Phi Beta Cons

Don’t Disinvite: Trash

Christine Hoff Sommers gets the treatment at Oberlin

If you can’t disinvite a speaker, trash her. As Charles Cooke reports elsewhere on NRO, author  Christina Hoff Sommers  spoke on Monday, sponsored by the Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians (OCLR). Before that, however, a group of students warned the campus with a letter to the school newspaper. Calling her a “rape denialist,” the letter signed by about 150 students said:

By bringing her to a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/survivors, OCRL is choosing to reinforce this climate of denial/blame/shame that ultimately has real life consequences on the well-being of people who have experienced sexualized violence.

They offered an “alternate event” called “We’re Still Here Monday,” and proposed “direct action.”

Not everyone read the letter, I presume, because it had the following “trigger warning.”:

Content Warning: This letter contains discussion of rape culture, online harassment, victim blaming and rape apologism/denialism.

In any case, Sommers  did speak. She tweeted afterward that some students “yelled and jeered” and others sat with their mouths taped shut. That last is particularly strange. What was the idea? That because Sommers was speaking, they could not?

Another typical day on one of  today’s “liberal” campuses…

Jane S. ShawJane S. Shaw retired as president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in 2015. Before joining the Pope Center in 2006, Shaw spent 22 years in ...
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