Ed Driscoll calls attention to the latest campus appearance by Heather Mac Donald, who spoke at Colgate University ($72,585 a year, including room and board) where she was accosted by disruptive protesters.

Mac Donald, who has degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Stanford, was at Colgate to speak about her most recent book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. It seems, however, that the protesters wanted to talk about rape. Mac Donald has written critically about the mythical “epidemic” of campus rape, pointing out the fraudulence of the claim that 1-in-5 female college students become victims of rape during their undergraduate years. This widely cited statistic is a wild exaggeration, based on misleading surveys (rather than actual reports of assaults), and simply will not withstand critical scrutiny. Attempts to speak factually about this issue, however, are rendered impossible by the emotional investment that activists have made in a certain set of assumptions about “rape culture.” Consider this scene at Colgate:

Perhaps the most tense moment of the evening took place when a woman took the mic to ask about campus rape culture . . .

“In 2008 you wrote an article called ‘The Campus Rape Myth’ where you decided to claim that rape could be attributed to ‘sluttish behavior’ and that it’s women’s fault for getting drunk,” the question began amid applause, cheers and moans of shock from the surrounding audience, mostly students dressed head to toe in black to protest the scholar’s visit and views.

“You also said in a 2019 interview with the Hoover Institution that ‘all college-aged women can avoid 100 percent of so-called campus rape,’” Mac Donald’s questioner continued in an impassioned tone before dropping her bombshell:

“As someone who has been assaulted on this campus, do you believe that I am at fault?!”

Of course, this heckler deliberately distorted Mac Donald’s argument, but the point is she plays the “My Experience” Card. Obviously, it’s absurd to expect Heather Mac Donald to know anything about this person’s experience, and thus demand that Mac Donald pass judgment on her case. This declaration — “I am a victim of assault” — is intended as a trump card, to silence dissent and end discussion.

THIS IS NOT HOW ARGUMENTS WORK.

A single personal anecdote does not refute a general statement.

What Heather Mac Donald is talking about is, first of all, the prevalence of rape — how often does it happen on college campuses? Her contention is that the “1-in-5” claim is a gross exaggeration, and this cannot be refuted by one person saying, “I am a victim of sexual assault.” Mac Donald’s second contention, made in her 2008 article “The Campus Rape Myth,” is that claims of an “epidemic” of sexual assault are rooted in a “booze-fueled hookup culture.” That is to say, in a climate where drunkenness and promiscuity are tolerated, many college girls will have sexual encounters that they subsequently regret. The collective sense of shame and resentment emerging from this “hookup culture” has been harnessed by activists to justify a variety of programs and policies, based on exaggerated claims about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus.

In her 2008, Mac Donald easily debunked the “1-in-5” statistic, and she replicated that debunking in her appearance at Colgate:

“Let’s put that number in perspective,” she said. “… Our most violent city, Detroit, when you look at all four of the FBI’s violent index felonies — that includes murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — all four of those combined gets you a violent felony rate of 2 percent. So 20 to 25 percent [of campus rape victims] is a catastrophe.”

She continued that such a “sexual holocaust,” if it were really going on, would prompt a stampede of women away from college campuses, yet the opposite is true, females are now the majority on them.

Exactly so. Feminists have fostered an irrational fear based on bogus statistics, claiming that rape is more common on university campuses than in America’s most crime-ridden inner cities. When the falsehood of these claims is demonstrated, activists respond with hysterical outbursts intended to silence the voices of truth-telling critics. No intelligent person could possibly believe that women are more endangered on the Colgate campus in tranquil Madison County, N.Y., than in the slums of Detroit, Baltimore, or St. Louis, and yet that is what the “1-in-5” statistic implies.

College students have lost the ability to think. The emotional protests at elite schools like Colgate show that students are incapable of weighing evidence and discerning between truth and fiction. Instead of making arguments based on facts and logic, students can only chant slogans and engage in fascist-style bullying tactics to silence opponents.

Given this proof that irrationality has become common on university campuses, is anyone surprised that Bernie Sanders gets his highest level of support among college students and recent graduates?









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