The IWF is an interesting group — they've made a name for themselves as sticklers for data over demagoguery. Positioned as the intellectual arch rival of Patricia Ireland and the National Organization of Women (NOW), the IWF takes on feminist nonsense in all its forums — but especially in the realm of academia, where the IWF's outspoken beliefs have earned them a multitude of opponents.

The latest round of controversy began when the IWF tested a full page ad debunking the "Ten Most Common Feminist Myths", including such popular fables as the wage gap and the "gender-biased" nature of public schoolrooms and tests. According to Kate Kennedy, the IWF’s head of campus projects, the ad was sent around to several student newspapers over the past few months, with mixed results.

The Columbia Daily Spectator rejected the ad, claiming they have a policy against publishing "political content" in ad space — despite the fact that the paper ran several ads promoting Ralph Nader rallies last year. The Harvard Crimson rejected the ad, then accepted it after the IWF sent them the citations for the points in the ad, then they accidentally charged the IWF without running the ad. The Yale Daily News ran the ad, as did the Dartmouth Review, but both received muted response from the student body — it was nearing the end of the semester, after all.

There wasn’t much reaction on the UCLA campus, either, when the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, decided to run the ad in their April 18th issue. After the ad ran, the Bruin only received two negative letters for the Op-Ed page, and the issue died down. On May 18, though, the UCLA Clothesline Project, a campus student feminist organization, organized an on-campus protest against the newspaper, demanding the Bruin apologize for publishing the ad and print a retraction.

Even though the ad was printed in the Bruin only once, Clothesline executive co-chair Christie Scott said its publication was a "reprehensible" repetition of "hateful misinformation," and merited a student protest.

"I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile ad," Scott said. "It breeds a very bad attitude toward campus women … It repeats the same kind of ideas that have limited, even today, the occupations and abilities of women to express themselves."

After a month of scheduling and promoting the protest, only about 30 students showed up in Meyerhoff Park. LeAnn Quinn, member of the campus’ Coalition for the Fair Representation of Women, warned the small crowd of the dangers of groups like the IWF.

"They’re trying to infiltrate campuses with their lies and myths," Quinn said.

Bruin Editor-in-Chief Christine Byrd said she was "disappointed" with the protest, but there would be no retractions or apologies for publishing the ad.

"When we first heard that people had a problem with the ad, we invited them to write in to Viewpoint to express their opinions," Byrd said. "That’s usually the best way to discuss these issues."

Clothesline leaders met with Bruin representatives two weeks after the ad ran, but the paper decided against any editorial response, a decision that Scott termed "cowardly." She accused the editors of hiding behind the First Amendment.

Tina Oakland, the director of the UCLA Center for Women and Men, has a slightly different perception of the ad. "It strikes me as revisionist history. It’s the same thing as the people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened," Oakland said. "It’s like that white supremacist ad, like the Horowitz ad." [link]

Terming the ad part of a "campaign of misinformation," Oakland told Bruin reporter Scott Wong that she took issue with the first item, which debunks the notion that one in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. She claimed the "one in four" statistic had been repeated on the websites of the FBI and the American Medical Association.

After searching the AMA and FBI websites, the statistic is nowhere to be found — that’s because it’s from a Ms. magazine survey from over a decade ago, not government research. According to the FBI, actual incidents of rape in the United States are the lowest they’ve been since the early 1980s, approximately 64 per 100,000 women in 1999. And according to recent Department of Education studies of campus police report data, a total of 1,600 or fewer forcible sex offenses are reported on the 6,300 U.S. campuses annually. While it’s certainly true that rape is an awful and horrific thing, and that many incidents of rape go unreported, even if you tripled the number to account for unreported incidents, that’s still statistically less than one per college campus in a year’s time — hardly the epidemic Oakland suggests.

"The statistics don’t really matter that much in the big picture," Oakland said after she was questioned about the data. "We’re just trying to focus on the real issue here, to debate about civil rights, not bicker about numbers."

According to Byrd, the Bruin doesn’t have any responsibility to factcheck the ads they choose to run.

"It’s ridiculous," said one UCLA student who writes for The Bruin. "It’d be as silly as asking Sports Illustrated to, hey, check if this power drink will really make you more attractive, or if this shoe will really make you run faster, before they run the ad."

Not all of the flak has been external. Byrd has had to stand up to some of her own editors throughout this controversy — next year’s editor in chief, Timothy Kudo, said he’s planning on reworking the advertising policy with this incident in mind. And the editor of the Bruin’s opinion page, Jonah Lalas, said that he couldn’t see why Byrd "let something so anti-woman through."

"We have our policies laid out, we follow them, and they work," said Byrd. "I think it’s important to do this … And I do think it’s probably a good thing they’re dealing with me, a woman editor."

What Byrd and the UCLA campus are experiencing is merely the side effects of a much larger problem. For far too many years college campuses have been places where overwrought ideological bullies have effectively blocked political debate, rather than engaging in it. In doing so, they’ve created campuses that are very unlike the real world—arenas where the microcosmic gods of doctrinaire academia and bureaucratic administration hold sway, where the only extensive ideological debate is found in the politics of the bigger sign, the more provocative slogan or the more attractive pitchmaker. There are no civic conversations here, only the deafening blather of taunts, boos and hisses, the mau- mau flak of extremists and reactionaries.

The IWF ad is powerful because it knows the rules of the game before it enters the field. It does not attempt to expound at length on the detriments of feminism, or make the intellectual case for an alternative. It does not analyze the sociological reasoning behind "Ms. Information," or expand their message to include the factual relativism that encompasses post-modernist culture. Instead, they offer a list of 10 myths and 10 facts — it is quiet dissension amidst a cloud of conformity, but it is dissension nonetheless.

It’s not enough to merely lament the state of campus debate. The argument must be made for reason over hysteria, for common sense discussion of ideas over cheap sloganism, for seeking after truth, not getting caught up in the childish fisticuffs of campus politics. It must be made, even if the other side is more interested in pointing fingers than finding answers. And you and I must make it.