by Meghan Daum
I’ll say it again: I believed Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about what happened between her and Kavanaugh when they were in high school. But this is my personal belief, based on nothing more than gut feeling, that things transpired more or less as Ford described them and that Kavanaugh was too drunk at the time to remember. There is a difference between believing and knowing. All the truth digging in the world will not change the fact that all kinds of people misrepresent, misremember, misinterpret, and willfully or unwillfully make misleading statements for all kinds of reasons. In fact, Mark Judge, whom Ford said was in the room, told the FBI that he did not recall the party and denied witnessing the alleged assault.
My list of “raise your hand” questions will surely set some teeth on edge. It’s difficult to talk about things like women tricking men into getting them pregnant, not least of all because it makes you sound like a part of the men’s rights movement—a loosely knit and often self-defeating enterprise that overrides legitimate grievances (about, say, the family court system) with ambient misogyny and conspiracy theories. It can also be a slippery slope to appearing overly sympathetic with so-called incels, a similarly incoherent, self-defeating, and occasionally dangerous subculture of men who hate women because they can’t find any who will have sex with them.
But the thing about growing older is that, as time goes on, you run into more and more people. That means you bear witness to the different forms of havoc human beings can wreak. When I was in my twenties, just hearing a phrase like “tricking men” would have made me assume it was coming from a woman-hating kook. The phrase does sound antiquated, after all. But by now, I’ve seen all kinds of people attempt all manner of tricks, sometimes for their own amusement and sometimes because they’re legitimately disturbed. I know men who, amid contentious divorce proceedings, have been accused, preposterously, of spousal and child abuse. I know women who are so skilled in the dark art of gaslighting that the targets of their mind games, be they boyfriends or BFFs, don’t stand a chance. Once, while working with high school students, I overheard some girls joking to one another about how they were going to go out that night and “hit on older guys who don’t know we’re underage and later be, like, ‘Dude, you’re a pedophile.’ ”
I decided to give the girls the benefit of the doubt and assume they were just goofing around, condemning misogynist stereotypes about young women as jailbait by ironically reclaiming those stereotypes. Along the way, I tried to think like a good feminist and consider that patriarchal societies foster or even force this kind of manipulative female behavior because it’s often the only power available to women. But that’s an excuse and a poor one. Some women act abominably because some people act abominably. Both sexes contain multitudes.
We are all, as George Carlin suggested, incorrigible, insufferable, equally defective earthlings. Deal with it.
CHAPTER 5 What Hath One Lecture Wrought!: Trouble on Campus
Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a sophomore at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, student activists made national headlines when they seized control of the college’s main administration building and disrupted campus life for several days. The inciting incident was an offhand comment made by New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a legendary liberal and champion of women and minorities (that was the phrase back then, “women and minorities”) who had come to campus to receive an honorary title called the Eleanor Roosevelt Chair. Moynihan gave a lecture in conjunction with the award and spoke with students, staff, and community members at a reception afterward. It was here that many witnessed him making a remark to a woman named Folami Gray. The remark was perceived by at least a few people, including Gray herself, as racist.
This was well before the days of ubiquitous recording devices; there’s never been complete consensus on what was actually said and what was meant by it. Most reports, however, suggest that Gray, who directed a local youth organization and was of Jamaican descent, challenged a statement Moynihan had made about America being “a model of ethnic cooperation.” At this, Moynihan is said to have told Gray something to the effect of “if you don’t like it here, why don’t you pack your bags and go back to where you came from?”
Moynihan then turned to a student, who, perhaps in an effort to diffuse the tension, asked if he was a senior senator. Gray interjected and said, “He’s a senior racist!”
This was decades before the age of memes, but there’s no telling what sort of viral load a phrase like “senior racist” could carry today. (You can imagine a GIF of Betty White shaking her finger in the spirit of “you’re not calling me a senior racist!”) Nor were we anywhere near the era of clickbait headlines like “Aging White Male Senator Insults Woman of Color at College Wine and Cheese Reception and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!”
Here’s what did happen next. A group emerged that called itself the Coalition of Concerned Students. The coalition held a series of meetings over two weeks that included representatives from a variety of campus political and social organizations (the Black Students’ Union and the Vassar Jewish Union, among them). There was no specific agenda initially. As one leader told the student newspaper, The Miscellany News, “We were trying to form a unity between student groups on campus to seek some solidarity. We thought that as a united group, we might be able to get a little more action out of the administration on concerns that each of the individual groups had been voicing to no avail for weeks, for months, for years.”
Early in the morning of the first day of demonstrations, students began blocking doors to the college’s administration building, a large multiuse building called “Main,” which stands at the end of the campus’s main driveway. They barred entrance to all but other protesters and those who lived in the building’s dormitory area. The next day, hundreds of students had joined in the protest. Classes were canceled as people rallied outside Main, chanting, playing bongos, and, in my memory, holding up at least one empty chair in reference to “de-chairing Moynihan.”
According to the Miscellany News, the protesters told the college president, Frances Ferguson, she had two days to respond to their demand that Moynihan be removed from the chair. (Moynihan, for his part, said he had no recollection of the incident with Gray, though he did correct the record and say he had not talked in his lecture about “a model of ethnic cooperation” but had said that “the United States of America provides a model of a reasonably successful multi-ethnic society.”)
By this time, national news outlets were covering the controversy, including the New York Times and CNN. Moynihan finally relinquished the chair and returned the $1,000 that had come with it. The New York Times appeared to take some delight in relaying highlights from his letter to Ferguson:
“Heavens, what hath one lecture wrought! . . . I know you won’t approve of this, and I’m sure Eleanor Roosevelt would not have done, but let me do so anyway. The times, unhappily, have changed . . . [I can] scarce believe the present ruckus . . . [and do] not want to prolong it.’’
The protesters, for their part, were happy to prolong the ruckus. They issued the president a list of further demands that hit upon a range of social justice issues, from divesting in South Africa to establishing a black student center to calls for total transparency about how tuition dollars are allocated. They also wanted a college rabbi, an intercultural center, and better wheelchair access throughout the campus.
By now, it might not come as a surprise to you that I thought the protests were mostly theater. As such, I mostly carried on about my business, which frankly was what most students did. (Like many campus protests today, it was a small but loud minority of students that led the revolt; most of us just wanted to go to class so as not to squander our tuition dollars.) I was dimly aware of the demands and thought they seemed not unreasonable, but mostly I was struck—even surprised—by the passion of the students. As with many urbane, East Coast enclaves of privilege, the social temperature of Vassar ran decidedly cool. It was important to
seem smart, but even more so, it was important to not appear to get too excited or upset about anything. This wasn’t so much about not caring, but about making clear that you recognized the limitations of caring even while in the process of caring. (This applied to everything from getting good grades to doing well in sports to getting a boyfriend or girlfriend, where the implicit idea was that if any of the above required strenuous effort, it was perhaps a sign that there were better ways you could be spending your time.)
It’s not that I was indifferent to activism. A year earlier, I had joined dozens of my classmates as we boarded buses to Washington, D.C., to march in an abortion-rights rally organized by the National Organization for Women. There were an estimated 600,000 marchers that day, and I remember how good it felt to stand with my friends in our matching college sweatshirts shouting “Never again!” and “My body, my choice!”
For some reason I could not fully board the bus of the Moynihan protest. Maybe it was because the student protests seemed like such a departure from the coolness posture, but I couldn’t get past the feeling they were at least partly performance art.
That’s not to say those involved were consciously performing. On the contrary, they had genuine and long-standing gripes about how the school was run and had had the good strategic sense to seize this opportunity to get those gripes heard. I just couldn’t shake the perception that they weren’t protesting so much as doing impersonations of protesters. I felt guilty about feeling that way even at the time, and I’m still ashamed to admit it now, but that’s where my head was. For some reason, I saw just about everything through the lens of artifice back then. The guy playing guitar in the dormitory stairwell wasn’t reveling in the joy of music but Playing the Part of the Guy Who Played Guitar in the Stairwell. The people who returned from junior year abroad experiences in the Middle East wearing those black-and-white-checkered Palestinian scarfs known as kaffiyehs weren’t interested in freeing Palestine, as they would be today, but rather just signaling that they’d been someplace exotic. In some cases, “exotic” meant the East Village in New York City, where you could buy kaffiyehs from street vendors, along with sunglasses and “I Love New York” kitchen magnets. I know because that’s where I bought my kaffiyeh, which I wore with a vintage leather car coat in an effort to prove to myself that I wasn’t just a bland girl from the suburbs. All this is to say that the reason I felt like everyone was impersonating a college student more than actually being one was because I was impersonating a college student more than actually being one.
* * *
Save my years for graduate school and then later as an instructor at Columbia (which, despite having a proper campus, has always felt to me like an extension of the city), I would not spend significant time on a traditional college campus again until the earliest days of the Trump era, when I would go to the University of Iowa for a teaching stint. January of 2017 was a strange time to arrive in a liberal university town in a red heartland state. But that is where I found myself, teaching nonfiction writing to graduate students in Iowa City.
This was a semester-long gig that I had accepted nearly a year earlier, a time that, once I arrived in Iowa, felt like another historical period altogether. Back in New York, as I’d prepared for my trip, the open wound of the November election made the 2016 holidays feel like a party no one was really in the mood to attend. Come Inauguration Day, we would all effectively report to prison for a minimum four-year sentence. Come the New Year, I would get in my car with my dog and drive to Iowa City. By then, any excitement I’d had about the job had given way to a hazy sense of foreboding. Teaching sensitive, young people was challenging even in non-apocalyptic times. This might all prove to be too much.
I drove through sleet and snow on Interstate 80 for two days until I arrived to a flat, frozen land that wouldn’t thaw until just before my return in the spring. During my months in Iowa, I often felt like I was walking through fog so thick I could see little more than my hand in front of my face. The world—not just Iowa, but the whole world, at least the whole country—was a place utterly without perspective. There was no depth of field, no sense of context. Everyone seemed to be reacting to every piece of news like a toddler reacting to the needle stick of an immunization; so unprecedented was this particular pain sensation, so uncertain was the knowledge that it was ever going to end, that it could be met only by screams of terror. Everyone, no matter their station in life, was enraged, scared, confused, paranoid, despondent—at least if they were liberals, which can be said of most people in Iowa City. (The town, which has a population of around 75,000, went solidly for Hillary Clinton; the state itself favored Trump by almost ten percentage points.)
* * *
By the time I got to Iowa, I’d been observing the college political scene for a few years, both as an instructor and as a follower of endless news stories about the ideological warfare happening mostly on liberal arts campuses. In trying to distill my observations into written words, I always found myself in what ultimately amounted to an endless game of Whac-a-Mole. Every time I sat down to document the latest uprising at an institution of higher learning, the story would be eclipsed by a yet more egregious example of late-adolescent leftist sanctimony run amok. More frustratingly, every time I thought I’d seen the worst of it, I saw something better. By which I mean I saw something that suggested the situation was better than I’d thought it was. Or at least getting better. Or at least not becoming measurably worse. But then something ridiculous would happen all over again—like Harvard law students calling for a law professor and faculty dean to resign (and publicly apologize) in February 2019 because the professor had joined Harvey Weinstein’s defense team and this was “trauma-inducing”—and I’d be back to where I started. (For what it’s worth, in May, Harvard acquiesced somewhat to students and announced that the professor would leave his position as a faculty dean, though he would remain on the faculty.)
Maybe it’s best put this way. When it comes to the American college campus, the climate is at once not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be and far worse than you could ever believe. The “snowflake” reports we’ve seen for the last several years in the news and on social media—(“Colleges Offering ‘Safe Space’ for Naps,” “U. Kansas resident advisor warned against ‘very masculine’ gorilla image in jungle-themed decor”)—have done a masterful job of cherry-picking the most egregious displays of collegiate radicalism, but they never tell the whole story. They tell the parts that are fun to laugh about. They tell the parts that can be boiled down to a 140-character tweet, a clickbait headline on Google News, an indignant post from your Facebook friend who didn’t bother to get all or even most of the facts. No doubt you’re familiar with the greatest hits of the last few years: the meltdowns over offensive Halloween costumes (or, really, just the idea of offensive Halloween costumes) at Yale, the Oberlin students who complained that the dining hall sushi was culturally insensitive, the academic journal that deemed Starbucks’s pumpkin-spiced lattes a symbol of white privilege.
Aficionados of this genre of news might find themselves regular readers of digital sites like Campus Reform and Inside Higher Ed. Here they can choose from any number of varieties of the low-hanging fruit that have come to represent student activism and “PC culture.” They can hear about intersectional theory and inclusion and privilege (this is not necessarily the same as learning or understanding what these things actually mean). They can learn just enough about trigger warnings and safe spaces to make them grouse about the aforementioned “special snowflakes” and the abject entitlement and fragility of “all millennials” without realizing that the stories they keep hearing represent but a tiny fraction of an enormous generational cohort.
The most recent Pew Research data shows that millennials, who are usually defined as those born between 1981 and 1996, are estimated to now number around 71 million (this is according to the latest census data for which population estimates are available). By contrast, there are now around 74 mi
llion baby boomers (at their peak population, in 1999, there were nearly 79 million of them) and a paltry 65.8 million Gen Xers (that’s our peak, by the way). In 2017, some 20 million people could count themselves as college students, meaning they were enrolled in some kind of institution of higher learning.
The ones yelling and picketing and pulling fire alarms when someone with digressive views comes to speak on campus are actually but a fraction of those who fall under the rubric of “college student.” Most students, by and large, are too busy studying and working multiple jobs and generally trying to pull themselves up the socioeconomic ladder to get involved in political or social activism. The “social justice warriors,” or SJWs, we hear about on the news are a small but obstreperous minority.
Still, even at a place like the University of Iowa, a public institution whose 33,000 students lean toward football and fraternities more than gender theory and Marxism, there are clusters of leftist activism in just about every direction. One spring evening in late April of 2017, I sat on the grass outside the Old Capitol building on campus watching a Take Back the Night rally. Take Back the Night is a nonprofit organization and also a sort of umbrella term for a type of protest event where survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse gather in solidarity and often publicly share their stories. I remember Take Back the Night rallies from my own college days; some of my friends had attended and said they were deeply affected by the experience. A few who were survivors of trauma said that the gatherings had given them the much-needed feeling that they weren’t alone.
