Title IX issues at Northwestern University are currently receiving a lot of attention, largely in editorial pieces and comments that obscure or omit certain facts. Since these facts may be relevant to your opinion about the events at Northwestern and Title IX more generally, and since the events in question centrally involve a philosophy professor and a philosophy graduate student, I thought a post here was in order. The figure at the heart of the controversy is Peter Ludlow. Ludlow, you may recall, has been accused of sexually assaulting an undergraduate student. That accusation has gotten the most attention, but that is not the accusation most relevant to the current controversy. Peter Ludlow has also been accused, in an internal Title IX complaint at Northwestern, of raping a graduate student in the philosophy department. This story has received less publicity, in part because those making the accusation, including the graduate student, are fearful that publicizing their side of the story will subject them to costly and drawn-out lawsuits (which are an ordeal even if you win). The most publicly accessible account of the accusation has been in Ludlow’s own legal documents, in which he alleges that he had a consensual relationship with the graduate student. According to several documents I’ve reviewed, the graduate student alleging that he raped her strenuously denies that she and Ludlow ever had a consensual dating relationship. (And just to be clear, the word “rape” is not being used in some unusual or idiosyncratic or merely legalistic sense.) Enter Laura Kipnis, a professor in Northwestern’s School of Communication, who has now written a pair of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Education about Title IX issues. In her first piece, she does not clearly distinguish between the events involving the undergraduate and those involving the graduate student. She writes: [Ludlow] sued for defamation various colleagues, administrators, and a former grad student whom, according to his complaint, he had previously dated; a judge dismissed those suits this month. He sued local media outlets for using the word “rape” as a synonym for sexual assault—a complaint thrown out by a different judge who said rape was an accurate enough summary of the charges, even though the assault was confined to … Continue reading Northwestern and Title IX: What’s Going On (updated)