My Alma Mater American University Cancelled My Title IX 'Hate Speech' Panel

Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Last night I was supposed to participate in a panel at my alma mater, American University, on feminism, free speech, and Title IX. My co-panelists were to include a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the current head of a group that fights for students' rights, and two staffers from the British website spiked—not what you might think would be a controversial lineup.

But in the days leading up to the event, the AU chapter of American Association of University Women organized a campaign to "Keep Our Campus Safe," describing the panel as "hate speech" and "violence" designed to undermine "decades of work... to make campuses safer for victims of sexual violence."

The panel was put together by spiked as part of its "Unsafe Space" tour, which will visit several U.S. campuses and include such figures as Laura Kipnis and Jonathan Haidt (along with Reason's Robby Soave). The event on American's D.C. campus was to kick off the tour, with me, spiked's Ella Whelan, former ACLU chief Nadine Strossen, and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education director Robert Shibley on a panel moderated by spiked Deputy Editor Tom Slater.

Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) was the student group hosting the event, and was in charge of making arrangements with the campus. An auditorium had been secured since summer, but a few days before the event AU administrators told YAL that the space was no longer available and then that the panel had to be canceled altogether.

The event went on, albeit in a smaller and much less collegiate location: Reason's D.C. office. Luckily we were able to open our space to the event at the last minute

Overall, it's a thoroughly tame event, albeit one that fostered some good discussion with students who had trekked from AU's campus to the Reason office. We talked about how Title IX proceedings are often assumed to only involve sexual assault, though they encompass a range of other areas that can have nothing to do with sexual activity or violence, and that can seriously jeopardize academic freedom and (often liberal) professors' livelihoods. Whelan talked about how Title IX proceedings and the general sexual climate on campus can infantilize female students and take women's progress a step backward.

I talked about how it's the feds, much more than any minority of illiberal students, who are forcing campuses into absurd "safe spaces." The media spend too much time blaming "campus feminists" or leftist student groups for Title IX's worst excesses when the real culprits are government bureaucrats and schools scared to cross them. Colleges would rather crack down on any potential liabilities—i.e., anything anyone complains about—rather than face steep fines or lose the ability to participate in federal student-loan programs.

It was especially disappointing to learn today that this may have been provoked by a women's student group severely misrepresenting the event and then urging students to be angry about it.

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