In 2015, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern
University, published a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes
Academe.” Kipnis argued that students’ sense of vulnerability on campus was
expanding to an unwarranted degree, partly owing to new enforcement
policies around Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at
educational institutions that receive federal funds. The new Title IX
policies on sexual misconduct which were then sweeping campuses perpetuated “myths
and fantasies about power,” Kipnis wrote, which enlarged the invasive
power of institutions while undermining the goal of educating students
in critical thinking and resilience. “If you wanted to produce a
pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method,” she concluded.
Kipnis wrote of a philosophy professor, Peter Ludlow, whom Northwestern
disciplined for sexual harassment; Kipnis questioned the logic of the
accusations against him.

One of Ludlow’s accusers, a graduate student (unnamed in Kipnis’s essay), then
joined a fellow graduate student in the philosophy department in filing
Title IX complaints against Kipnis, under Northwestern’s
sexual-misconduct policy. Through her essay and a subsequent tweet about
the essay, Kipnis was alleged to have violated the part of the
sexual-misconduct policy prohibiting “retaliation”; additionally, she
was alleged to have created a “hostile environment” and a “chilling
effect” on complaints. Northwestern launched a formal Title IX
investigation of Kipnis.

Most people under Title IX investigation don’t speak publicly about it,
even to defend themselves. But Kipnis responded by publishing a
follow-up essay in the Chronicle, called “My Title IX
Inquisition,”
decrying the investigation as a misuse of Title IX that allowed
“intellectual disagreement to be redefined as retaliation.” On the same
day, Northwestern cleared Kipnis of wrongdoing, finding that “viewpoint
expression” is not retaliation, and that a “reasonable person” in the
complainant’s position “would not suffer a hostile environment on
account of” the essay and the tweet.

Earlier this month, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, delivered a
policy speech on Title IX that focussed on the need for fair process for
both accusers and the accused. She also stated that “schools have been
compelled by Washington to enforce ambiguous and incredibly broad
definitions of assault and harassment,” stemming from over-compliance
with the Department’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which DeVos has made
clear will be replaced by new regulations after a formal rulemaking
process. Individuals “have faced investigation and punishment simply for
speaking their minds or teaching their classes,” she said. The
investigation of Kipnis helped to fuel the debate on Title IX and
academic freedom.

In the meantime, Kipnis told me something that had only just been made
public in a court filing. Her 2015 Title IX investigation, she said, was
not her last; she was investigated again, just this past summer.

Back in 2015, the first investigation of Kipnis immediately triggered
several other complaints. A professor whom Kipnis brought to her
interview as her “support person” also had a Title IX retaliation
complaint filed against him, after he spoke to the faculty senate about
his concerns that the Kipnis investigation threatened academic freedom.
An additional Title IX complaint at the same time also accused Kipnis of
“involvement in and/or approval of” the faculty support person’s
statement to the faculty senate. (Both of those complaints were
eventually dropped.)

Drawing on her experience, Kipnis wrote the book “Unwanted Advances,”
which was published in April. After Northwestern terminated Ludlow’s
employment, he gave Kipnis access to confidential records in the
graduate student’s successful Title IX complaint against him, along with
thousands of texts and e-mails between them. Kipnis writes that “the
more I learned about his situation, the more I saw his case as a lens
through which the excesses and hypocrisies of the current campus
hysteria came into focus.” Kipnis devotes a chapter of “Unwanted
Advances” to her theory that Ludlow was falsely accused. In a letter to
the editor in the Daily Northwestern, the Northwestern Philosophy
Graduate Student Association objected that Kipnis “unfairly portrayed
our colleague,” the graduate student.

In May, the graduate student sued Kipnis and her publisher,
HarperCollins, for defamation. (A HarperCollins representative told me
that the company does not comment on pending litigation.) The suit
alleges that the book falsely suggests that the graduate student and
Ludlow had a consensual dating relationship, falsely insinuates that her
allegation of rape was untrue, and falsely claims that she is a “serial
Title IX filer.” It also makes an invasion-of-privacy claim, alleging
that Kipnis’s book publicly disclosed private facts, including the
plaintiff’s prior relationship with a married professor at another
school, and details intimate conversations from her relationship with
Ludlow.

It’s puzzling that the plaintiff is staking part of her lawsuit on the
alleged falsehood of the statement that she is a “serial Title IX
filer.” Kipnis mentions in the book that the graduate student was a
complainant in six Title IX complaints; in the suit, the plaintiff
acknowledges two, one against Ludlow and one against Kipnis. But days
before filing the defamation suit, in May, the graduate student joined
four Northwestern faculty members and five other graduate students as a
complainant in yet another Title IX complaint against Kipnis, this time
based on the publication of “Unwanted Advances.”

Kipnis told me that she was surprised when Northwestern once again
launched a formal Title IX investigation of her writing. (A spokesperson from Northwestern did not respond to a request for comment by press time.) Kipnis said that investigators presented her with a spreadsheet laying out dozens of quotations from her book, along with at least eighty written questions,
such as “What do you mean by this statement?,” “What is the source/are
the sources for this information?,” and “How do you respond to the
allegation that this detail is not necessary to your argument and that
its inclusion is evidence of retaliatory intent on your part?” Kipnis
chose not to answer any questions, following the standard advice of
counsel defending the court case.

She did submit a statement saying that “these complaints seem like an
attempt to bend the campus judicial system to punish someone whose work
involves questioning the campus judicial system, just as bringing Title
IX complaints over my first Chronicle essay attempted to do two years
ago.” In other words, the process was the punishment. Possible evidence
of retaliatory purpose, she learned, included statements in the book
that aggressively staked out her refusal to keep quiet, expressed in her
trademark hyperbole. Her prior Title IX investigation, she writes, “has
made me a little mad and possibly a little dangerous. . . . I mean,
having been hauled up on complaints once, what do I have to lose?
‘Confidentiality’? ‘Conduct befitting a professor’? Kiss my ass. In
other words, thank you to my accusers: unwitting collaborators,
accidental muses.” Also presented as possible evidence was her Facebook
post quoting a book review—“Kipnis doesn’t seem like the sort of enemy
you’d want to attract, let alone help create”—on which Kipnis had
commented, “I love that.”

If Kipnis did engage in retaliation or violate confidentiality, those
infractions would be impossible to untangle from her book’s performance
of her protest. “Unwanted Advances” sharply criticizes both the use of
Title IX to silence political opponents and the secrecy that can enable
abuse and overreach in campus Title IX processes. The latest iteration
of Northwestern’s investigation of Kipnis took a month to complete, and
again ruled in her favor. The university concluded that she did not
retaliate or engage in sexual harassment by discussing mostly public
information about pseudonymous students in a book meant to critique the
Title IX landscape, including false accusations and the use of Title IX
to punish those critical of Title IX. Though she didn’t honor the
confidentiality of university investigations, Northwestern recognized
that confidentiality is a request rather than a requirement in its
sexual-misconduct policy.

Northwestern’s decision letter did suggest, however, that the dean of
Kipnis’s school might still choose to sanction her for possible
violations of the university’s policy on “civility and mutual respect.”
The evidence: her statements after the book’s publication, in e-mails, on
social media, and in talks, in which she questioned the veracity and
reliability of the graduate student’s account and hoped that “the book
will cause a bit of a shit storm.” The university said that these
“behaviors could be interpreted as demeaning and/or intimidating.”
Kipnis objected that her statements rebutting charges of inaccuracy in
her book could not legitimately be construed as “incivility.” The dean
ultimately found that Kipnis did not violate the civility policy, and
that was the end of the matter.

The U.S. Supreme Court has remarked, in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshores
Services, in 1998, that sexual-harassment law is not intended to become
a “general civility code.” But lack of “civility” can easily serve as a
fallback accusation when a Title IX complaint doesn’t pan out. And Title
IX can be deployed to make life difficult for a person one despises, for
whatever reasons—good or bad. Two professors I spoke to said that they
have experienced this phenomenon firsthand.

Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor of family and consumer studies, said
that he was on the receiving end of this dynamic at the University of
Utah, where he has been at odds with his colleagues for years. He told
me it is because he has been openly contemptuous of colleagues who are
“dead wood” and do not produce scholarship. Wolfinger was accused last
year, under the school’s Title IX policy, of “being aggressive, rude, or
dismissive of female faculty members” and “making unwelcome/unwanted
sexual jokes or comments to other faculty members in the department”
over the previous twelve-year period. Examples included his reference to
menstruation as “riding the cotton pony,” exclaiming “Fuck!” at a
faculty meeting, and recounting stories of proposing to his wife at a
strip club.

The university’s investigation found him not responsible for Title IX
sexual harassment and gender discrimination, but his dean still decided
to impose an administrative reprimand and suspension for “unprofessional
behavior,” specifically with reference to his use of profanity and the
“constant stream of insults that you direct at others, particularly
those berating and belittling your colleagues.” (Wolfinger has
written about his Title IX process, but his piece did not mention the reprimand
and suspension for unprofessional behavior.) It seems that the wish to
knock off unlikable and ill-behaving colleagues can lead to illegitimate
use of the Title IX process to punish them, even if there is no finding
of responsibility. Ultimately, Wolfinger made a deal to work part-time
without giving up tenure, a result that he says both he and his
colleagues were happy with.

A professor who previously taught at a small college in California told
me a related story. He was an outspoken critic of the school’s
president, administration, and board, asking “too many questions” and
calling for transparency regarding the school’s management, curricular,
and financial problems. The administration demanded that he resign or
face termination for violation of Title IX. When he didn’t resign, the
school launched a Title IX investigation, with no complainant, that
accused him of sexually harassing a former student five years
earlier—but the former student sent the school a signed affidavit saying
that the charges were baseless. The college decided to drop the Title IX
charges, but it terminated the professor anyway for not living up to
its standard of conduct, citing an alleged instance of public
drunkenness (which he denies), his use of profanity (an e-mail in which
he used the term “bullshit”), and what the college deemed to be immoral
correspondence with a woman who had no connection to the school. (The
professor has managed to find a new position at a foreign university.)

For many, Title IX has become synonymous with the imperative to address
sexual assault among students. But Title IX can also be used to
discourage disagreement, deter dissent, deflect scrutiny, or register
disapproval of people whom colleagues find loathsome. The problem is not
with Title IX itself, much less the generic capacity of any rule to be
used as a pretext for unrelated ends. Rather, it is the growing tendency
to try, in the words of Kipnis’s book, “to bend Title IX into an
all-purpose bludgeon.” This warping is made possible by ambiguous and
undisciplined understandings—misunderstandings—of sexual harassment and
its harms. Kipnis’s rebuke of common slippages and conflations, whereby
“gropers become rapists and accusers become Survivors,” anticipated a
situation in which expression of her opinions about a sexual-harassment
allegation could be sincerely perceived as an act of sexual harassment.
Perhaps, in this environment, the complaint that followed the
publication of “Unwanted Advances” was inevitable.

Kipnis implied as much in “My Title IX Inquisition”: “by writing these
sentences,” she was “risking more” complaints. That risk is now built
into the professional life of those of us in universities who engage on
subjects related to gender and sexuality. Like Kipnis, I routinely hear
from teachers who say they are refraining from teaching and writing on
such topics for fear of attracting Title IX complaints, which bring
possibilities of termination, demotion, pay cuts, and tens of thousands of dollars
in legal fees, especially for the swelling ranks of teachers who, unlike
Kipnis and me, do not have tenure.

Yet debate on these topics is crucial to the pursuit of sex equality, as
much as participants may disagree on what that means. As the Education
Department under Secretary DeVos undertakes new rulemaking under Title
IX, it will be important to be more explicit about how it may better
protect the core educational activity of a campus: the production of
knowledge and the expression of ideas. At this moment, Title IX is too
often conscripted to serve purposes antithetical to the education of
citizens in a democracy, in which disagreement, dissent, or disapproval
should lead to argument, not to an infinite loop of institutional
investigation.