Read: A violent attack on free speech at Middlebury

Camille Paglia, who identifies as transgender, joined the University of the Arts in 1984 when older institutions were merging in order to create it. While UArts no longer awards tenure, Paglia is among a few long-serving faculty members grandfathered into a prior system. According to detractors, “Paglia has been teaching at UArts for many years, and has only become more controversial over time.” In fact, she has always been controversial.

In Paglia’s first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, she describes sex and nature as “brutal, daemonic” forces, “criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the causes of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes,” and roots sex differences in biology. Seven publishers rejected the book before Yale University Press bought it in 1990; Sexual Personae was then savaged by feminist critics on the way to becoming an unexpected, 700-page best seller. And it sparked a national debate about art, history, gender, ideas that offend, free inquiry, and political correctness.

The fight over Sexual Personae was especially vicious at Connecticut College, where a student suggested adding the book to the institution’s 1992 summer-reading list. Some professors were so outraged that they tried to block its inclusion.

“During meetings with the committee, professors denounced the work as ‘trash’ and compared it to Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’” the Hartford Courant reported. In the campus newspaper, the head of the women’s-studies program opined, “Whenever we think about freedom of expression, we need to think also about the damage that certain kinds of speech can do. Let’s not be fooled by packaging into mistaking any hate-speech or sexist or racist doctrine for ideas.”

Read: Camille Paglia doesn’t understand how civilizations commit suicide

But Claire L. Gaudiani, the president of the college, countered, “It is a bizarre idea to think that by placing a book on a reading list that an academic community is endorsing any book as a community. For those who take offense at the various passages is understandable, but we cannot let that influence the book’s selection.”

Sexual Personae stayed on the list.

The student who originally proposed it commented at the time, “I got angry because I was seeing a great deal of intolerance that I would have sworn a few months ago did not exist at Connecticut College. I fear a little bit for the future of the reading program with people here who might try to stifle the diversity of ideas.”

As incoming freshmen arrived for the fall semester, the controversy was still simmering, according to an account published in August 1992 in The New York Times:

Students interviewed on campus said they were more motivated to read the book because the controversy has provoked so much discussion. “When someone tells you not to read something, I suppose that makes you all the more curious to see what all the fuss is about,” said one incoming freshman woman. “I agreed with some things in the book and disagree with others, but I certainly think I am capable of understanding it and discussing its meaning. It’s pretty condescending for a professor to think that freshmen aren’t capable of that …” The president of the student government, Colleen Shanley, added: “Now that I’ve started reading the book, I can’t see why people have been opposed to it. But I feel that it’s when people don’t talk about something that it can become really dangerous. I may not agree with the book’s content, but we should not be removing books from reading lists because don’t agree with them.”

In The Washington Post, the columnist Nat Hentoff argued that “the students in particular saved the book––and the intellectual credibility––of Connecticut College,” endorsing the question posed by one among them: “What is more dangerous––to talk about ideas in the open, or to pretend they do not exist? If we cannot discuss controversial ideas here, where can we have open-minded debate?”