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On October 7th, I wrote an opinion piece asking a simple question: Why is Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education (SLE) inviting a dominatrix to give advice to students and promote her book—which includes stories about poisoning coworker’s dads and then having sex with them, pineapple-sized dildos, and suicide kinks?
The Daily published an opinion a week later defending Newell and SLE, followed by a headline news piece painting the dominatrix and SLE as victims of malicious attacks. Both articles are so egregious, so ahistorical, so crude, that I feel compelled to address the articles’ lack of journalistic integrity—so bad they broke their own code of conduct.
In her opinion piece, Huang confidently asserts that I misunderstood the nature of Newell’s talk—and she’s right: I definitely misunderstood the nature of her talk.
I did not expect Newell, a “professional” brought in by SLE, to point at students and ask them over five times if they had read my “fuckass article.” I did not expect the lecturer to watch her guest repeatedly curse at a student with an opinion and do nothing about it. And I certainly did not expect the Daily’s headline news piece to report only that she “openly addressed” my article.
Though I could not attend the event, multiple attendees told me that the meeting, like her book, “had no plot” and that, contrary to SLE’s claim, the event included “little to no actionable advice for navigating the publishing world.” In fact, Newell told the students to forgo plots in favor of describing emotion, as if the two are mutually exclusive.
Following the event, the Daily’s Annika Sirtori, who wrote the headline piece, accused two students without definitive proof of attempting to record the event and then frantically deleting videos, something both students deny. The Daily removed the accused’s names but included a picture that obviously implicated them to their classmates, leading them to fear social backlash.
But most puzzling was Sirtori’s decision—and by extension, editor-in-chief George Porteous’s—to favor quick and easy sensationalism over unbiased reporting, breaking the rules of basic journalism.
Instead of giving the accused “ample time to comment” as their code of conduct mandates, the Daily published their news article at 2:24 a.m. on Wednesday. Then, six minutes later, at 2:30 a.m., they emailed the accused for comment. In other words, the accused were given negative time to provide their perspectives, ones that may have threatened the “objective” Daily’s narrative.
The Daily’s reasoning? “We couldn’t wait to publish it given that the Daily Mail picked it up,” one of the accused recalls Sirtori telling him.
“It was written in such a way that it was so damning, it left no ambiguity in the question,” one of the accused told me. “It’s unfair that they published without our perspectives.”
Sirtori also contends that the students moved from the back to the front row to film, to which one of the accused responded: “If we really wanted to record inconspicuously, why would we have moved to the front of the room?”
Aside from the Daily’s at best misinformed, at worst disingenuous reporting, SLE’s immature and illogical backlash to my article calls into question whether SLE actually encourages students to interrogate their beliefs, or if they just pretend to. If my article was received so harshly and I'm not even in SLE, if students mock me, laugh at me, and leave rather than engage in good faith debate, how are SLE kids with opinions different from the herd supposed to prosper in such a hostile environment?
Personal experience and testimony from SLE students have convinced me that SLE loves to hide beneath a veil of virtue. They paint themselves as guardians of the classical liberal education while cowering behind the comfortable nihilistic idea that “all perspectives are valuable in intellectual development.” This is flawed for two reasons. The first is that not all perspectives are valuable, and second, they don’t even follow their own mantra.
Since when is simply having a different perspective grounds for inviting someone to speak at one of the best universities in the world? Should SLE invite Diddy because he was successful and harbored disgusting sexual fantasies? He certainly has a different perspective. Does this mean Diddy’s songwriting and storytelling is useful for college students? Diddy had unconventional ideas regarding sex, as does Newell. Neither are particularly helpful for 18-year-old students.
Another cliché claim SLE and Huang commonly make is that one must separate the art from the artist. This view is simplistic and lacks any ounce of critical thinking.
Not only is this logic of separating art from artist impossible in Newell’s case—whose book is based on her personal experiences as a dominatrix—but even if one does separate her personal life from the novel, the book considered on its own is still truly awful.
Though SLE loves to call her work “critically-acclaimed,” they fail to realize that every single book ever written has been acclaimed. Huang, for instance, mentions that Soft Core received praise from the NYT, but evidently did not read the full article, which calls the plot shaky. She also ignores the fact that every book ever written has received praise. Mein Kampf, for instance, boasts a 4.4-star rating on Amazon, which is almost a full star higher than Newell’s 3.6, because it offers valuable firsthand insights into one of the worst men in history.
Ultimately, I did not argue that Newell should be disallowed to come, nor did I assume she would talk about sex, as Huang proclaims. In fact, the central question of my original article was that I had no idea what she could possibly talk about to justify her invitation. As it stands, SLE and the Daily have failed to answer my question.
