Camille Paglia Can’t Say That
For more than 30 years, the critic Camille Paglia has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Now a faction of art-school censors wants her fired for sharing wrong opinions on matters of sex, gender identity, and sexual assault.
“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” an online petition declares. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” Regardless, the students behind the petition want her banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas “are not merely ‘controversial,’ they are dangerous.”
Others believe that the student activists are trying to set a dangerous precedent that would undermine freedom of expression and free academic inquiry. “The effort to remove her for expressing her *opinions* strikes me as political correctness run amuck,” a faculty member emailed. “Instead of discussing and debating, they attempt to shame and destroy. This is pure tribalism. It is exactly what Donald Trump does when he encounters something he doesn’t like.” Most at the institution seem to hold positions somewhere in between.
[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 about to create it by merging. 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, . 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.”
