Laura Kipnis’s endlessly repeated Title IX investigations at UD‘s befuddled alma mater, Northwestern University, begin to sound like the famous Beatles song. She keeps getting investigated for sex discrimination and found not guilty of it. Her life is heading into Groundhog Day territory, waking up every morning to the same effort to nail her for nastiness.
She wrote about her first investigation in a recent book:
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.”
Failing to bring her down via Number Nine, Northwestern tried to ruin her for incivility.
The dean ultimately found that Kipnis did not violate the civility policy…
Rats. How about her violations of The Free Woman policy? She’s been flouncing around being a free woman – can we go after her for that?
No. Let’s stick with Title IX. A law professor specifies, in the New Yorker, how it can be used:
Title IX can … 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… 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.
September 20th, 2017 at 5:25PM
Good thinking, ninety-nine!
September 21st, 2017 at 4:44PM
I just did the annual forced march through the on-line Title IX training / quiz thing. I want a refund of the 75 minutes of my life back. If these things prevent a single case of actual harassment, I would like to see the evidence.