BY AMANDA WINTERS

In print | Published April 10, 2008

In my Op-Ed poem of last week, I suggested that academically acquired relativism led several students to decline to protest the Women’s Studies Department’s sponsorship of Wendy Shalit’s lecture. As relative tendencies could politically paralyze those inclined to them, I feel compelled to address these issues in prose. “Relativism” is “the doctrine that knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to culture, society or historical context.” This generally means that you can apply standards to your own culture, society and historical period in time, but not to others.

The relativist rationales presented consisted largely in the idea that there was no standard by which we could judge Shalit’s work independent of our ideological disagreements with her. I disagree, for the following reasons. By sponsoring her lecture, the department claimed that the event was worthy of our attention insofar as it would spark productive dialogue among the audience. The problem is that Shalit’s lecture had little productive potential. In any productive dialogue, all participants must: 1) agree to a set of shared ground rules, and 2) act honestly and in good faith according to those rules. As Shalit makes claims that she presents as objectively verifiable, that is, grounded in “research,” she has already opted in to the ground rules of academic discourse. However, her work violates the rules of this discourse.

My point is that we are fully justified in judging her work by academic standards, and it’s wrong for a department to give its endorsement to any event, the only possible outcome of which can be anger, frustration and discomfort. Though I did not attend in part for this very reason, all accounts so far indicate that this was indeed what happened. That’s unfortunate, since I know people on all sides of the issue who really wanted to have “an open and honest discussion of [modesty and] the campus hookup culture,” as the event was advertised. Everyone would have been better served if the sponsoring offices had taken more than a cursory look and perhaps suggested that the organizers bring someone representing this viewpoint whose case was more compelling. My fear is that the motive behind bringing her to campus wasn’t really to have such a discussion, but to bring someone who would expound radical conservative dogma as objective truth, thereby offending people and generating a controversy from which the organizer(s) could claim victim status.

Regardless, students were not comfortable asking the department to apply any standards to Shalit’s work, and I think overcaution stemming from a misunderstanding of postmodern theory is a big part of the reason why. If we are afraid to use the skills we have acquired, because we fear either falling short of Ultimate Truth or not being able to read meaning accurately enough outside our own cultural semantics, then the entire endeavor has been in vain. Ironically, people like Wendy Shalit have no qualms about making claims to objective truth, even completely unqualified claims not contingent on empirical evidence. If we don’t critically evaluate these claims, then the media and the publishing houses, who are not beholden to these standards and have little reason to uphold them, will determine their legitimacy for us. Shalit has already had far more than her fair share of air-time for precisely this reason.

Anyone not engaging in flagrant hate speech may speak at Swarthmore. But we don’t do anybody any favors by rolling out the red carpet of academic endorsement before deciding critically whether or not it is merited. It diminishes the credibility of the institution, gives the speaker unwarranted legitimacy, and is unfair to busy students who expect speakers to come to the podium with credible evidence for them to evaluate. In the past departments have been very trusting that students will bring quality speakers and not demagogues thinly veiled in the pretension of “research.” In this case trust has been abused, and I strongly urge all departments to be more careful about granting sponsorship in the future.

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