Unwanted Advances

February 13, 2017
In this courageous, thought-provoking polemic, Kipnis (Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation), a feminist cultural critic and professor at Northwestern University, targets the overzealousness of Title IX investigations on college campuses and shows how they’re undermining academic freedom, free speech, and gender equality. After being at the center of a 72-day Title IX investigation herself (the author was accused of creating a “hostile environment” on campus following the publication of her essay on sexual paranoia in the Chronicle of Higher Education), Kipnis uncovered a “netherworld of accused professors and students, rigged investigations, closed-door hearings, and Title IX officers run amok.” The book focuses on one investigation of a well=known philosophy professor at Northwestern University, but Kipnis draws in numerous other examples to highlight the current climate of “criminalization” of sex on campus due to the 2011 expansion of Title IX’s mandate to encompass sexual misconduct. The guidelines for this are vague, leading to unfair trials where investigators aren’t accountable to anyone. She argues for more honesty about the sexual realties on campuses. Without diminishing the gravity of sexual assault, Kipnis’s readable and judiciously reported work illustrates how the “sex-as-danger preoccupation on campuses now” is infantilizing women rather than empowering them. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

February 15, 2017
An argument for how the "recent upheavals in sexual culture on American campuses" are symptomatic of "officially sanctioned" sexual paranoia and hysteria.Kipnis (Filmmaking/Northwestern Univ.; Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, 2014, etc.) examines the sexual culture shift among millennial university students within an increasingly bureaucratized academic system. She argues that although sex culture today outwardly vaunts women's choice to be as libertine as they wish, the reality is much more complex. Many women are using--and in Kipnis' view, abusing--Title IX legislation designed to prevent sex discrimination in education as a way to "remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences, and to adjudicate relationships post-breakup." Drawing on documented Title IX cases, interviews, and her own experiences, Kipnis delineates a world in which "witch hunt conditions" are now the new campus norm. In one case, a troubled female undergraduate used Title IX to take aim at a respected male professor, Peter Ludlow, at Northwestern. The student, Eunice Cho, alleged that he forced her to drink and submit to unwanted groping, two actions Cho claimed led to her suicide attempt. The episode, which later included accusations of improper behavior from a female graduate student who had been Ludlow's lover, transformed his image into a rapist who used his power and personal charisma to target "vulnerable young women." The author's trenchant yet witty analysis reveals how the entrance of university administrators, each with his or her own agendas and vendettas, rendered a complex situation even murkier and more byzantine. Not only did the outcome--which included Ludlow's dismissal--reinforce stereotypical ideas about males as sexual predators and females as their prey. It also strengthened traditional ideas that women were victims with no agency of their own. Though the narrative occasionally reads like an academic gossip column, it never diminishes the problem of campus sexual assault, and the author reveals disturbing trends in university culture that merit further conversation. As in all her books, Kipnis is consistently provocative and intelligent.

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March 1, 2017

A cultural critic and feminist, Kipnis (Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation) found herself the subject of student protests and a Title IX investigation after writing an article about "sexual paranoia" at Northwestern University. This book functions partly as a response to her experience and partly as an overall examination and critique of the current dialog around sexual assaults on school campuses. She states that a stifling sense of hysteria sets feminism and gender progression many steps back rather than furthering them. Unfortunately, this book's content and tone often feel in conflict. While there are indeed criticisms to be made of the bureaucratic implementations of Title IX and of the often-conflicting messages of modern activists, those criticisms marry poorly with Kipnis relating anecdotes of her own mother fending off a professor who chased her around a desk, and then pondering why modern women can't show that much "agency." VERDICT Kipnis writes sharply and presents valid points, but they're hamstrung by the text's tendency to drift into statements that sound uncomfortably close to excusing the mind-sets and behaviors that allow sexual assaults to continue.--Kathleen McCallister, Tulane Univ., New Orleans

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2017
Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive government financial support, has been both a boon and, intrepid cultural critic Kipnis (Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, 2014) posits, a bane to institutions of higher education. From the hookup culture that permeates dating to a hypervigilance regarding student-professor relationships, there exists on college campuses a heightened awareness of sexual behavior. After writing an essay about what she terms a sexual paranoia in academia, Kipnis found herself the target of a Title IX investigation that put her career as a respected professor and reputation as an ardent feminist at risk. Kipnis assails the ease with which these Title IX allegations can be made and exposes the onerous burden they place on the accused. In doing so, Kipnis reveals the nearly Shakespearean juggernaut of innuendo and irony, witch-hunting and revenge that is reaching epidemic proportions and hindering not only the quest for gender equality but also the pursuit of intellectual excellence. A brave, sobering, and disturbing account of the perilous state of academia.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)