How do you regard having your work imposed on a university lecturer in the name of gender equality?

JB: I am not in favor of my work being imposed by quotas. … Suggestions can be made about how to expand perspectives on gender, or which texts might be useful, but the final judgment has to be made by the faculty member. I am opposed to imposing specific texts and authors on faculty. I would myself reject any such attempt on the part of the administration, no matter the social goals that they seek to achieve through that method. The method is wrong, and the goals cannot be achieved through coercion.

You have written several texts on academic freedom. Why is academic freedom important?

JB: Academic freedom is the protection that faculty have against administrative or state intervention in our research activities, the curricula for our courses, and our academic point of view. … Of course, we can, and ought to be, challenged when our work demonstrates prejudice, bias, or consequential blind-spots. But that has to happen through conversation and public dialogue. If it is imposed by a university authority, then that authority is augmented, and we expand the power of the administration to control what we teach. What happens if the administration becomes a fascist one? Or what if it decides to ban feminist perspectives from the classroom? If we give that power away, we suffer its consequences.

If not gender quotas, how should we work to achieve greater gender equality in our universities?

JB: Quotas are a short-cut, and they cannot achieve the social justice goal. Social justice is achieved through freedom, and any concept of social justice that denies freedom denies justice itself. We know this from the struggle against censorship. Equality and Freedom are equally important: freedom without equality is unjust; but so too is equality without freedom. Let us hold in mind that complexity as we proceed.

The “structural oppression” model is false, by the way. Homosexual male harassment is more prevalent than the percent gay men in the population would imply, suggesting that gay men harass men more often than straight men harass women. The obvious explanation for gender differences in harassment has always been that men constitute 80% of sexual harassers for the same reason they constitute 83% of arsonists, 81% of car thieves, and 85% of burglars. Since most men are straight, most victims are women; when the men happen to be gay, they victimize men. Men probably get victimized disproportionately often compared to the straight/gay ratio because society views harassing women as horrible but harassing men as funny. If this theory is right then it’s men who are the structural victims, which means it’s your harassment that doesn’t count and you’re the ones who shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it. The “it only matters if it’s structural” game isn’t so much fun now, is it?