claim that “It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14.” We have analyzed this report, and it in fact shows no such thing.

Other studies of the issue show a vastly lower incidence of sexual assault among college women.

But of course, if you are trying to “raise awareness” why not get everybody as overwrought about the issue as possible?

Then there is Marquette’s rhetoric about how sex without “consent” is sexual assault.  That sounds reasonable on its face, but unfortunately, the definition of “consent” is warped.   Some of what the university says about consent is sensible (“Giving in or going along with someone . . . to avoid being hurt is not consent”). But some of it is absurd. For example: “Giving in or going along with someone to gain approval . . . is not consent.” So if a girl allows a guy to have sex with her because she wants his approval he has raped her.

Then there is “Silence and passivity do not equal consent.” So if a woman allows a guy to fondle her, or have sex with her, without any protest or resistance, he has raped her.  This may be true in the fever swamp that is feminist academia, but it’s not true in the real world.

Such absurdly broad definitions of rape cheapen the meaning of the term “rape” and trivialize real rape.  This feminist tendency to call every unfortunate sexual encounter that a woman may, in the morning, feel unhappy about “rape” is the reason that a vastly lower number of college women say they have been raped than are classified as rape victims by feminist researchers.

But at least, Marquette is taking a forthright stand against date rape, right?

But what happens when women on campus are the victims of actual sexual assault? Especially, what happens when the assailants are members of the basketball team? Marquette covers it up. One case involved a woman who began consensual intercourse with a male student, and then told him to stop. Not only did he refuse, but he roughed her up badly in the process.

The woman met with Student Affairs staffer Stephanie Quade. According to the Chicago Tribune:

The woman said she met with Quade, who encouraged her to focus on her schoolwork and mental health rather than pursuing charges, the woman said. Quade also asked if she had thought about praying about the situation, the woman said. She said she left the meeting in tears.

“I felt like they were trying to get me to be quiet and disappear,” she said. “I’ve never been made to feel so dumb, so stupid and so much like I didn’t matter.”

Marquette, which was legally required to report the incident to local police, failed to do so.

Another article in the Chicago Tribune described a separate incident:

One of the woman’s friends told police she became uncomfortable as the night wore on. The friend said an athlete poured alcohol into cups for the women and called them “big girl shots.” She told police that athletes were “dancing inappropriately” and that she overheard one say, “We’re (going to have sex with) these bitches tonight.”

At some point that night, the 19-year-old woman said, one athlete trapped her in a bedroom before grabbing her by the ears and forcing her to perform a sex act, police records show. The athlete told police the sex was consensual.

After leaving the room, the woman encountered another athlete who gave her two more shots of alcohol and started dancing with her. Minutes later, the woman went to a different bedroom with three other athletes. She recalled one slamming the door shut in the face of a friend who was worried about her safety. A second athlete put her hand in his pants, and another put his hand inside her pants, according to her statement to police and school officials.

She recalled that the encounter ended when a friend found another athlete to unlock the door, records show. The 19-year-old woman said she was slumped down in a chair with her pants undone and an athlete standing over her when her friend entered the room.

When the woman shared her account with campus security officers, they discouraged her from going to Milwaukee police by telling her the allegations would draw news media attention, she said.

This is what we would expect from the modern, politically correct university. Marquette bureaucrats will recite all the politically correct cant about sexual assault, will display ribbons and subject undergraduates to all sorts of indoctrination. But when faced with real sexual assault, they cover it up.

The problem, quite simply, is that Marquette has too many bureaucrats. They specialize in mouthing fashionable clichés, setting up “offices” for this and that, having workshops, subjecting students to all kinds of exercises to “raise awareness,” and declaring that this is “Sexual Assault Awareness Month.” Yet all this is fundamentally irrelevant, bureaucratic busywork, essentially. A genuine response to sexual assault would involve reporting it to the police and actually punishing the offenders.

Bureaucratic make-work, in other words, can’t substitute for actual moral integrity. The latter has been sorely lacking at Marquette.

More on Bogus Statistics on Campus Date Rape

We have, with some frequency, discussed the fact that feminist activists produce radically inflated and completely bogus statistics about the number of college women who fall victim to date rape.

Indeed, we were once charged with sexual harassment for telling a class of ours this. (The complaint was dismissed by Marquette, and we continue to say exactly the same thing in all our classes where the fact is relevant.)

The number usually bandied around is that 20 or 25 percent of college women are victims of date rape. Sometimes it’s not “rape” but “rape or attempted rape” or sometimes merely “sexual assault.” But the usual tactic is to scare women with inflated statistics.

Of course, this also serves the feminist agenda of demonizing men.

But what happens when the Department of Justice, and not feminist university professors, ask about rape? And what happens when their concern is not just with rape, but with all violent crime?

The numbers come back vastly lower.

Consider the following table, taken from an official report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (you’ll need to click on the image to see it clearly):

You’ll see that the incidence of rape among college women is 6.0 cases per thousand students. That’s .60 percent per year. Multiply that by four years in college and you have between two and three percent.

But then you have the fact that this is not merely rape, but rape and sexual assault. How is this defined?

Rape/sexual assault

This category includes forced sexual intercourse including psychological coercion as well as physical force.

Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal or oral penetration by the offender(s). This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object. It includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

Sexual assault is also included in this category which includes a wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. Sexual assault also includes verbal threats.

In other words, a lot of things that are gross and vulgar, but are vastly less serious than rape (because they are vastly less psychologically damaging to the victim) count as sexual assault.

Even ignoring this, there is no way to get to the 20 to 25 percent figure bandied around by feminist activists.

Note that the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers are derived from a victimization survey, and are in no way dependent on the victim having reported the crime to the police.

So the things that politically correct faculty, and politically correct administrators, tell students about the incidence of rape are simply untrue. They serve the ideological interests of feminists, and the career interests of campus bureaucrats. But they are lies.

Marquette Warrior Harassed Over Debunking of Bogus Feminist Rape Claims: More

We’ve blogged about the fact that one student on our fall American Politics class complained about “sexual harassment” because we, in class, debunked bogus statistics about date rape on campus.

Marquette Provost John Pauly insisted that the complaint be followed up, which resulted in our being summoned into the office of political science chair Barry McCormick to explain what we had said in class.

It was a clear violation of academic freedom, since the complaint didn’t allege we did anything more than debunk statistics that we judge to be bogus. The student who complained didn’t think such statistics should be debunked, apparently since campus rape is a serious problem (and therefore inflating the scope of the problem serves a good purpose).

This past Monday (January 30) McCormick came into our office, and explained that he and Pauly had decided that we were within our rights to say what we said.

So far, so good, it might seem. But not really.

No Written Explanation

McCormick informed us that Pauly was not willing to give us a written explanation of the case, or of the decision. That Marquette would not be willing to put the resolution of the case in writing raises the suspicion that campus bureaucrats might want to revive it in the future, or perhaps fear that it would create a precedent in favor of academic freedom that they might want to ignore at some future date.

Complaint Should Have Been Dropped

We told McCormick that the case should never have been pursued, since if the complaint was taken absolutely at face value, no sexual harassment happened. McCormick replied that he informed us during the office meeting why the case needed to be pursued. We asked him to repeat what his explanation was, and he refused.

In fact, he gave no such explanation. During the office meeting, he explained that perhaps a professor might ask a female student to take all her clothes off, and this would clearly need to be dealt with. But nobody accused us of that. All we were accused of was debunking bogus statistics that feminists produce, and our comments were not even directed at a particular student.

Protect Academic Freedom in the Future

Marquette needs to provide a clear policy that complaints of sexual harassment will not be used in a way that infringes upon academic freedom. Simply saying something, relevant to the course material, that some feminist doesn’t want to hear is clearly protected by academic freedom. Pauly, and Marquette, are unwilling to provide any such statement, something that clearly implies they want to keep open the option of using “sexual harassment” in the future as a pretext to shut up faculty speech that the politically correct crowd does not like.

They doubtless find this option very desirable, especially for use against some faculty member less combative than we are.

Scurrilous Semi-Accusation

Finally, McCormick made a rather scurrilous semi-accusation. He suggested that perhaps we criticized feminists in an “uncivil” way in class. What evidence did he have of that? First, he said we “accused feminists of lying” in our office meeting. What we actually said was that feminists lie about the incidence of rape. That’s a much more limited (and entirely accurate) statement. Secondly, he took exception to the fact that we characterized the person who brought the complaint as a “prissy little feminist” and said that in a properly run university, “some administrator would sit this prissy little feminist down and explain to her ‘this is a university, you are going to hear things you disagree with. Live with it.’”

Of course, we said nothing remotely uncivil in class, and the student didn’t claim that we did.

Liberals, of course, have all kinds of tactics for shutting up speech they don’t like, and if they aren’t willing to escalate to shouting “racist!” or “sexist!” or “homophobe!” will invoke “civility.” McCormick, who is extremely liberal and quite politically correct, seems excessively sensitive to unkind things said about his ideological cohorts.

Conclusion

So it seems that a faculty member can be called into the office of an administrator and required to explain his or her speech, even when nobody has claimed that the faculty member did more than say things that a politically correct student didn’t want to hear.

And while somebody who is willing to make an issue of it (as we were) can prevail, Marquette refuses to renounce the sort of attack on academic freedom.

After all, it’s often prudent for administrators to pander to politically correct faculty, given that they are very numerous, and very vociferous in wanting to shut up speech they dislike.

Thus nothing has been settled, and academic freedom remains in huge danger from Marquette officials.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Takes Note of Harassment of Marquette Warrior

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: an article on the fact that Marquette has “investigated” a complaint from a student who accused us of sexual harassment based on gender for our debunking of feminists’ bogus statistics on campus rape.

FIRE notes that the incident:

. . . provides a good example of how unwarranted investigations of campus speech can cause a deeply problematic “chilling effect” at a university. Universities must not pursue investigations of protected expression just because someone submits a complaint; as soon as it is clear that the expression in question is protected speech, the inquiry must end, even if there are other factual disputes. Prolonging the investigation tells everyone on campus that the university will pursue charges against you no matter how frivolous or malicious the complaint. The likely result is that people self-censor and keep their mouths shut rather than risk such investigation and a possible punishment.

Of course, for the politically correct types on campus, this is the point. They are deeply hostile to free and open debate.

FIRE goes on the quote Marquette’s own Student Handbook on the legitimacy of differences of opinion:

It is clearly inevitable, and indeed essential, that the spirit of inquiry and challenge that the university seeks to encourage will produce many conflicts of ideas, opinions and proposals for action.

Of course, Marquette’s Student Handbook also includes several very dangerous and over-broad statements that could be used to stifle speech. For example:

Harassment is defined as verbal, written or physical conduct directed at a person or a group based on color, race, national origin, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation where the offensive behavior is intimidating, hostile or demeaning, or which could or does result in mental, emotional or physical discomfort, embarrassment, ridicule or harm.

Read at face value, this could mean that if a frank discussion of ghetto crime makes a black student feel “discomfort” that could be harassment. Of course, a feminist talking about the evils of male sexism could make a male student feel uncomfortable, but the odds of anybody seeing any problem with that are nil.

FIRE concludes:

Yet by pursuing this investigation, Marquette is letting a single student entangle a professor in disciplinary proceedings simply due to protected classroom expression. How many professors at Marquette are now going to steer clear of sensitive topics just to avoid an Ethics Point investigation?

The truth, of course, is that even without this kind of inquisition, any prudent junior faculty member, wanting to get tenure, better stifle any urge to say anything politically incorrect. And a lot of tenured people, not wanting to “make waves” or generate hostility, tend to “lay low” and keep their opinions to themselves.

Welcome to the modern politically correct university.

Marquette Warrior Harassed by University Over Debunking of Bogus Feminist Rape Claims

Week before last, we dropped in to speak with Political Science Department Chairman Barry McCormick about a different matter, and were told he had something unpleasant to discuss.

It seems that Marquette has a whistle blowing website (Ethics Point) designed mostly to let employees rat out people who have been stealing money from Marquette, and such.

But somebody had complained that we said something that was “demeaning to rape victims.”

What in the world could be the basis of this?

What do we say about rape in our classes?

Debunking Feminist Rape Claims

We deal with the issue in our introductory American Politics class in the context of media bias, and how one can recognize media bias when the media accept bogus and inflated numbers as factual. This was the case in the 1970s with regard to the number of combat divisions the Warsaw Pact had threatening Western Europe, and in the 1980s with the number of homeless people in the U.S.

Then we get to a more contemporary example: one that the students have almost certainly been subjected to as part of their university indoctrination: the idea that 25% of all college women are victims of “date rape.”

The number is absurdly inflated. We point out that in the study most widely quoted (the Koss study) 73% of the women categorized as having been “raped” by a feminist researcher didn’t interpret what happened to them as rape. Indeed, 42% had intercourse again with the guy who supposedly raped them.

(Our analysis of another campus rape study is here.)

What is happening here? Feminists are defining rape far too broadly. Ambiguous sexual encounters, often fueled by alcohol, are defined as “rape” by feminist researchers, but not defined that way by purported victims.

We point out that feminists insist that if a woman consents to sex under the influence of alcohol, she has been raped.

(Feminists have gotten this definition written into law, a fact that helps women not at all, since these kinds of sexual encounters are virtually never reported to police and even less frequently prosecuted.)

Often, some guy who hasn’t yet learned that, in academia, he’s not supposed to question any feminist claim, will raise his hand in our class and ask “suppose the guy has been drinking too? Why didn’t she rape him?”

We always respond, sarcastically “you’ve got to look at this from the feminist point of view. Males are the oppressor class, and women the victim class. So of course the guy is responsible.”

We typically add “if you wake up in the morning and ask ‘what in the world did I do?’ you haven’t been raped. If you’ve been raped you feel violated. If it requires a feminist political activist to explain to you how what happened was rape, you weren’t raped.”

This past semester we piled on a bit by pointing out to our class that “this is yet another issue, like abortion, where academic feminists simply don’t think like real women in the real world.”

Marquette Responds

Upon hearing from McCormick about the charges, we contacted a lawyer we know – one who loves to sue Marquette – and were advised that we had a right to see the precise charges against us. We conveyed this to McCormick, and just yesterday he got back to us with this:

[T]he Provost [John Pauly] . . . presses me to move forward on the response to the Ethics Point complaint in a timely manner. University Counsel has determined that you may read the text of the complaint, but that I should not give a copy of the complaint to you.

So we meet with McCormick at 2:00 p.m. today. We will report on how the meeting goes.

That we should ever be required to defend to university bureaucrats what we say in class is a gross violation of academic freedom. Faculty have a right to disagree with any political movement – including feminists. And social science faculty have a right to debunk bogus social science statistics.

But this is Marquette in 2011. Timid bureaucrats are unwilling to defend the notion that faculty have a right to say things that feminists don’t like.

[Later, after the 2:00 p.m. meeting]

The meeting was a bit dull, with McCormick insisting that the only purpose was to get our story on what happened. This was simple, since our blog post contained everything we say about rape in class, virtually verbatim.

We did get to look at the student’s complaint, and it roughly accurately recounted what we said, then went into a rant about how rape is a serious problem on campus, and thus we were engaging in “harassment based on gender.” Apparently, in the mind of this feminist, you are “harassing” women if you refuse to accept bogus and inflated statistics on rape. She rhapsodized about a dorm that put out blue ribbons to oppose rape, but didn’t explain how that justifies lying about the incidence of rape.

McCormick admitted that this Ethics Point site had never been used before to register a complaint about what a professor said in class. In essence, the university is making this up as it goes along.

But the complaint should have been dismissed immediately. Taking the complaint absolutely at face value, we did nothing but disagree with feminist claims about date rape, something clearly protected by the canons of academic freedom.

We will, of course, say exactly the same things about rape when we teach the same class next semester.

In a properly run university, some administrator would sit this prissy little feminist down and explain to her “this is a university, you are going to hear things you disagree with. Live with it.” But a timid administration, used to genuflecting to all the demands of political correctness, will never do that.