Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia on the fight for student liberties | VIEWPOINT — Transcript

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1. 0:00Christina: It's amazing, and it's a kind of axis of intolerance with deans, and fanatical
2. 0:08young feminists, and the United States government.
3. 0:12Because the Department of Education has sent this directive to all the schools, that they
4. 0:16have to clamp down on harassers, and they've defined it so broadly that it includes if
5. 0:24you overhear someone telling an off-color joke, you can bring them up on charges of
6. 0:28harassment.
7. 0:29So we have this little reign of terror, this hyper puritanism.
8. 0:31It's as though George Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League has occupied feminism.
9. 0:37Camille: It's truly Stalinist, absolutely.
10. 0:38Now I take a very extreme view which is that colleges and universities should never interfere
11. 0:45in any way with the social lives of the students.
12. 0:48It's up to the students to regulate themselves.
13. 0:50If a crime is truly committed, it must go to the police, so a lot of these problems
14. 0:54with stuff if universities would confine themselves to education and not to the surveillance of
15. 1:00student's private lives, now our generation won these freedoms.
16. 1:05It was in loco parentis when we arrived in college.
17. 1:07Christina: Yes, parietal hours.
18. 1:09Camille: And men wouldn't be allowed in your room, and then if they were there...this was
19. 1:14right before I got to college...but you had to have your feet on the ground at one time.
20. 1:19They'd look through your door.
21. 1:20Christina: People managed to do things.
22. 1:22Camille: In 1964, when I arrived in college our women's dorm, the girls had to sign in
23. 1:28at 11:00 o'clock at night whereas the men could run free all night long.
24. 1:31So we are the ones who demanded that the authority figures get out of our sex lives.
25. 1:36Christina: And we wanted to be as free and as wild as the boys.
26. 1:39Camille: Yes, and they said to us, "No, the world is dangerous.
27. 1:42We need to protect you from rape," and what we said was, "Give us the freedom to risk
28. 1:47rape."
29. 1:48These are the freedoms that we won, and now this younger generation of girls want the
30. 1:52parental figures back in.
31. 1:53It is deeply Stalinist.
32. 1:56It is deeply infantilizing.
33. 1:57It's deeply reactionary.
34. 1:58It has nothing to do with feminism.
35. 2:01Christina: It's fainting couch.
36. 2:02Camille: This is a retreat.