Laura Kipnis' "Should students be allowed to hook up with professors?"

Now, there was the case where one day I started a new class for the quarter and recognized somebody that I had had a one night stand with the previous year...

Slut.

x-post to Ed

intra=within
inter=between/across

;-)

Pasting her NYT opinion piece w/out comment. (I haven't read the Ghomeshi piece that set off these events, and don't plan to.)

The Perils of Publishing in a #MeToo Moment

By Laura Kipnis
Ms. Kipnis is the author of a book about campus sexual harassment policies.

Sept. 25, 2018

When Robert B. Silvers, the founding editor of The New York Review of Books, published an article in late 2011 speculating that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a prominent French politician accused of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper in New York, might have been set up, I remember being shocked and appalled. If you accepted the evidence that the author, Edward Jay Epstein, had amassed (timeline inconsistencies, missing cellphones), you had to conclude that the accuser wasn’t just lying, she was also collaborating with nefarious entities to bring down Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who happened to be planning a presidential run in France.

An international conspiracy on this scale seemed hard to credit, and still seems improbable. In the end, the criminal case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was dropped because of significant discrepancies in the accuser’s story; she accepted a settlement in a subsequent civil case against him. The various mysteries in the case were never cleared up.

The Epstein article came to mind with the abrupt departure this month of Mr. Silvers’s successor, Ian Buruma, after he published an essay by another man accused of sexual assault, the former Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi, called “Reflections From a Hashtag.” The consensus on social media seemed to be that running the Ghomeshi essay was an unforgivable mistake: Important facts were left out or misleadingly presented (for example, there were many more accusations against him than the ones that a judge acquitted him of), and giving Mr. Ghomeshi a platform was seen as equivalent to excusing or exonerating him. Mr. Buruma seems to have fatally underestimated the amount of pushback the essay would generate.

Mr. Silvers and his longtime co-editor, Barbara Epstein, became legends by taking editorial risks; Mr. Buruma became an ex-editor by taking editorial risks. No doubt they all made their mistakes. Mr. Buruma gave an interview after the publication of the Ghomeshi essay that came off as cavalier about the omissions in the piece, fanning the controversy. Do we now live in such unforgiving times that one problematic essay (or interview) guillotines a job? If so, my fear is that no editor in America will be taking editorial risks ever again. Whatever one thinks of the Ghomeshi essay — my purpose isn’t to defend it; I understand why many found it sniveling and dissembling — I suspect that The Review’s parting of ways with Mr. Buruma will change the nature and content of intellectual culture in our country.

Mr. Buruma was my editor at The Review, so perhaps I’m not objective enough. And I don’t know what precise calculations informed the decisions concerning his departure. But I have sympathy for The Review’s owner-publishers, who perhaps feared possible economic repercussions (rumors circulated about advertisers threatening to flee). As someone who has occasionally taken controversial stances on sexual harassment policies, I myself fear the possible economic repercussions that being on “the wrong side” of this moment could entail: Will my own opportunities to write and publish, in The Review or elsewhere, be curtailed? Self-censorship is the pragmatic move right now.

It would also be craven. What I found, writing for The Review under Mr. Buruma, was a rare opportunity — or rare in a periodical with significant circulation — to take intellectual and stylistic risks, be offbeat in my opinions and get the last word in editorial scuffles. I also got the chance to enthuse about the impact and necessity of the #MeToo movement in an essay commissioned by Mr. Buruma last November, shortly after the first wave of accused men starting falling. I hear there are now a lot of victory dances about bringing down Mr. Buruma, too. What’s painful about the stance of many now claiming the #MeToo mantle is the apparent commitment to shutting down voices and discussions that might prove distasteful or unnerving. What use is such an intellectually stifled version of feminism to anyone?

I recall, as a teenager, reading the former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s prison memoir “Soul on Ice” and being beside myself with fury at his description of raping white women as a political act (and black women for practice). It shook me up. It also demanded that I grapple with the experience of someone — a criminal, a rapist, an enraged black man — entirely unlike myself. Is this a book that could still be published at the moment?

What about Joan Didion’s famously tough-minded essay in The Review in 1991 on the Central Park jogger case, which raised doubts about the guilt of the five accused teenagers, all of whom were black or Hispanic, while parsing the sentimentalized stories told about white rape victims? Would the savvy editor of today publish such an article?

It’s impossible to say whether another article by a person accused of sexual assault would arouse the response the Ghomeshi essay did, or whether the reaction to it was specific to its particular flaws. Allocution is a tough genre. But even when the account is disingenuous and self-pitying, I’m interested in what the accused have to say for themselves, including those I think are guilty and despicable and who haven’t learned the proper lessons from their crimes. One of the reasons we read prison literature is because we’re all guilty and despicable. One of the reasons we read literature as such is to know what it’s like to be a criminal, a coward, a refugee, a pariah. In other words, human.

Something significant was lost last week. One consequence of Mr. Buruma’s departure will be a new layer of safeguards we won’t even know are in place, including safeguards from the sort of intellectual risks The New York Review of Books always stood for.

safeguards from the sort of intellectual risks The New York Review of Books always stood for.

I can't say she cited enough evidence to substantiate that Ghomeshi's essay was intellectually sound, or that any pending changes in editorial policy would have prevented Didion's essay from being published. It is just hand-wringing afaics.

Mr. Buruma was my editor at The Review, so perhaps I’m not objective enough.

Fair dinkum. But I'd leave out the "perhaps".

Mr. Silvers and his longtime co-editor, Barbara Epstein, became legends by taking editorial risks; Mr. Buruma became an ex-editor by taking editorial risks.

Christ, she should really know better than to try such a blatant rhetorical con.
Not mentioning the Slate interview--wherein Buruma made it seem like a major intellectual outlet was being run by a clueless lightweight--also does her no favors.

That’s a bad take. If she really wants to defend professors hooking up with students—an obviously terrible idea, but it’s her thing—her case is hurt by taking a soft line on Jian Ghomeshi.

To be fair to Buruma, the idea for the piece could have been fine if it was framed differently. It wasn’t framed as prison literature or something that the paper by no means stood by... it was a cover story that seemed like it was trying to give the “other side of the story.”

The new york times has published op eds by dictators—it’s sometimes good to get people’s perspectives even when they are awful—but this wasn’t that

That’s a bad take. If she really wants to defend professors hooking up with students—an obviously terrible idea, but it’s her thing—her case is hurt by taking a soft line on Jian Ghomeshi.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, September 25, 2018 10:45 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a bad take for sure, but this is not a fair reading of her piece.

that's true. i read it through again and it's true she compares the value of it to like, "soul on ice" and other texts where the writer admits abhorrent behavior. but i still think the nyrb didn't present it that way, or didn't do enough to make the impression that that's what they were doing

Yeah, agreed. She's not defending professors hooking up with students (despite this thread being about that), she's defending - or trying to - not his particular piece but the 'possibility of a piece like (t)his being written'. That seems fair to me. But the NYRB fucked this up in pretty much every way imaginable. Buruma's defense - "I am being persecuted by the twitter mob" - is a distraction, really. He shouldn't have run the piece. Well no, he should have, but not in this way. Not without a choir of voices on the other side heard loud and clear.

ghomeshi can burn in hell, one hopes