The controversy swirling around a Northwestern University professor’s essays about what she has called “sexual paranoia” on campuses poses a philosophical debate. When does a university’s responsibility to protect sexual-assault victims from retaliation violate a professor’s right to free speech?
But to people here at Northwestern the issues are not just academic; they are personal. The stakes, and the emotions, are high.
Two female graduate students who filed complaints about a February essay — published in The Chronicle Review and written by Laura Kipnis, a professor in the department of radio, television, and film — say the resulting media firestorm has been vicious. They have been maligned, and their academic careers, they say, are threatened. The students, one Northwestern professor said, “became academic villains of the week.”
For professors, the university’s investigation of Ms. Kipnis has had a chilling effect, creating what some have even called a Stalinist environment. The Faculty Senate leader, meanwhile, has faced calls for his removal because of his role in the controversy.
Northwestern’s president is in damage-control mode. At the same time, he, too, has been the subject of a complaint, following an opinion piece he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. In it he defended professors’ rights to free speech.
This week the president, Morton O. Schapiro, was defending how Northwestern had handled the students’ charges against Ms. Kipnis, who was eventually cleared by the university.
“This is not about restricting the free speech of a faculty; it’s about abiding by the laws and doing what we think is right,” Mr. Schapiro said during a faculty meeting on Tuesday. The leader of the Faculty Senate, Stephen F. Eisenman, had just said that the university’s handling of the conflict had tarnished Northwestern’s reputation.
“We don’t do these things haphazardly,” Mr. Schapiro said.
A New Battle
This is what it is like to be on the front lines of a new battle over the use of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX.
The law requires universities to promptly and fairly investigate complaints of sexual misconduct. But does Title IX allow sex-assault victims to stop professors from writing and speaking about sex-assault charges in a way that students say compounds the harm already done to them and creates a hostile environment?
Earlier this year Northwestern hired a team of Kansas City lawyers to investigate whether Ms. Kipnis’s February essay had harmed the two female graduate students. The students accused Ms. Kipnis of violating Title IX, saying her essay was error-ridden and reckless. They said the essay amounted to retaliation against female students who in the past few years had brought sexual-assault complaints against a prominent philosophy professor here, Peter Ludlow. In one of those cases, the university found Mr. Ludlow responsible for some “unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances.” In the other, the university found him responsible for sexual harassment.
Mr. Ludlow has said that the claims are false and that he did nothing wrong. He has sued the students for defamation and the university for gender discrimination and invasion of privacy. Northwestern has banned him from the campus, he said, and has scheduled a hearing for next month on whether he should be fired.
The Title IX charges the two female graduate students filed against Ms. Kipnis touched off a series of events that led to Title IX complaints’ being filed against other people on the campus, too. After Mr. Eisenman, a professor of art history, described the complaints against Ms. Kipnis at a Faculty Senate meeting and said they posed a threat to academic freedom, the students filed Title IX complaints against him. The students accused Mr. Eisenman of violating the law’s promise of confidentiality.
One of the students also filed a Title IX complaint against Mr. Schapiro, after his piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal, saying he had prejudiced the university’s investigation of the other complaints by writing about the precedence of academic freedom. The students dropped the complaints against Mr. Eisenman and the president after Ms. Kipnis was cleared by the university.
Piling on ‘Torment’
The two female graduate students at the center of the complaints against Ms. Kipnis talked to The Chronicle this week but asked to remain anonymous. Both of them are philosophy students. One had accused Mr. Ludlow of raping her in 2011; the university found him responsible for harassment, not rape. The other says she wanted to support that student and so joined her in filing the Title IX complaints.
The graduate student who accused Mr. Ludlow of rape now lives outside the United States. In an interview over FaceTime, she said she wished she had never come forward to complain about Mr. Ludlow. Since the publication of Ms. Kipnis’s first essay, in February, and a follow-up essay published last week, “My Title IX Inquisition,” the graduate student has become the target of nationwide criticism by those who say she is using federal law as a weapon to stifle free speech.
“The Kipnis article piled torment on top of an already impossible situation,” the graduate student said of the original essay. She felt Ms. Kipnis was belittling her, the student said, for reporting a sexual assault and was minimizing the gravity of it.
When she first reported the alleged assault by Mr. Ludlow to the university, the graduate student said, administrators promised to keep her charges confidential and to protect her from retaliation. What she’s learned, she said, is that universities are incapable of following through on such pledges.
“Why did I hand this over to a system that is so toothless, so full of empty promises, only to be made a laughingstock?” she asked. “They can’t stop Laura Kipnis from calling me a liar. They can’t stop Eisenman from going up before the Faculty Senate and talking about this. They can’t keep my name off the blogs.”
In response, Ms. Kipnis said that the graduate student had mistakenly conflated everything in the February essay to personally pertain to her, even though the professor said only seven words in the essay specifically refer to the graduate student’s complaint against Mr. Ludlow. The essay gave more details about the other assault case against Mr. Ludlow, in which an undergraduate accused him of fondling her. The professor has disputed that complaint, too, although the university found him responsible for inappropriate sexual advances.
“What she [the graduate student] wants is for me to have told this story from her point of view,” Ms. Kipnis said in an interview. “She seems to think the entire essay is about her, so I think she misread the essay.”
A ‘Grave Threat’
Mr. Eisenman said universities can and should respond to students’ complaints of sex assault. But, he added, colleges cannot protect students from public discourse about the issue or even about their cases in particular. “The university cannot prevent speech from happening because she had a terrible experience,” he said.
As the head of the Faculty Senate, Mr. Eisenman said, it is his responsibility “to talk about significant threats to academic freedom.” And he considered the Title IX complaints against Ms. Kipnis to be a “grave threat.” That’s why he talked about them in a meeting of the senate. But he didn’t mention any names, he said, and so he didn’t believe he was violating requirements that Title IX investigations remain confidential.
During the faculty meeting here on Tuesday, the fallout over the Kipnis piece was not on the agenda. But it came up when Baron Reed, a philosophy professor, asked how the Faculty Senate would handle his department’s request that Mr. Eisenman be removed as president of the senate if it was determined that he had broken rules of confidentiality for speaking about the investigation of Ms. Kipnis.
In response, Mr. Eisenman said he was worried about the effect the issue would have on his younger colleagues, who may decide not to say or write anything controversial for fear of getting brought up on Title IX or other charges. The university, he said, never should have hired lawyers to investigate the complaints against Ms. Kipnis. Instead, it should have decided very quickly on its own — perhaps in 10 minutes, he suggested — that the charges were baseless. “Title IX is diminished by cases such as these,” he said.
The executive committee of the Faculty Senate subsequently determined that while speaking about the case before a faculty meeting was inappropriate, Mr. Eisenman should not be removed as president.
At the Tuesday meeting, one professor told his colleagues that he had had an interview request from The Chronicle but had decided not to talk. He mentioned it, he said, because he saw it as proof of Mr. Eisenman’s point that the flurry of Title IX charges had been chilling. “This is, in fact, what Stephen has talked about, the suppression of academic freedom,” the professor told his colleagues. “I find that sad.”
Later he explained to The Chronicle why he didn’t want to be quoted by name: “These issues have become so fraught here on campus, and I am headed to Europe for four months in two and a half weeks, first stop being a conference in my honor. I would hate to miss it for unpleasant legal snafus.”
Mr. Schapiro said it is the university’s responsibility to take each Title IX complaint seriously. The university had to hire outside lawyers to investigate, he said, because conflicts of interest prevented its own administrators from conducting the investigation.
“The idea that I could say, ‘This is frivolous, you can’t use Title IX in this way,’ is ludicrous,” he said. “It’s the law.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.