PROFESSOR LAURA KIPNIS Writes About Being An Eyewitness To a Title IX Witch Trial
Attending the disgraced philosophy professor Peter Ludlow’s dismissal hearing was like watching someone being burned at the stake in slow motion. The five Northwestern faculty members empaneled to hear the case were striving to make clear that they were neutral and not prejudging anything. The whole thing dragged on for over a month. It was the campus equivalent of a purification ritual, and purifying communities is no small-scale operation these days: In addition to the five-person faculty panel, there were three outside lawyers, at least two in-house lawyers, another lawyer hired by the university to advise the faculty panel, a rotating cast of staff and administrators, and a court reporter taking everything down on a little machine. Ludlow had his lawyer (and on one occasion, two). And there was me. One of Ludlow’s lawyers had contacted me a few weeks earlier to ask if I’d be willing to act as Ludlow’s “faculty support person” at the hearing. I was surprised by the request: Ludlow and I didn’t know each other, but he was such a pariah on campus I suspect there was no one else to tap. And even though we hadn’t met, our situations were already somewhat intertwined…So when Ludlow’s lawyer called, of course I said yes — I was being offered a front-row seat at a witch trial.
Though it was staged as an actual trial, both of Ludlow’s accusers had declined to participate, meaning there was no opportunity for his lawyer to question their stories, meaning the whole thi
ng was, judicially speaking, an elaborate sham. But however rickety their case, I could see why the university needed Ludlow to go away. For one thing, he’d become a public-relations nightmare. When student activists staged a protest about the university’s handling of sexual-misconduct cases, they did it at the kickoff for a $3.75-billion university fund-raising campaign. . Big universities are multibillion-dollar international businesses, and Ludlow was bad for the brand.
At one point during these protracted hearings, something unexpected happened that reminded me of what can be so great about the academy, and what we stand to lose in the wave of sexual paranoia sweeping American campuses. Paranoia is a formula for intellectual rigidity, and from what I’ve seen in the past couple of years, its inroads into higher education are so effectively dumbing down the place that the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for the free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear. Especially on the subject of campus sexual politics.
But there are still a few holdouts, and one of them, is a feminist philosopher named Jessica Wilson. She volunteered to testify as a character witness for Peter Ludlow. Wilson had known Ludlow for 15 years, first as his student and then in two departments as a colleague, and spoke movingly about him as a mentor and a person. She also sketched a far more convivial view of professor-student relations than the predatory scene depicted in the Title IX reports…The hearings plodded on and on and were nowhere near concluding when Ludlow told me he was thinking of pulling the plug and resigning. He was bleeding money on lawyers who were no match for the university’s, numerically or otherwise. His lead lawyer turned out to be terrible at cross-examination and squandered every opportunity. Whatever case Ludlow might have presented wasn’t getting made.
…As you’ve probably gathered, going through a Title IX investigation — though my situation was nothing compared with what others have been through (I still have a job, at least for the moment) — and learning what I’ve learned has made me a little mad and possibly a little dangerous: transformed from a harmless ironist into an aspiring whistle-blower.
chronicle.com-By Laura Kipnis KIPNIS Book: UnwantedAdvances Sexual Paranoia Comes-to-Campus
