Where’d you go, conservative defenders of free speech and academic inquiry? Just a few days ago, you were championing a college student who said he’d been removed from class for expressing skepticism over some very dubious sexual assault statistics. But now that the story has taken a turn, you’ve grown so quiet. Last week, Reed College became the subject of intense scrutiny when 19 year-old freshman Jeremiah True went public with his claim that he’d been banished from the “conference” portion of a Humanities 110 lecture-seminar class for his controversial views on rape culture, and the frequently trotted out statistic that one in five college women experience sexual assault. True retorted by launching a Change.org petition for his reinstatement, and penning an eight-page letter to the faculty in which he said his professor’s decision represented an “infringement upon my academic freedom.”
