Scholarship by classics professor with "incorrect" views is now as bad as sexual harassment according to students at UT Austin

I'm glad the university has rebuffed these benighted students, but it's no doubt a symptom of what's to come as the campaign against actual sexual harassment gets mixed up with the general New Infantilist hysteria about "harmful" ideas:

A group of students at the University of Texas are calling for the firing of a classics professor who has written extensively on “pederasty”—socially acknowledged romantic relationships between adult men and teen boys—in ancient Greece....

“Contemporary American legislation premised on children’s incapacity to ‘consent’ to sexual relations stems from outmoded gender constructions and ideological preoccupations of the late Victorian and Progressive Era,” Hubbard reportedly wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Thymos: Boyhood Studies. “We should consider a different ‘age of consent’ for boys and girls"....

A group called Students for Safety issued a press release last month which claimed that Hubbard “has used his position to further a community of individuals hoping to prey on underage boys” and that his writings “encourage these illicit acts.”

“An individual who advocates for violent crime against teen boys had no business teaching the leaders of tomorrow,” said the release. “It is clear to us that the University of Texas does not have its students’ safety, health, and welfare in mind.”

“We refuse to stand by while this man uses his status to promote pedophilia,” said the group.

Sarah Blakemore, one of the students leading the charge against Hubbard, told The Austin American-Stateman that the professor’s “academic license” should not be tolerated at a public university since it promotes “breaking the law"....

“I write mainly about ancient Greece, where ‘pedophilia’ (as defined by psychiatry’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, 5th Edition) is not part of the cultural record,” said Hubbard. “I do discuss the very different phenomenon of ‘pederasty’—romantic courtship of adolescent males, which was practiced in complex historical cultures as diverse as Ancient Greece, Han-dynasty China, Renaissance Florence, and Samurai-era Japan, as well as some Melanesian, Asian, and African tribal cultures.”

He added: “How teen sexuality should be regulated and how legal violations should be punished are legitimate areas of research and debate among scholars and public policy professionals. Historical and cross-cultural evidence have a place in such discussions.”