Rhodes Professor gets Logical, Left Attacks Her

via Wall Street Journal

Usually, when junior professors publish scholarly articles, they are lucky to elicit more than a yawn. But last week the philosophical musings of Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., provoked a spasm of fury.

Ms. Tuvel’s paper, published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, takes on one of the weakest points of the left’s mania for identity politics. Ms. Tuvel asks why society is increasingly willing to embrace people who identify as “transgender,” even as it rejects those who identify as “transracial.” Why laud Caitlyn Jenner while vilifying Rachel Dolezal ?

Instead of taking on Ms. Tuvel’s arguments, the professoriate attacked her for asking questions to begin with. More than 500 academics signed a letter denouncing the paper. One of their main complaints was that Ms. Tuvel didn’t lace it with references to scholars “who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color).” Absent such citations, they said, her paper “painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege.”

Some of Ms. Tuvel’s foes are employing the fashionable trope that criticism is a form of violence. On Twitter , a student at the University of California, San Francisco accused Ms. Tuvel of “epistemic violence.” The hundreds of academics who signed the petition asserted it was “dangerous” for Hypatia to leave the article up, given that “its continued availability causes further harm.”

This liberal pile-on has rattled Ms. Tuvel, who burst into tears before declining my request for an interview. She fears, legitimately, that she’ll be blacklisted in academia.