Laura Kipnis was at first amused to be the target of a campus protest. A group of about 30 students, some carrying pillows and mattresses to symbolize their concerns about the sexual climate on campus, demonstrated in March at Northwestern University, where Ms. Kipnis is a professor of film. They demanded “swift, official condemnation” of her.
A few days earlier, Ms. Kipnis had taken to the pages of The Chronicle Review to denounce what she saw as “sexual paranoia” on campus. She argued that new prohibitions at Northwestern and elsewhere, particularly against professors dating students, had fostered a climate of sexual terror and vulnerability. She lamented the treatment of students as “such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.” She suggested that something of a moral panic had taken hold on university campuses.
She pushed back on a culture of victimization.
And here were 30 protesting students, petition in hand, seemingly proving her point.
Then, a few weeks later, she was thrust onto the front lines of a new battle over the use of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX. Two students filed Title IX charges against Ms. Kipnis, alleging that her essay had a “chilling effect” on the willingness of other students to report incidents of sexual assault. They also argued that Ms. Kipnis’s brief mention in her article of two sexual-assault investigations at Northwestern constituted an act of retaliation and that she had misrepresented and impugned one of the students who had accused a philosophy professor of misconduct.
The university’s monthslong investigation into Ms. Kipnis, which she documented in a second essay for The Review, created a new uproar. Suddenly, her ordeal became an emblem of an era of heightened sensitivities in which students ask for safe spaces and trigger warnings. Her case intensified a continuing fracas over how those sensitivities can infringe on the free-speech rights of faculty, and it heightened the debate about Title IX — namely, by showing how the law can be misused. Ms. Kipnis, who was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, spoke out on NPR and made national headlines in places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. She was invoked this month in a letter several prominent legal and other scholars sent to Congress, expressing “profound concern” about erosion of free speech and due process on campuses.
Ms. Kipnis became known as an infamous provocateur and a kind of philosopher-queen of faculty fears. Student activists “have a certain amount of hatred of me,” she says, but the overall response to her articles has been positive. At least once a week, she says, she hears from a professor who’s been accused of a Title IX violation and warned that discussing the case might result in retaliation charges or dismissal.
“I became the public face of this because there are so many prohibitions against people speaking out,” she says, adding that as a tenured professor she never seriously worried about losing her job.
Ms. Kipnis, 59, spent the summer researching and thinking through the messiness of sex on campus: Administrators are adjudicating often murky and drunken situations, and pronouncing on thorny questions like, What is consent? “There’s been a movement away from education and toward regulation on campuses,” Ms. Kipnis says. “I’d like to see that reversed.”
She is working on a book, tentatively titled “Higher Education/Stupid Sex.” Her aim is not to scold student activists, she says, but to force an honest discussion about what she calls a “new culture of victimization.”
“Under the banner of campus slogans, a feeling of emotional disruption or offense is now regarded as equivalent to being physically endangered,” she says. “We aren’t doing a good job as educators if all we’re doing is regulating the environment for maximum comfort and emotional safety.”
Evan Goldstein is the editor of The Chronicle Review.
