Wendy McElroy's "The Bill of Intellectual Rights" is a smoking indictment of gender feminism's role in producing the disrespectful, anti-intellectual climate of modern America. According to a recent study by Public Agenda Online, 80% of Americans believe that "lack of respect" is a serious social problem (Cornel, you are not alone!). McElroy's column argues that the baseline hostility of gender feminism--which assumes men to be oppressors and assumes women to be oppressed--has done a great deal of damage to both the relations between the sexes and our collective understanding of what civil behavior is and why it matters. Citing anti-woman backlash such as the Men's Rights Movement and books by alienated feminist insiders Phyllis Chesler and Tammy Bruce (former president of L.A. NOW), McElroy writes that the "fractiousness [within and about feminism] might be written off as distracting gossip were it not for the fact that slander has become standard methodology for many discussions that affect social policy: domestic violence, rape, abortion, sexual harassment. The methodology of malice has become a barrier to progress that must be addressed." The rest of her column consists of a guide to individual etiquette in the age of PC groupthink. Read it, and read the links she provides, too. Among other things, you will learn about her own experience of being libelled by malcontents at NOW.

But then think a bit harder about McElroy's "Bill of Intellectual Rights," and ask yourself just when they will and will not work. As rules for respectful engagement, honest inquiry, and dignified refusal, McElroy's Bill of Intellectual Rights will work well in certain contexts: open, public debate among equals; private discussion among friends or acquaintances; minor imbroglia among office mates. But it won't work worth a damn in school--the very place where so much of this "methodology of malice" is taught, nurtured, sustained, and enforced through the power imbalances between teachers and students. These imbalances work both ways--if professors hold their students' grades in a moral vise, students can, and do, ruin entire careers with a few well-chosen accusations.

To get down to specifics: What about when the person practicing fractious, malicious feminism is your teacher? What if your grade depends, say, on your willingness to parrot your professor's ideological beliefs and even misinformation? What if disagreeing, however respectfully, with your professor makes you wrong? And what if the content of the course, not just its slant, is the problem? What if, for example, a course in women's studies, or feminist theory, or women's literature, is more concerned with imposing on students a certain way of looking at women's issues, than with exposing students to a range of ways women may be understood and then letting the students themselves choose the form of reasoning that works best for them? This happens all the time. I'd go so far as to say it is the norm. You won't find Christina Hoff Sommers on a gender studies syllabus. But you'll find a lot of Judith Butler and Catherine MacKinnon. You won't hear women are doing well these days. But you will hear that the situation is bad, very bad, that it has always been bad, and that with men around it isn't likely to get better anytime soon. I exaggerate--but not much.

It's fashionable now for humanist professors to make their politics, and even personal information such as their sexual preferences, very visible to their students. It's the rare teacher who can prevent that kind of self-disclosure from shutting down student thought by putting enormous pressure on students to conform to the teacher's positions. Those who flatter themselves that they produce openness in their classrooms by disclosing their histories of abuse or by coming out or by endlessly rattling off pat putdowns of men, or Republicans, or Christians flatter themselves indeed. A more likely scenario: they mistake the nervous toadying of students who find they are being graded by an ideologue for a truly progressive classroom dynamic.

Conversely, what if the person practicing fractious, malicious feminism is a student? Daphne Patai's Heterophobia is a chilling account of the way sexual harassment charges can be wielded by disgruntled students (usually women, but not always) against professors (usually men, but not always, as the cases of Jane Gallop and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese show all too clearly). But Patai only covers the extreme cases in what is a deeply entrenched culture of punitive expectation among students, one that tells them it is not only okay--but *good*--to go after teachers who upset or discomfit them. Students have an enormous policing power over their professors these days; it isn't widely acknowledged or discussed, but it should be. Only then will we begin to register the extent to which fear of reprisal inhibits teachers from teaching, and only then will we also be able to register the ways teachers have been punished, formally and informally, by sanction and through slander, for doing their jobs the best way they know how to do them.
All of which is to say that we need a lot more than an Intellectual Bill of Rights to put us right as a culture. We could start by making a serious, dedicated study of the place of thought control in academe. We could identify its manifestations in everything from mandatory sensitivity workshops to the professor who grades a student down for not using "gender-neutral language." And we could begin an open, honest, national dialogue about the role of the university in civic life, one that seeks to "problematize" the "politicization" of the classroom--something so many teachers are so very proud of--by helping students, teachers, parents, and the public see how closely tied that "politicization" is to a profoundly anti-intellectual, frequently hostile stance toward certain groups, certain beliefs, and ultimately to education itself.