The Review

Back in April, Jodi Dean, a political-science professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, published an essay on the blog of the left-wing publisher Verso. She expressed unqualified support for Hamas’s actions on October 7 and rebuked other leftists, like Judith Butler, for condemning Hamas. Such soft-heartedness, Dean wrote, takes “a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project.”

This militant position is, of course, open to criticism on all sorts of grounds. But it is exactly the kind of controversial position-taking academic freedom is meant to protect. In a healthy academic environment, Dean would have been robustly debated. Instead, she was removed from the classroom, excoriated by her institution’s president, and investigated for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and national origin. As of July 11, she has been cleared of all charges and reinstated.

In one way, Dean was lucky. Her suspension came at a time of heightened scrutiny of violations of academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote to Mark Gearan, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, rebuking him for suspending Dean. Robert P. George, a leader of the Academic Freedom Alliance, told The Chronicle that “none of the unprotected categories of speech are relevant here. Jodi Dean did not threaten anybody. She did not harass anybody. She did not engage in defamation or accuse somebody of a crime falsely.” And a petition on Dean’s behalf gained signatures from scholarly luminaries of widely varying politics.

In a note thanking the signatories, Dean recognized that “the support of thinkers and scholars across a range of views” bolstered the petition’s authority. That’s the happy side of the story: Dean’s case shows what can happen when various academic factions, including the militant left, the pro-speech right, and the “liberal institutionalist” center — converge on a common defense of bedrock principles.

But Gearan’s quick readiness to suspend Dean in the first place reflects a potentially troubling new state of affairs, what Dean calls the “widespread” “misuse of Title VI.” Such misuse, Dean says, is “likely to increase,” particularly in the wake of the Department of Education’s May 7 “Dear Colleague” letter reminding colleges that the Office for Civil Rights “vigorously enforces” “protections against discrimination based on race, color, and national origin,” which “encompass antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.”

In the face of this reminder, colleges may overreact in moments of controversy, for instance when responding to complaints about essays like Dean’s — which Gearan should have known was plainly protected faculty speech. Even though Dean was ultimately cleared, the investigation is its own punishment and surely has a chilling effect on other faculty members. “My institution,” Dean writes, “interpreted” the “Dear Colleague” letter “to require removing me from the classroom in case there might have been students who felt threatened by an essay published on the Verso blog.” Her removal was followed by a series of bureaucratized witch-hunting procedures, one assumes at no small expense to the college:

The institution then hired an outside investigator who repeatedly solicited complaints about me from HWS students. Over 100 members of the community were contacted and asked if they had information relevant to an investigation as to whether I had violated HWS policies or standards prohibiting harassment and discrimination. The investigator called this “targeted outreach.” My lawyer complained about this repeated solicitation but it went on and on. These efforts failed to turn up a single complaint of any illegal conduct on my part.

There are of course situations in which such a process would be warranted, but any investigation whose principal trigger is an instance of protected political and academic speech, like Dean’s Verso essay, is extremely suspicious. Derek W. Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and an expert in discrimination law, told me that, although “it may be the case that some institutions may overreact by reading too much into” the “Dear Colleague” letter, “the letter is not, as I read it, intended to threaten academic freedom.” That may be so, but unless people in roles like Gearan’s become more sophisticated about the legal landscape, or else braver in the face of public pressure to punish professors for controversial speech, the letter risks functionally constraining academic freedom.

We have been here before. In 2011, the Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter on Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. That letter made a series of recommendations for how colleges should adjudicate sexual harassment and assault complaints. Despite the fact that the letter had little legal force — “every single court would have said, ‘You don’t have to do this,’” as Harvard Law’s Janet Halley put it — Title IX investigations on what seemed to many to be very dubious grounds became common. One of the most infamous incidents: In 2015, Laura Kipnis, who taught at Northwestern University, was subjected to a Title IX investigation for having written an essay (in our pages) expressing skepticism about the new Title IX regime.

Kipnis described her ordeal in a follow-up essay called “My Title IX Inquisition,” which has already become one of the essential documents of the period. Any historian hoping to understand the strange goings-on of the American campus in the second decade of the 21st century will need to consult it.

Things began with student protests. Students set off “marching to the university president’s office with a petition demanding ‘a swift, official condemnation’ of my article. One student said she’d had a ‘very visceral reaction’ to the essay; another called it ‘terrifying.’” So far, so farcical. But “things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay … and that the university would retain an outside investigator to handle the complaints.”

Kipnis, ensnared by the totalitarian logic whereby criticizing a policy entails a possible violation of that policy, spent the next several months in the twilight zone of the illegitimately accused. The specific nature of her supposed offense was not initially revealed to her. She was not permitted a lawyer, though she could bring a “support person” to investigative sessions (the “support person” wasn’t allowed to speak). Lawyers from an outside firm flew in to interrogate her. She was forbidden to make any audio recordings of anything. “I’d plummeted into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it.”

The charges against Kipnis, of which she was eventually cleared, were brought by graduate students. Her ordeal made her an early diagnostician of a syndrome that would only become more widespread in the years following — the weaponization of student feelings against faculty (and student) speech. “It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” The result: An environment in which, Kipnis says, “most academics I know … now live in fear.”

Almost a decade later, and under threat of Title VI rather than Title IX, Jodi Dean makes a similar case.

Recommended

• “Meyers’s toggling between praise and put-down is a hallmark of envy, and here he inadvertently harmonizes with Salter’s work.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Adam Sobsey offers an ambivalent appraisal of Jeffrey Meyers’s new book about the novelist James Salter.
• James Baldwin’s “letters elucidate the ineffable something that makes his work special.” In The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II looks at the correspondence of James Baldwin, who would have been 100 last week.
• In Aeon, Peter Hill explains how “the roots of rational secularism and of divisive religious identity were intertwined” in the 19th-century Ottoman world.
• “Modern statecraft since the 18th century has involved a great deal of effort to make society ‘legible’, in Scott’s illuminating term.” In the London Review of Books, Paul Seabright offers a simultaneously admiring and skeptical take on some work of James C. Scott, who died last month. (From 1999.)
• “Everything about Botticelli’s Sebastian depends on his stance not being one of physical tension. Unlike almost every Saint Sebastian of the Renaissance and Baroque, he looks out at us directly.” In her Substack, “Notes of an Aesthete,” Alice Gribbin writes about what makes Botticelli’s Sebastian special. (From March.)

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin