I took it that the links to the CHE Letter to the Editor and the HuffPo piece were supposed to give a sense of the claims of falsity.

@Plouffe: Did you try reading the pieces linked within the article (the one about the factual liberties and the one about issuing corrections)? They seem to address your question directly.

Thanks so much for writing this!

I did not claim it would not be “problematic” (if the claim is indeed false). The issue is whether it would rise to the level of retaliation.

The Kipnis article claimed that the grad student and the professor found guilty of sexually harassing her had been engaged in a consensual relationship–that they had dated. The second correction to the CHE article suggests that this was explicitly denied by the author of this post. This post makes clear that the author of this post and others corrected Kipnis on this matter in time for Kipnis to avoid making that accusation. That, regardless of its legal status or upshot, is shockingly poor journalism and just plain revolting.

That’s a good point. I can see how the issue you raised might be of interest to, say, other people in a similar position as the graduate students mentioned here: people who are considering whether they should file a retaliation claim/procedure when they are the target of or have to deal with the effects of some publicly available articles such as Kipnis’s. In this case, however, people commenting on this thread will hardly be helpful to these students in this manner. Nor can we contribute much to the actual development of the case since I assume that we, as simple readers, are not part of it. In any case, I take it that this very thoughtful letter is making different and more important points- some of which are not directly relevant to the philosophy of law.

Quick thoughts. First, rape isn’t ruled out by the existence of a romantic relationship. Maybe I’m being touchy but it seems like some commentary on this case elide that. Second, what are we arguing about, really? Kipnis behaved badly? Agree! Kipnis is guilty of retaliation in the title IX sense? Disagree! Higher ed is completely f’ing clueless about how to handle these issues well (granting that it’s a really tough problem)? As much endorsement as I have in me.

I agree with Andy Metz. Nothing in the articles–and I’ve read them closely, along with the responses here and on Huffpo and the Chronicle–strike me as grounds for a Title IX action.

“We filed complaints because in her desire to weigh in on the theoretical debate, Kipnis took factual liberties with the specific issues facing students at Northwestern.” […] “Whether or not such a refusal [to make basic factual corrections] amounts to signaling retaliation is a separate question, but shouldn’t we have the right to ask our university that very question?”
Is anyone else puzzled by this? One files a Title IX complaint asking for the grounds of one’s complaint?
Not to deny the seriousness of the need for collective and individual reflection on many of the points raised above; but if this piece is meant to be an apologia or some sort, I can only read it as tacit admission that the author(s) did not know what they were doing and have only come to realise/publicise this.

An anonymous comment is not brave. It’s prudent, not cowardly, but not brave either. Neither is an an anonymous essay. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad essay, it’s just that bravery, like the accuracy of the allegations against Ludlow, and the accuracy of the statements in the editorial, is besides the point in a discussion of the legitimacy of a title IX complaint against Kipnis.

There is a weird argumentative move that’s become popular here. When somebody accuses you of being too sensitive, you do not show that you are not too sensitive by saying the person who called you too sensitive is too sensitive for pointing out your sensitivity. that doesn’t show you’re ‘tough’. You just show the person who called you sensitive is a hypocrite, but then, you are still both too sensitive. You have to explain why you are not too sensitive. You don’t do this by saying, “I know you are but what am I?”

“Even if their complaint is in the end dismissed, this doesn’t mean that the students made a mistake in presenting their complaint to being with. There is a lot of criticism of the students for presenting the complaint. The students’ claims may or may not be found to have merit but this is a different question as to whether they were within their right to present a claim.”

No one is questioning whether they had a right (in the broadest legal sense) to lodge the complaint. Nor is anyone claiming that because the complaint was dismissed that this shows ipso facto that the complaint should not have been lodged. The question is whether there was sufficient reason for the complaint to be lodged. Given the available evidence, there was not. And that the complainants did not know how Title IX cases are actually handled does not justify lodging the complaint.

AnonAttorney — Yes, this complaint was filed to support the graduate student who was allegedly raped by Peter Ludlow. What is interesting is that if this was a legal suit, I am not sure the author would have standing.

Anon — I agree that if the graduate students had not called attention to Kipnis’ first article, the feared chilling effect on them would be non-existent. The major point of Kipnis’ article had to do with changing mores concerning faculty-student relationships. The Ludlow example was a side issue, and I don’t know that many of the readers would have focused on it. Once the complaints were made, though, it really escalated the controversy. I saw the original article, and left thinking, “Wow, things have changed a lot,” and reflected on how the relationship lines among faculty and students were much blurrier when I a graduate student.

Anon 28 – you mean like this letter: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/open-letter-from-an-nu-grad-student/? Or like the ones that multiple students wrote to Kipnis and the Chronicle informing them of errors, the most important of which wasn’t corrected until nearly a month later, and well after the complaints were filed? The letters that have earned their writers hate mail and abuse from multiple corners of the Internet? We know what lies in store for young women who wrote reasoned defenses of themselves on issues like these.

We’re still waiting to hear what errors in the original piece could possibly justify a Title XI complaint. “Several”? The fact that someone disputed a fact? This is absurd beyond belief, and Daily Nous is disgracing itself by presenting it as reasonable. Graduate students should not be encouraged to dig ever deeper holes for themselves after having been pressured into digging the first hole. Verbum sap.

Thanks to this student for writing this important clarification of the record, and thanks to Justin for posting it. There are a lot of us out here who support you!

@Crimlaw: Perhaps they think “no retaliation” means “no consequences, even if you are being wildly irresponsible”.

anon female grad student — are you saying the student who came forward in this case with an assault allegation was being ‘wildly irresponsible’ in doing so?!

Great letter, by the way. I’m really glad that Justin shared it.

I strongly agree with #36.
I would almost agree with Johnny Thunder, but I think the biggest question is not so much whether the charge of retaliation was “obviously unjustified” under the current interpretation of Title IX, but rather whether what Kipnis did *should* be actionable, under a reasonable law. Apparently Brian Leiter thinks it *is not* actionable, and I hope he’s right, but most of us don’t know enough law to have an opinion about that.
In any case, I just wanted to add myself to the list of those who think the problem here isn’t really with what the students did, but with a system that threatens to punish Laura Kipnis for publishing her article.

@DC: I have just read the additions to the thread (I don’t check the comment thread that often, I’m afraid). Yes, I can see the confusion. The way I see it, many authors in this thread try to elucidate whether the graduate students at NU ought to have filed a Title IX complaint. Some of them describe it as “going after prof. Kipnis”. They evaluate in multiple ways whether the parties had any justification for doing so. To me, it seems that this line of thought developed above boiled down to whether the factual inaccuracies are minor or not. I see that many authors in this thread conclude: “no, they ought not to bc the corrections were minor”. I see many problems just with this line of questioning: well, *who* has to decide when one/someone else files this complaint? I find it strange that a bunch of people who are not personally involved to start policing the actions of someone whom they don’t even know. I, myself, have just started reading the Title IX documentation. But it is clear to me, that this is hardly a matter to be settled by some remote parties. Moreover, I think it’s deeply problematic to think that one can separate the factual inaccuracies from the overall point or narrative of Kipnis’s piece if only because the same misrepresented facts can be embedded in rather different arguments: they can exemplify different things, they support different conclusions. One such narrative is where they are instances of “sexual paranoia on campuses”. And this is where Kipnis’s beliefs and philosophies are directly relevant to how she writes about the cases. Finally, I can imagine how being the graduate student at the receiving end of this argument, I can say that as far as those matter involve *me*, they are not minor. I can also see how telling someone else what is/ought to be of minor importance or not is dismissing their point of view as a knower. Suppose there was an overwhelming consensus on this thread that the changes are minor. What then? First, let us remind ourselves that this is not a conversation in which the person who is most deeply involved can be a part of, in a safe manner. Did we manage to support anyone here? Kipnis, perhaps? I am not sure what we would achieve, other than split into camps and feel that our opinions are validated and “right” every time someone posts something we resonate with. The way I see it, we missed other good opportunities for conversation. Leave that aside for a moment. I don’t see many suggestions for how the graduate student would have been empowered to act in light of Kipnis’s first piece. What is clear to me is that we can count ourselves to be very lucky to have a thoughtful and kind friend who is willing to support us and lend their voice when we need it. I would have been personally devastated by Kipnis’s piece if I would have been the case she described there. But it would have hurt more to see how so many members of the community I want to see myself a part of are policing my reasons, question my motivations and take me to be the paradigmatic case of destroying academic freedom, digging at the heart of what universities as knowledge communities stand for. Far from being melodramatic, it is deeply worrisome.

Thanks to the author for a very thoughtful post, and for his/her courage in getting involved. Still, I am not sure about filing the complaint. The author says the complaint was filed not because of Kipnis’ views on the “theoretical issues”, but because Kipnis took “factual liberties”. I don’t think such a sharp distinction can be drawn.

If I were in the student’s position (I may not be able to image it fully), I would be upset both by the factual liberties Kipnis took and by the fact that she was using my situation as an example in making her point about the broader, theoretical claims. If I came forward about an allegation of rape, I would be horrified to find that someone, even if they got the facts right, was treating my coming forward as a weakness on my part, and was seeing my situation through the lens of students behaving like children. If the person also got the facts wrong, that would merge together for me with the theoretical stance into a general sense of condemnation and disapproval, as if I was making a big deal out of nothing. Kipnis’s “melodrama” comment captures this: it blurs the line between her theoretical position and her depiction of this particular example.

In the current atmosphere, it might not be possible to come forward and hope that the case will be seen only on a factual basis and independent of broader theoretical issues. That is only possible when there are more precedents and conceptual clarity on the issues. To help the people coming forward, and the people accused, what is needed is much more discussion of the theoretical issues; to create frameworks in which the cases can be seen more objectively, rather than the cases themselves also being the locus of the theoretical disagreements.

@Monica:

I think it is important to have empathy for the students involved with Ludlow, and even to some extent with the student who wasn’t involved with him but decided to become part of the process. The more I see how Title IX is fundamentally misunderstood by professional academics and university administrators, the more sympathetic I am to the students for not getting it right. Again, most of our ire seems reserved for Northwestern for making such a mess of it. The attorneys especially involved knew better and should have alerted the school pretty quickly that the essay wouldn’t support a Title IX complaint.

It is very important to scrutinize this case not in order to attack or punish the complainants, or even the university, but to have a public debate over what Title IX is and what it is not, and the responsibilities of universities to conduct investigations that are fair to all parties involved, including the accused. The harder Northwestern gets hit during this discussion, the more likely it is that other universities will do a better job going forward.

To specifically address an important point you raise:

” They evaluate in multiple ways whether the parties had any justification for doing so. To me, it seems that this line of thought developed above boiled down to whether the factual inaccuracies are minor or not.”

I think there are a lot more issues implicated that are being glossed over, and the fact that even the anonymous explanation that we are all responding to here does not address in concrete terms what inaccuracies constituted the retaliation does not help. As I see it, to have an arguably justified retaliation claim in this situation you would need all of these things to be at least credible on their face:

1. First, that Kipnis’ statement about the student being in a relationship with Ludlow is inaccurate. Unless I’ve missed something, Ludlow claims they were in a relationship, and the student has not publicly said one way or the other. Obviously sexual assault can be carried out within a relationship so absent a statement from the student I don’t see how Kipnis is accusing the student of lying or doing anything improper, so I don’t see how Kipnis’ decision to rely on Ludlow’s characterization absent any available denial constitutes wrongdoing under Title IX (as opposed to, arguably, poor journalistic practices).

2. Next, that as a matter of law a single essay by someone in a non-supervisory role in which the complainant was referred to anonymously and frankly almost tangentially could “intimidate, threaten, coerce, or discriminate against” Title IX complainants. The only way I can think of making this stick would be a “hostile environment” claim, which the caselaw is pretty clear has to be repeated and pervasive and cannot stand simply because of a single incident.

3. That Kipnis, in this case actually wrote the essay intending to “interfer[e] with any right or privilege” of the complainants secured by Title IX.

4. That the innaccuracies in the essay were, in fact, material ones that could have created a hostile environment, which would require them to be so egregious and over-the-top that they fundamentally changed the day-to-day “environment” in which the complainant existed. Simply being inaccuracies (even intentional inaccuracies) is not enough; retaliation under Title IX refers to something more specific than generalized bad behavior. It is not an administrative analogue to defamation, slander, or charges of unprofessionalism.

If any one of these is not credible then the claim as a whole is not credible. Personally, I find 2 and 3 especially to just not be credible accusations.

I was open to the complaint until reading this. Violating–and this is an obvious stretch to bring up that as part of an action regarding federal law–the faculty handbook has nothing to do with Title IX. Getting facts wrong is not retaliation–even if they should have been fixed. Some things are obvious: Kipnis should have corrected her piece. But if the question is if this is obviously not a title IX, the essay answers it by not even bothering to go through anything in title IX or caselaw or precedent that would lead one to the conclusion the author wants to draw. The problem is we have a way of importing all manner of behavior into the law: the prison industrial complex is fed by bringing within the law all manner of behaviors that have no business there. Academic freedom means putting up with crappy ideas, even offensive ones (and Kipnis’s rather naive suggestions about professor-student relationships are well past their expiration date). But if the question is about Title IX, then leave it for those who use their power to abuse women or men.

I would also like to know more about the factual mistakes that, according to the author of this post, Kipnis made in her original piece. Indeed, I have read Pogin’s letter (https://www.facebook.com/kathryn.pogin/posts/10100416756678472), but it seems to me that it only establishes one factual mistake, namely that Kipnis wrote that several lawsuits from the undergraduate student who accused Ludlow of sexual assault were dismissed, when in fact only one of them had been dismissed.

The rest of the letter, as far as I can tell, does not establish that Kipnis has made any other factual mistakes. It explains Pogin’s disagreement with Kipnis on various philosophical issues and argues that she was careless in handling some of the facts. But that’s not the same thing as showing that she made other factual mistakes, beside the one I mentioned above.

In particular, Pogin blames Kipnis because she wrote that Ludlow previously had a consensual relationship with the graduate student who accused him of having raped her, even though she “has neither confirmed this is the case, nor had a chance to dispute the claim in court given that her motion to dismiss had to presume all the facts as he alleged them could be substantiated, whether or not she believed that to be true”.

Now, I hate to state the obvious, but a claim is factually mistaken only if it implies a falsehood about matters of fact, not if it’s true but has not been shown to be true. The fact that the graduate student who accused Ludlow has not confirmed that she previously had been in a consensual relationship doesn’t make Kipnis’s claim that she had false. So, at best, Pogin could have established that Kipnis was careless — perhaps culpably so — because she made a claim that she didn’t have sufficient reason to believe to be true.

But, even if she had indeed shown that, it would still not have established that Kipnis made a factual mistake about that specific point. In any case, I don’t believe that Pogin has established even that weaker claim, that it was careless of Kipnis to claim that Ludlow had been in a consensual relationship with the graduate student how accused him.

Indeed, note that, in the passage of her letter quoted above, Pogin did *not* say that the graduate student who accused Ludlow of rape denied that she was at some point in a consensual relationship with him. If the graduate student denies that she was ever in a consensual relationship with Ludlow, then why didn’t Pogin just say so, which might indeed have established that Kipnis shouldn’t have written what she wrote? I’m not a lawyer, so there may be a legal reason why she didn’t that I don’t know about, but in that case I would be curious to know what it is.

It’s true that, in her letter, Pogin also says « given that the university’s finding that he sexually harassed her was based precisely on the relationship which he alleges was consensual, one must wonder how a relationship could be found to both sexually harassing and consensual at one and the same time ». This suggests that, according to Pogin, the graduate student who filed a complain against Ludlow for sexual assault was never in a consensual relationship with him.

But what’s in the public record suggests to me that it’s only true if you accept a particular, highly controversial notion of consent, according to which consent cannot really exist when the right kind of power asymmetry obtains. (For the record, if you think I’m jumping to conclusions here, I want to say that in the original version of this comment I had argued for that claim more at length but Justin refused to publish that part. I say that, not to publicly shame him, though I think his decision was unjustified, but because I don’t want to be accused of being careless.)

If that’s right, the claim that Ludlow was previously in a consensual relationship with the graduate student who accused him of rape is only a factual mistake if you accept this conception of consent. But of course this conception of consent is highly controversial and that’s precisely one of the things Kipnis was criticizing in her original piece.

Of course, even if she was indeed in a consensual relationship with Ludlow, he might still have raped her. But, as far as I know, Kipnis never said that she wasn’t. Thus, it seems to me that, if we’re talking about factual mistakes, not philosophical views that we may or may not agree with, Pogin has only established one in her letter, namely about the number of lawsuits by the undergraduate student that were dismissed. Honestly, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly egregious mistake, and certainly not one that warrants filing a complaint for retaliation against Kipnis.

In her article in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathryn-pogin/melodrama-notes-from-an-ongoing_b_6805676.html), Pogin mentions another factual mistake in the article Kipnis wrote, namely that she wrote that a suit was thrown out “last month” when in fact the suit had apparently been dismissed on February 5 and Kipnis’s piece was published on February 27. But it’s even more ridiculous that such a completely unimportant mistake could ever justify a retaliation complaint.

So, unless the author of this post can show that Kipnis made other factual mistakes (in addition to those Pogin identified), it’s really hard to believe that s/he filed a complaint against her merely because she made some factual mistakes and refused to correct them. That’s not because I think that no such a complaint could ever be justified by the fact that someone made factual mistakes in a column that mentions a sexual assault complaint. I have no doubt that it could happen, but the factual mistakes in question would have to be very different and a lot more serious than the ones Kipnis made, at least those which have so far been established.

To be clear, I have also little doubt that the author of this post *believes* that’s why s/he filed that complaint, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually why. Given the nature of the factual mistakes that Kipnis did make in her piece, it seems more plausible to me that s/he filed a complaint because she didn’t like what Kipnis said in that article and somehow convinced herself that s/he was doing it because she made factual mistakes and refused to correct them. After all, people’s real motivations are not always transparent even to themselves, it happens to everyone to fool themselves about why they do what they do.

While I’m at it, I also think that comment 45 above is exactly right, I hope people will read it.

Associate Professor (54), this seems absolutely perfectly put. I’d only note that what Kipnis did seems even worse than “speculate in a national publication that the student had been dating the faculty member” which would at least have implied that it was an open question. What she smuggled in was a presupposition.

Associate Professor at 12:39: exactly! Yes, free speech hooray. Laura Kipnis can say what she wants, jackbooted agents of the state are not clamping her in leg irons. But that she can say exactly what she wants, in a national publication, about students involved in an ongoing bureaucratic process at the university at which she works, and expect somehow not to also become embroiled in exactly those bureaucratic machinations: give us all a break, please. And what exactly has Kipnis suffered as a result? Nothing. Her career is fine, her salary is fine, some people’s opinion of her (mine included, someone who has really liked some of her previous writing) has dropped through the floor, but that’s a part of the exercise of free speech. You say what you think, other people hear it and draw conclusions. Meanwhile, the consequences for students — who in this specific case were availing themselves of processes and procedures that are institutionalized in the university they attend, not that were cooked up by a coven of radical feminist witches run from a brambly mountaintop, and who were awaiting the outcomes of those processes and procedures — are self-evidently chilling and their positions are much more vulnerable than that of Kipnis. Of course Kipnis, as tenured professor, can say the sort of things she said and keep her position intact. That a university might be asked to examine specific instances of using that privilege to kick down and to consider whether they constitute retaliation isn’t a travesty of justice.

There is a foundational problem with this argument: allegedly false reporting is not a civil righs violation. To the precise contrary, allegations of defamation and false light depiction, which this account of the still secret complaint amounts to, have long been used to stifle civil rights activism. That is exactly what happened in the case that imposed constitutional limits on defamation claims, NYT v. Sullivan, where a defamation action was used to attempt to punish a newspaper for reporting on civil rights activities in Alabama. It also allegedly happened in the Ludlow case itself, where the professor asserted defamation claims The idea that a student who was not even the subject of the purportedly false reporting could instigate what amounts to an asminstrative defamation investigation under the guise of a civil rights law is truly absurd.

In my last comment, I meant to write that comment 44 by Seriously? is exactly right, not comment 45 as I wrote by mistake.

Comment 62 is in response to comment 50 by David Sobel, by the way. I thought it would be nested under his comment. No such luck.

Once again, some very basic and simple facts are getting lost here. LK wrote a long essay, one paragraph of which discussed the events in Northwestern Philosophy (a department that is not her own, concerning students with whom she has no professional relations whatsoever). In that paragraph, she ran several events together confusingly and made some factual errors that were later cleaned up. This is turn sparked a Title IX allegation of retaliation. It would behoove everyone who comments here to read Kipnes’s two essays and the response to the letter in the Chronicle that provides her own timeline and her own characterization of the errors. There is I think reasonable grounds for conflicting interpretation of their intent and their seriousness, but I cannot fathom an interpretation that warrants the claim of retaliation. The author and her friend were, I suppose, within their rights to file such a claim (and I suppose somewhere in this thread, someone explains how a third party, like the author, can claim to be retaliated against). But they ought not to have. And I think one can say that and still have real sympathies for the humans at the center of this story, for the horror of rape and the deep problem of sexual harassment in academia. And of course one can say that and still think that the ugly backlash the women bringing the charges are receiving is deplorable and should stop.

I strongly object to the notion that Free Speech Warriors and People Who Care About Oppression are mutually exclusive categories. This notion seems to plague these debates. I am a Free Speech Warrior precisely because I care deeply about oppression. The problem with free speech, folks, is that it only works if everyone has a right to it, the oppressed and the oppressor alike. Otherwise, who exactly gets to decide who exactly is worthy of speech? The powerful? The majority? Our free speech right has been one of our greatest tools in the fight against oppression. But, defending free speech is often a very lonely road, because you get accused of not caring about how whatever speech made whomever feel. I care deeply about free speech, because I care deeply about the oppressed.

[ My apologies and many thanks to the moderators of this thread. If you can tolerate my last musings, thank you. ]

First: unlike some authors here, I am not willing to indulge the fantasy of taking the philosophical community at large (real or virtual) to be a place where equally situated self-determined, autonomous rational thinkers interact by exchanging reasons, claims, counterclaims, accepting or rejecting them but shaking hands at the end when they reach the conclusion they’re happy with (@seriously?). To do so is irresponsible when, de facto, some voices are louder than others, some have more credibility and authority than others, when some people have more power than others.

Second: I see that some people here(@DC) have more knowledge of the use and meaning of Title IX procedures (and laws in general). Which is great and very encouraging! Thank you all. I hope we/I can learn from you.

Finally, a more radical proposal. I am open to the idea that, although professor Kipnis is a faculty member at NU, she is ignorant (i.e. has no clue) of some parts of the social tapestry of NU. Many points in her Freudian analysis make me believe that this is indeed the case. Why does it matter? Well, it matters because her voice would not be quite as chilling or credible if she were to apply her Freudian insights into the workings of a university in a galaxy, far, far away.
In the old days we would say that “with freedom comes responsibility”. Far from being just “intellectually silly”, professor Kipnis’s musings are intellectually (and not only) irresponsible. For some time I hoped that another professor at NU would raise their voice and provide the much needed, wiser alternative to her article. Perhaps, then, nobody would have thought that the only instrument they have to give others some strength is to be the NU Title IX maze runner. So far, this letter by a grad student is the closest thing to that hope.

@Monica:

Then what do you take the “philosophical community at large” to be if not the “fantasy” of a community of inquirers equally dedicated to truth all with equal access to the means of producing and discerning the truth?

You seem to think that philosophy isn’t about reasoned argument among people who have no initial claim to occupying a privileged position in the space of reasons. I’m just guessing. But it sounds as though you just might think that philosophy is something like a mere roll call of competing ideologies, each backed by some greater or lesser degree of power. Not the power of reason — that’s just a delusion and fantasy to think that a philosopher could try to back his or her views with nothing but the force of the better reason. I don’t know but if I had to guess, I would predict that you’re going to any talk of the force of the better reason to be just a disguise. In the end, I suspect that you think it’s just politics all the way down. I assume that because of the way you seemed to dismiss what you called “policing reasons” as a move that the powerful make when they don’t want to take the complaints of the marginalized seriously.

Call me a fool, call me naive, call me, of all things, “irresponsible” for not believing as you appear to believe. But unlike you, with respect to equality, I actually do believe that humans have a degree of autonomy, self-determination, and rationality. And in my naive delusions, I also admit believing that we all have roughly equal access to and so are equally situated with respect to the most important thing of all — the space of reason.

But I suspect you don’t believe in that space as I conceive it. I suspect you think that’s a deluded fantasy too, right? One person’s reason, is another’s treason, as it were. It’s all about power. And of course, not all are equally situated with respect to power. I mean some have tenure, some have wealth, some have opportunities that others lack. I assume your talk of credibility and authority, is meant to refer to that the kind of credibility and authority that come with institutional power. There is such credibility and authority — no doubt about it. But if that were all that mattered in philosophical discussion, god it would be a depressing and pointless profession. That’s a profession I wouldn’t want to be a part of. A game I wouldn’t want to play. What would be the point?

But hey maybe that’s just my false consciousness operating. Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong about the way the philosophy game is really played. Maybe I’m really just a deluded politician merely parading as an explorer out to chart the landscape of reasons.

No 72, I think you have gotten to the heart of the matter. Title IX is among the most demonstably successful civil rights regimes instituted by Congress. It has changed the face of our nation’s universities, not as much as we should want, but all for the good.

That is why it is essential that opponents of gender based discrimination, in all its forms – including and especially harassment and abuse – should be at the forefront of decrying misuses of this important civil rights regime like the absurd complaint that is so weakly defended above.

Thankfully, the answers to the problem are not obscure, rather, they are procedural: as the commentor above suggests – no institution of higher learning should ever accept and investigate claims that are directed at punishing speech, period full stop.

Finally, as professor Eisenman generously stated after the even more frivolous claim against him was terminated, it is primarily the responsibility of university administrators and the government regulators they look to for guidance to ensure that abusive and facually defective claims are rejected at the outset.

Thus, Eisenman said, it is wrong to direct undue criticism at students who are in the process of learning the rules of the raod for discourse in civil society, and are to be expected to make mistakes along that road

Yet all of us have a responsibility to reflect on and learn from our mistakes, and that includes students and faculty in university communities who should always endeavor to preserve and enhance – and certainly not abuse – valuable tools like civil rights enforcement regimes. As the Kipnis affair shows, such abuses can have deeply unfortunate repercussions. That is why the lack of such self-critical reflection evinced in the above post from the complainant is so concerning.

Following up on Phillipe Lemoine’s post (53), there are some language issues here (ironically, issues very familiar to Ludlow himself)…
The OP says in part:
“I am a graduate student who knowingly involved myself in a legally volatile situation because Kipnis, intentionally or not, wrote false things about two students found by our university to be victims.”

This asserts “Kipnis wrote false things about two students found by our university to be victims.” Since we don’t know their names, call the two students U and G. Let’s grant that Kipnis wrote about U. What did Kipnis say about U that was false? That U brought “several” lawsuits when U only brought two, is what we are told. OK, granted. What did Kipnis say about G that was false? Here’s where things get interesting. We can infer from Kipnis’s (albeit clumsy) response to Cynthis Lewis (http://www.chroniclecareers.com/article/Parsing-Sexual-Paranoia/229009/) that Kipnis was intending to say about G that Ludlow had brought a defamation suit against G. But how did Kipnis attempt to identify G in the first place? One answer is, with the description: “a former grad student whom he had previously dated.” Now either this description applies to G or it doesn’t. If it applies to G, then Kipnis did not write a falsehood, and so did not write a falsehood about G. But the charge in the OP and elsewhere is that the description does not apply to G. It either applies to some other individual, or else to nothing at all; but then it seems Kipnis did not succeed in writing anything about G. To put the point another way, if the correct rendering of Kipnis’s original assertion is “There exists an x such that x is a former graduate student, and Ludlow previously dated x, and Ludlow sued x for defamation,” then what Kipnis said is false all right, but not about G. My claim is modest: that the author of the OP (and several–or only two–others on this thread and elsewhere) have not yet given an account of how it is that Kipnis wrote something false about G.

[Note that although she might have succeeded in doing so, Kipnis did not even attempt to identify G as an alleged victim of Ludlow’s. Indeed, Kipnis was criticized for not identifying G in this way (by Cynthia Lewis). And fair enough—from Kipnis’s article alone, no one would known that anyone other than U was an alleged victim of Ludlow’s. (If you think differently, then you might as well read “The professor sued for defamation various colleagues, administrators, and a former grad student whom he had previously dated,” as saying that he had allegedly sexual assaulted colleagues and administrators whom he had previously dated.) Kipnis’s article has a pretty strong implicature that the defamation lawsuits arose out of the U case alone.]

So what is the argument that Kipnis (originally) wrote something false about G? Presumably it is that Kipnis’s assertion is properly rendered as “The former graduate student that Ludlow sued for defamation was previously dated by Ludlow.” That is, Kipnis’ assertion is of the form “The F is H,” and is false since “the F” picks out G uniquely (via the usual Russellian machinery), and G is not H.

Some evidence against this rendering is that Kipnis used the indefinite article “a” rather than “the.” (Test your intuitions. If Ludlow *had* dated G, and had also sued at least one other former graduate student for defamation, then would what Kipnis wrote have come out false? Not by my lights, yet it would be false on the suggested rendering.)

Perhaps Kipnis’s critics can deny the Russellian treatment of definite descriptions. Or perhaps they can deny that the Intentional Fallacy is a fallacy. Or perhaps they should claim something weaker than the OP quote above: either that although not asserted by Kipnis, something false about G (of the form “The F is H”) was nevertheless communicated (e.g. by implicature); or else that falsehood is not the issue after all (cf. Lemoine at 53).

@Seriously? (#71): For me, philosophy is not a game. I’ll let you guess, suspect, assume, and predict the other stuff about myself and others, since you seem to like this activity tremendously.

Universities act primarily to protect themselves from liability, they do not act to protect anyone, students or faculty, accuser or accused. Sexual harassment codes morphed long ago from their original feminist intention, to offer redress to those harassed under conditions of gender inequality and sexual predation. Now, they are more like military anti-fraternization codes that forbid socializing across status lines, to protect the hierarchy and the institution. The confidentiality rules, supposedly designed to protect a complainant from reprisal and ostracism, actually function to protect the university. They are drafted by lawyers working for the university. Title IX, though issuing from the federal government, is similarly being instituted by liability averse university corporate lawyers. In such circumstances, accusers and accused will feel abused by the process–because in fact neither is truly being served. Protests aimed at asking for enforcement from a university administration are ill conceived, in the way that hate crime legislation is ill conceived–such laws enhance the power of the police and the prison system more than they act meaningfully to reduce hatred and violence. Organizing on campus might be aimed at creating new forms of solidarity and collective action, from among students themselves, rather than at asking for and using university regulations that will only frustrate all concerned. An example might be taken from Incite! a woman of color organization against violence against women that eschews strategies that only enhance the powers of the police state. It is also necessary to keep in mind, even as we organize ourselves to address the realities of sexual assault under conditions of gender inequality, that we need a process that recognizes the rights of the accused and doesn’t assume guilt upon accusation. There are too many historical examples of anti rape and sexual assault movements gone horribly awry by invoking slogans like “believe the women” or “believe the children.” Black men have been lynched and unfairly prosecuted for over a century for rapes they didn’t commit, that many white women have lied about. The panic over Satanistic child abuse practices in day care centers put scores of people in prison with long sentences, before those prosecutions were revealed as deeply flawed. It also doesn’t help us to overdramatize the impact of rape and sexual assault. Yes, these are horrible events connected to gender inequality (I have been subject to sexual harassment and assault myself). But if we use hyperbolic language to declare that all instances of such assaults, without regard to circumstance, “ruin” lives and “damage” people–what are we telling ourselves and the people who live through such assaults? Gayle Rubin long ago, in her classic essay “Thinking Sex,” argued that sex is overburdened with significance, and that this underlies persecutory sex law and rampant moral panics. When we equate a rub on the bottom with a brutal rape, we are going to end up in a persecutory frenzy that can not make crucial distinctions. Can we keep all of this in mind, while we also organize around the indisputable fact that sexual assault is too often trivialized and dismissed? Can we accept that simply “believing” every charge leads us down a very dangerous path, as dangerous as disbelieving. We have to hold the possibility that the accused is not guilty in mind when we write and organize around sexual assault. And we should reject the “protection” of paternalistic institutions and supporters along the way.

@ Philipe Lemoine (81), presumably responding to my (76): thank you for the correction to my understanding of U’s case (even though you wrote “one” where I wrote “two”). I relied on what others had more or less asserted here, hence my “is what we are told” (note that folks–including you, apparently–have been oddly coy about responding with precision to requests for clarification from e.g. Ligurio (38) and others). More fool me–I will never again rely upon my fellow philosophers in this way.

As to G’s case, you respond as though I misunderstood your (53). I didn’t. And I mostly agree with it. But I fear you did not understand my point. You write (81):
“I think it’s reasonable to say that Kipnis referred to the graduate student who accused Ludlow of rape, even if the description she used in order to do it turned out not to apply to that student. After all, people often refer to something by using a description that it doesn’t satisfy, so I don’t think this line of argument is particularly convincing.”

Your intuition might not even be relevant: you might be talking about speaker’s reference when the issue is semantic reference. Or else you’re begging the question (against e.g. Russellians). Or else you’re following some other response I outlined at the end.

Kipnis has been accused of harming G, in part (cf. the OP) on the ground that Kipnis publicly *wrote* something *false* *about G*. This ground involves interpretive claims, ones that philosophers of language are entitled to examine. The more dubious those claims are, the less compelling is the *stated* case against Kipnis, your psychological report notwithstanding.

The author of the article states the following about Kipnis’ essay:

“I think the argument Kipnis offered in her essay was intellectually silly and concretely harmful to individuals in our community…”

“Her erroneous representation of a particular case at Northwestern, involving living, breathing, human beings, caused tangible further harm to two women…”

Please explain how Kipnis’ essay — regardless of its quality — “concretely” and “tangibly” harmed *anyone*. Be specific. And no, someone *saying* they were harmed is not enough. Anyone can say that about anything.

As graduate students at a top university, I am sure that the author will be more than able to answer this very simple question.

I think it is courageous of the poster to adress these issues here. I am very grateful she did. Anonymity seldom survives much scrutiny. At the same time, we need to start to become more aware of what goes on when someone seeks to use the remedies the university appears to offer.

feministphilosophers.wordpress.com has a new blogger who has some expertise in the law and is going to attempt to clarify some legal concepts. Reading their posts might be interesting for those those addressing legal issues here. My own fraught 2.5 year trip to a final settlement through the EEOC left me convinced that laws have to be interpreted and that the resources needed for a good interpretation were beyond me. And some of the stuff was so complicated – such as who can testify at a hearing – that it wasn’t worth it to me to try to store it in my brain. Also, very often how these complicated matters are conducted is not simply a matter of decisions by university administrators. Further, given the federal scrutiny universities are getting re Title IX, it might well make sense to act on all complaints.

I am truly inspired by the courage of the author of this post. And, at the same time, my heart hurts knowing that yet another woman graduate student is being distracted from her own important research in order to spend her time defending herself, and other vulnerable members of academia, who inevitably will be, or have been, targeted in similar ways by irresponsible and unprofessional self-proclaimed tenured-professor “journalists,” who can’t bother to conduct thorough and unbiased research for their “articles” in order to get their facts straight. I really hope the graduate student continues to find the strength and motivation to protect herself, both her reputation and her own personal well being, because I can only imagine how devastating and demoralizing this all must be right now. And, we really need people like this author in our profession.

“She regards it as nothing less than a life and career ruining decision. Hold these two facts together in your mind: she believes she was assaulted, and she regrets having ever told another soul. This is the world we live in. It’s not melodramatic; it’s heartbreaking.”— Very well said.. and this passage is, unfortunately, representative of the experiences of too many women in academia. And, it expresses why so many victims will never come forward.