Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Academic Freedom

Coming Soon to a Campus Near You

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:28:00 EST

Indoctrinate U, an awesome new documentary tackles important subjects such as speech codes, censorship, and enforced political conformity on campus, is hitting the road. Details about the movie's spring campus tour are available here. If it's coming to your area, it's worth checking out.

What Civil Liberties

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:11:00 EDT

Libertarians tend to be frustrated by both political parties: Republicans tend to embrace limited government when it comes to economic issues and free markets, and Democrats protect civil liberties and personal freedoms, but neither party embraces freedom in both areas.

This description though increasingly gives the Left too much credit. It just doesn't seem true that the political Left stands up for civil liberties anymore (other than to foil American efforts in the War on Terror at least). The smoking ban movement is largely led by those on the Left, and on campuses students see their speech stifled by the hippies of old. John Fund has a piece in today's Opinion Journal that also highlights how Democrats are leaning toward greater repression of speech, by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine:

Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of "controversial" issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC's "Meet the Press," called "timid, don't-rock-the-boat coverage." On radio, Newsweek's Howard Fineman notes, it "effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves," so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.
But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce, explained: "Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue." The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.
Democrats who have become "Fairness" mongers insist they simply want to restore civility and balance to the airwaves. Al Gore, in a typically overheated speech last year bemoaned "the destruction of [the] marketplace of ideas" which he blamed in part on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein rails against "one-sided programming" that has pushed the American people into "extreme views without a lot of information." She thinks Americans deserve to know "both sides of the story." Isn't it enough that National Public Radio, subsidized by the government, serves as a vehicle for liberal voices in just about every community in the country?
True, commercial radio is dominated by conservatives, but perhaps that's because liberal arguments in their full-throated glory just haven't sold as well. Air America, the liberal talk radio network that debuted in 2004, is in perpetual financial trouble. Then there's the GreenStone talk radio network started last year by feminists Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. It offered cutting-edge liberal thinking pitched to a female audience--and flopped completely.

It shouldn't matter whose ideas are successful in the marketplace. The government has no business trying to create "balance" -- whatever that might mean. There is still plenty to complain about with both Right and Left, but libertarians who retain a belief that the Democrats at least stand up for civil liberties should reevaluate.

UCSD: Battling Over 'Dimensions of Culture'

Mon, 14 May 2007 17:17:00 EDT

The forces that be at the University of California at San Diego (Thurgood Marshall College), according to Inside Higher Ed, have been locked in combat over the fate of Comp 101, aka "Dimensions of Culture."

A cohort led by two graduate teaching assistants-- not re-hired for the upcoming academic year-- charged that the course, originally designed to "challenge hegemonic assumptions about race, class, gender and sexuality" has degenerated into "uncritical patriotic education that fails to interrogate the injustice integral to the founding of the U.S. and the current state of U.S. society."

The program's administrator, Abraham Shragge, says that he is resisting efforts "to turn this into a program of political indoctrination." Also encouraging, students have been speaking out against its tendentiousness:

Students consistently complain of a left-leaning bias in the curriculum on evaluations...

The Web site NoIndoctrination.org, gives a glimpse: One student in 2003 describes the course as perpetuating "the ideology that the United States is nothing beyond a despicable and hypocritical country that continues to oppress minorities and the disadvantaged."

Folks in the California system taking a stand? Always very welcome, and deserving of our support.

Indoctrinate U Review

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:57:00 EDT

David Hogberg was lucky enough to see one of the advance media screenings of Indoctrinate U. He’s got the scoop on the upcoming documentary over at the American Spectator.

Check out his review here.

Blaming America first?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:55:00 EDT

Michael Barone's column on those whom the late Jeane Kirkpatrick called the "blame America first" crowd shows just how out of touch with reality the soi-disant educated classes are today:

"In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The 'we' can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.

"Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls 'tenured radicals,' people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

"On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.

"Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals' description of the world is wildly at odds with reality. But this battering away at ideas of truth and goodness does have some effect. Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives.

"The default assumption predisposes them to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault; if peasants in Latin America are living in squalor, it is our fault; if there are climate changes that have any bad effect on anybody, it is our fault.

"What they have been denied in their higher education is an accurate view of history and America's place in it."

"'There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,' Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are."

IWF Podcast: Conservative Political Action Conference

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:07:00 EST

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) IWF campus director Allison Kasic caught up with Georgia Tech students Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar. Ruth and Orit have filed a Federal civil rights law suit against Georgia Tech challenging the school's speech code and speech zones (both of which limit freedom of speech on campus). Check out the podcast interview for a discussion of free speech on campus and for insights into the situation at Tech.

Columbia Student Challenges University Speech Policy

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:47:00 EST

Campus free speech standards are under intensifying scrutiny, as I and my colleague Phil Orenstein, writing at Democracy Project, have been reporting.

One astute critic is David Feith, student editor of The Columbia Current, who recently wrote a critique of Columbia University President Bollinger's "weak standard." Among other examples, Bollinger stated that his reason for rejecting the invitation for Iranian President Ahmadinejad to speak at the campus was the likelihood that the Iranian president would not take questions from the audience. Had the condition been met -- that is, had this Holocaust-denying leader of an Islamic terrorist state simply agreed to a Q & A session -- he presumably would have been granted access to the university's prestigious podium.

Feith maintains speech advocating murder is unacceptable in an academic setting. Campuses have a special duty to maintain definitive standards with respect to controversial speakers. As Orenstein concludes: "The boundary of what is acceptable and what is not should be drawn somewhere between the far reaches of repressive speech codes and reckless anything-goes free speech."

The consequences of this debate are great, since ideas weigh heavily on the fate of civilization itself. Thus Feith's warning that it is "irresponsible to promote ideas in the marketplace that would ... destroy the freedom and openness that allowed them to appear in the first place."

"I Got an A in 'Phallus 101!'"

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 08:29:00 EST

The Young America's Foundation has reaped well-deserved publicity on its "Dirty Dozen: America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses" (first noted here by Candace de Russy). (Congratulations to Occidental College, whose course "The Phallus" is ranked number 1!)

In "I Got an A in Phallus 101," Charlotte Allen critiques the dirty dozen and concludes:

"The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable -- although that's a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn't include 'race, class and gender' among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on 'cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion' during the age of the Bard.

"The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: 'Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox?'

"Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

"Why not take a course in 'The Phallus?'

"You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy."

A Dirty Dozen or More

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:26:00 EST

The Young America's Foundation has assembled a list of the dozen looniest and most politically tendentious college courses of 2006-2007, a few of which I highlight below. Go to this link to see the rest, in addition to an array of "dishonorable mentions":

Occidental College's The Phallus covers a broad study on the relation "between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism."
Queer Musicology at the University of California-Los Angeles explores how "sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation" during the 1990s. Music under consideration includes works by Schubert and Holly Near, Britten and Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.
Amherst College in Massachusetts offers Taking Marx Seriously: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Students in this class are asked to question if Marxism still has "credibility," while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by "returning to [Marx's] texts." Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.
Students enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Adultery Novel read a series of 19th and 20th century works about "adultery" and watch "several adultery films." Students apply "various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution" and "feminist work on the construction of gender."
Occidental College -- making the list twice for the second year in a row -- offers Blackness, which elaborates on a "new blackness," "critical blackness," "post-blackness," and an "unforgivable blackness," which all combine to create a "feminist New Black Man."
Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration is University of Washington's way of exploring the immigration debate. The class allegedly unearths what is "highlighted and concealed in contemporary public debates about U.S. immigration" policy.

Today's Sign of the Apocalypse

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:08:00 EST

Coming soon to university near you: Fat Studies

Inkwell contributor Candace de Russy has more info over at Phi Beta Cons.

Why college professors don't like Beowulf...

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:27:00 EDT

I've already blogged on "Flags of Our Fathers," Clint Eastwood's new movie that debunks the notion that there are genuine heroes. It was with the movie still on my mind that I opened an advance copy of a splendid new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature," which hits the stands November 15.

Written by Elizabeth Kantor, who wields a wickedly funny pen, the book shows in the chapter on Beowulf, the great Anglo-Saxon epic, why English professors no longer assign the poem, it has to do with heroes:

"The typical English professor hardly wants his students learning the kinds of things you can learn from Beowulf: for example, to admire war heroes, to prefer the tried and true to the trendy and radical, to see Christianity as a powerful civilizing force, and-possibly worst of all-to ask what's wrong with the clever man who hates the warrior (who's a better man than he is)."

I’ll let you know more about this wonderful book when it actually hits the stands.

The Tired-Old "New" Global Studies

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:44:00 EDT

A University of Georgia professor of comparative literature, Betty Jean Craige, recently denounced higher education critics for speaking out about "liberal bias" in higher education. Craige maintains that what these critics call liberal bias is in fact the hoary academic "quest for truth, which always involves the questioning of established worldviews."

In particular, she portrays critics of the current-day college studies as troglodytes who quake in face of the "globalized curriculum" because they fear "new ideas."

The very purpose of the university, she believes, is to expose students to "critiques of what they have previously considered true" - this of course implying that students couldn't have arrived on the campus doorstep possessed of any truth garnered from family, church, school, or other of our benighted institutions ("New ideas must flourish at colleges," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 08/02/06, log-in required).

There ensued a robust and evocative rebuttal by Mary Grabar, a professor of English at Clayton State University, who gave Craige "an F due to obfuscation and PR-speak." In her aptly named op ed, "Colleges' open minds close door on sense," Grabar then went on to list the kinds of courses actually being taught in humanities departments today, such as:

· pornography appreciation

· analyses of the clothing of transvestites

· Native American scalp dances

· And "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Grabar writes of what passes for "scholarship" in prominent journals, for example, investigation into "abortion as ‘performance art' and bondage in lesbian sex acts."

She gives examples of panels she attended at a recent conference of the American Literature Association (ALA):

· "La Reconquista: The Application of Latina/o Studies to U.S. Literature(s) & Criticism" (where an up-and-coming young Latina professor gave instructions and sample syllabi on how to make a survey class on American literature into a class devoted to Latina/o literature and issues) [read: replacing this nation's classic masterpieces]

· "Teaching the Arts of American Protest" on social protest literature (yes, a how-to on teaching literature as a form of social protest)

· and a film and literature panel, where the intellectually challenging paper "Female Sexualities Revised in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and Anita Blake Series" was delivered. (The Anita Blake Series is a series of graphic novels, i.e., with pictures).

And she offers a sampling of literary calls for papers in 2006 from the University of Pennsylvania:

· Hard to Swallow: Reading Pornography on Screen

· An anthology of essays on "Brokeback Mountain"

· Michael Moore: The Documentary Tradition

· Papers for a roundtable discussion on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"

· "Sexing the Text": The description reads, " Do we consider Britney Spears kissing Madonna subversive? What about transgendered narratives? Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie? Slash fiction? (The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 08/04/06).

What kind of worldview does this blanket rejection of tradition as well as stupidity and trash bespeak? This is sophisticated "globalized new knowledge"? These are the alternatives to "established worldviews"? This is the fruit of the academy's vaunted "openness"?

Grabar gets an "A" for presenting yet more evidence that major overhaul of the college curriculum is long overdue. Professors such as Craig and professional organizations such as the ALA demonstrate anew that reform will not come from within the higher education establishment. It will have to be imposed from without it.

"Deepthroating Hopkins"

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:00:00 EDT

Remember the controversy and censorship surrounding an issue of the student-run Carrollton Record at Johns Hopkins that we reported on earlier in the summer? John McCormack has an update on the situation over at NRO today. Check it out here.

Self-Serving Musings of Yet Another Susan Sontag Groupie

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Allen) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:19:00 EDT

What is it with female academics that turned them into gushing, trembling, insecure groupies whenever the late Susan Sontag showed up on their campus to give a lecture?

Last year, I posted on Stanford English professor Terry Castle's essay in the London Review of Books about Sontag's visits to her campus. Castle would go ga-ga when Sontag's plane landed, cutting the classes she was paid to teach and leaving her students in the lurch in order to become Sontag's slavish chauffeur/tour guide/restaurant check-picker-upper/amanuensis, all the while listening to Sontag diss the very professoriate to which Castle belonged. Frankly, my sympathies were with Sontag. Love her or hate her, Sontag was a professional who met her deadlines and kept her commitments--unlike the flighty, class-canceling Castle. Castle professed to be Deeply Hurt that despite all the fawning, Sontag had never visited her apartment, which was ostentatiously decorated with...books by Susan Sontag.

Now we have another English professor relating a bad case of the disillusioned goo-goos over a Sontag visit not long before Sontag's death of cancer last year: Dana Heller, writing in the Common Review. Unlike Castle, Heller evidently was, and seems still to be, so intimidated by--and enamored of--Sontag that she's too embarrassed to this day to reveal the name of the university where she teaches (Google and Amazon say it's Old Dominion in Norfolk, Va., which I guess is no Stanford, although it does seem to have a pretty good science program).

Heller got her knickers into such a mighty twist at the news that the great Sontag had deigned to put in an appearance at the "third-tier" (Heller�s words, not mine) Old Dominion that she sent her graduate students into a frenzy of idolatrous research into Sontag's entire literary oeuvre, apparently for fear that they would embarrass their prof by looking too rustic when the Great One graced their campus:

They had, to their credit, spent considerable time getting in shape for this event, bulking up on Sontag's early essays, spinning mental timelines of her major position shifts on culture and politics, and sculpting their own urbane opinions on moral and aesthetic matters that they knew would matter . . . to Sontag. I could have sworn that a few of them even began to imitate Sontag's heavy-handed style in their own fledgling essays and short stories, with predictably hilarious results. But who could fault them for succumbing to her influence?
'Hilarious'? I guess Heller doesn't think much of her own students.

In fact, the poor students, obviously egged on by the panic-stricken Heller, became so intimidated at the prospect of Sontag that by the time she actually got there, they were struck dumb and forgot all the clever apercus with which Heller had prepped them:

My well-rehearsed apprentices, perhaps shaken by the visible signs of her illness or unnerved by her evasive response to the research assistant, went uncharacteristically mute. When pointedly asked if they had any questions for Ms. Sontag, they simply froze, stared idly down at the table or across the room as if concentrating on some distant, shiny object, and clammed up. My heart sank. As their teacher, my worst fear was that Sontag would see them not as imbecilic, but, even worse, as boring. I searched their faces, but none would return eye contact.

So Heller decided to step into the breach and demonstrate to Sontag that even if her students were dummies, she was one smart prof:

Unable to stand it any longer, and cognizant of my duty to set the example, I took the floor. 'I have a question, actually.� Sontag fixed her famous blas' gaze upon me.
I began by introducing myself as the director of the humanities graduate program, gesturing around the table to indicate that the tongue-tied spectators were my charges. Sontag raised one eyebrow. 'Humanities?' she asked incredulously. 'What is that supposed to mean?' Right then, at least viscerally, I knew that I had been singled out as prey.
'What does it mean?' I returned, mentally noting the initial rush of adrenaline through my bloodstream. Well, it's an interdisciplinary liberal arts program that started back in the 70s, I blabbered, with no particular direction in mind, and with the vaguest sense that she had intended the question to be rhetorical anyway. But no matter, for I could see that I had already blown it with Sontag, which meant that I would have to come up with something pretty impressive if I hoped to salvage my credibility with her before appetizers were served....
Is it true, as witnesses would later swear, that as I rambled on about the revised reading lists for core courses, Sontag appeared to recoil slightly, as if fearful that she would be contaminated by my formidable tediousness, and that I, as if compensating for the distance she sought to place between us, leaned intently toward her?

Yes, it's probably true. So Heller decided it was time to demonstrate to Sontag exactly how clever and literarily savvy she was. She asked Sontag if she had taken the title for her "Alice in Bed"--a 1993 play about Alice James, the sister of Henry and William who spent many years fighting a debilitating form of cancer, just as Sontag had--from a 1983 novel by the same name by one Catherine Schine whose feminist-allegorical plot concerned a woman who was confined to her bed--get it?--but still managed to think great thoughts.

Here is what Sontag said--and dontcha just love her, even if she was something of a lefty?:

'I am stunned, utterly stunned that you would ask such a stupid question that no one who knew even the least bit about the life of Alice James would ask.'
There was something else on Sontag's mind. Urgently, she asked me, 'Do you know who Alice James is?'

And here is Sontag's final zinger, which apparently lives on in the campus lore at Old Dominion:

'If you�re so taken with her,' Sontag said, 'perhaps you should have invited Cathleen Schine to be the speaker at your festival.'

Hah! Here is what I see as Sontag's problem with Heller: she could spot from a mile away that she, Sontag, was a genuine intellectual, whereas Heller wasn't--and thus Heller felt the need to turn Old Dominion's grad students into her personal "apprenctices" and to show off in front of a university guest.

Heller is supposedly an English professor, but like many an English professor nowadays, she devotes precious little energy to the works of English literature that are supposed to be her specialty. Instead, like many of her confreres, she's into "cultural studies"--that amateurish mishmash of Marxism and pop sociology in which humanities scholars untrained in the social sciences make portentous, jargon-filled, and painfully obvious observations about TV shows, advertising, and other flotsam of the popular scene.

Here, according to Amazon, is Dana Heller's list of published works:

Her previous books are The Feminization of Quest Romance: Radical Departures, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture, and Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance.

And here is Amazon's description of Heller's latest, typically themed book, "The Selling of 9/11 : How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity":

From American flag decals and replicas of the World Trade Center to an emotionally fueled advertising campaign for The New York Times, the marketing and commodification of September 11 reveals the contradictory processes by which consumers in the U.S. (and around the world) communicate and construct national identity through cultural and symbolic goods.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall listening to Heller's description to Sontag of what she was passing off as study of the "humanities" at Old Dominion. No wonder Sontag radiated contempt. Sontag was, as Heller herself notes, "one of the last great defenders of high seriousness." Sontag got her education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, back in the old days, when studying the "humanities" meant steeping yourself in the great philosophers and the monumental works of literature.

Heller remains obviously stung to this day by Sontag's public humiliation of her, for she devotes a not-insubstantial portion of her essay to informing us how terrible Sontag looked (hey, she was only dying!) and speculating that Sontag really did steal the title of "Alice in Bed" from Schine, all of whose works, by the way, are out of print, unlike Sontag's. Yeah, maybe Sontag did.

My advice to humanities grad students at Old Dominion: transfer, transfer, transfer.

Johns Hopkins/TCR Update

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:35:00 EDT

A few weeks ago I posted an op-ed that Johns Hopkins senior Jered Ede wrote for Human Events. Here's an update on the controversy:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education just sent a press release on the subject. They are defending The Carrollton Record, helping them fight back against the blatant viewpoint discrimination they've faced at the hands of Johns Hopkins.

Click here for FIRE's press release and here for a glimpse of the cover art that we received some emails about after the initial post.

Strippers on Campus: Outrageous or Empowering?

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Human Events Online

A lacrosse player who hires a stripper is likely a rapist, but a women's group that hires a stripper is empowered. At least, that's the logic too often employed at many college campuses around the country.

Everyone now knows that Duke lacrosse players threw an off campus party, where (gasp!) they drank beer and hired a stripper. There has been substantial hand wringing about what this says about young men and women on campus today. It's a worthy topic to consider. But those concerned might turn their attention back on campus, where feminist exploits make Duke lacrosse parties look tame in comparison.

A recent event at my alma mater, Bucknell University, highlights the extent to which campus feminism has devolved into little more than pornography. On March 8, a host of Bucknell offices and organizations including the Bucknell Feminist Majority, Women's and Gender Studies Department, Center for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, and Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness spent $1,920 to bring a "celebration of whore culture" to campus.

The Sex Worker Art Show featured a variety of titillating performers. Take Cathy McPork, for example. Cathy pretended to be a "right-wing Christian with a death wish" before stripping to a red bra and slip dress, the costume of her alter ego Scarlot Harlot.

Other performers stripped down their duct taped covered nipples or nipple pasties and panties. One performer even ran through the crowd looking for her clothes to the Mission Impossible theme song. Then there was the large man who rapped about "ho-ass n-----s" while lubing himself with baby oil. Critics are still, well, confused about that last one.

Saving the best for last, the show rounded out with a strip tease performed on a trapeze (try saying that ten times fast). The last feat might be impressive on a purely logistical level but how the acrobatics benefits Bucknellians, women, or feminism is less clear.

I wish this behavior was out of the ordinary for Bucknell feminists, but after four years on campus, I know better. These are the same young ladies who sold "I Love Vagina" and "Does Your Vagina Pop its Collar?" T-shirts and plastered campus with posters asking "What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?" to promote the feminist play the Vagina Monologues. If the advertisements aren't enough to scare you away, be prepared to be greeted by an empowered woman shouting "c--t" over and over again on stage once the performance begins.

The show doesn't end at Bucknell. Professors on the west coast don't let sex workers have all the fun- they get in on the action themselves. University of Southern California professor (of Women's Studies, of course) Diana York Blaine recently posted top-less pictures of herself online. When a NBC affiliate reached the school for comment, they were met not with outrage or embarrassment, but with a web policy defending Dr. Blaine's rights to "free speech" and "academic freedom" that "must be protected in a university environment." The school was also quick to remind NBC that it is not accountable for the content of the site.

Somewhere along the line an act of unprofessional exhibitionism (that would get Blaine fired from most jobs) became "academic freedom" that USC has no control or ability even to rhetorically condemn.

But what do women get from this hyper sexualization of feminism? Girls following in the footsteps of Dr. Blaine and Bucknell feminists are more likely to get an STD and a broken heart than they are to be empowered or liberated. Like it or not, women are more vulnerable to the negative consequences of sex. It's odd then that sexually explicit behavior becomes the rallying point of campus feminism, something to be admired and emulated.

Feminists may want to adopt the worst of traditional male behavior, but the consequences are different for women. Do feminists honestly think men gained power and respect by shouting sexual epithets and hanging out with hookers? This sort of primal behavior does nothing to advance women's rights. Instead, it does women a disservice by leading them down a dangerous path of sexual exploits and low moral standards-- and the true feminists on campus should demand better.

Allison Kasic is Director of Campus Outreach at Independent Women's Forum.