Professional Idiot George Will Paid $48K to Speak at Miami University

George Will, senior rape apologist at the Washington Post, is scheduled to speak Wednesday at Miami University of Ohio. For his trouble, he will be paid $48,000. Students and faculty are not pleased.

Will has long been an avatar of a particularly vile strain of sniveling, pencil-necked rape denialism so obstinately and willfully ignorant that it makes conservatives with a brain look stupider by association. But things ratcheted up a notch in June, when Will wrote that liberal flim-flammery had transformed being a rape victim into a “coveted status that confers privileges.” After justified outrage from basically everybody with a brain and a heart (including a letter signed by several Senators), Will’s WaPo bros essentially bent over backwards and tongued their own sphincters to justify keeping Will’s outdated loud mouthed idiocy in their opinion pages.

George Will’s idiocy isn’t contained to saying dumb crap about rape. Just this weekend, he appeared on Fox News to insist that “there are now doctors who are saying, we’re not so sure that [Ebola] can’t be in some instances transmitted by airborne.” There are no doctors who are saying that about Ebola. That is not a real thing. But George Will’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ability to talk out of his ass prevailed, and now that sound byte is out there.

And so, when Miami University of Ohio announced that Will would be paid in the mid-five figures to deliver a speech in the Anderson Distinguished Lecture Series, students and faculty in the know responded with anger. Over 1,100 people have signed a petition demanding the lecture be cancelled, according to The Plain Dealer, and in-the-flesh protests are planned for the talk today, which is scheduled to begin at 5:30 pm. Earlier this month, similar outcry at the all-female Scripps College resulted in Will having a speaking invitation rescinded.

An op-ed signed by the editorial board of the Miami student newspaper expressed bewilderment over why the university would pay Will such a large sum when he’s so famously idiotic, and why they’d invite someone who was such small potatoes compared with others in the lecture series.

We do wonder though why Miami has chosen to bring Will to campus in the heat of his controversial remarks about sexual assault on college campuses. For a lecture series that has previously included huge names such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the Editorial Board believes that the university could’ve brought someone less controversial, but equally, if not more well known.

Additionally, Will’s lecture will be held in the Farmer School of Business, whereas all previous lectures from this circuit were held in Millet Hall. This seems like a sign the university doesn’t believe Will is prominent enough to fill Millet, so why is it that he is being paid $48,000 to speak?

Miami certainly is capable of finding someone else to come speak in the light of student and faculty outcry against Will and his ignorant public remarks.

According to the op-ed, Will’s invitation was especially puzzling considering the school’s ballooning sexual assault numbers: in 2011, only 4 assaults were reported, and in 2013, that number more than quadrupled to 18.

The op-ed stops short of calling for Will’s lecture to be cancelled, noting that the dialogue he’s spawned has been useful and helpful. But surely, the community at Miami University of Ohio is capable of having a fruitful conversation about sexual assault without paying a guy who says date rape is mostly made up $48,000 in the process.