The folks at the Chicago Humanities Festival couldn’t have known, when they booked author Laura Kipnis for a May 24 event at the Studebaker Theater, just how topical her subject would be.
Ludlow’s investigations stemmed from relationships he had with two Northwestern students. The more notorious of the two was a single outing with a 19-year-old freshman who wound up spending the night with him in his bed. She claimed later that the then-55-year-old professor had forced her to get drunk and groped her.
So Kipnis can’t talk about the lawsuit (and HarperCollins says it doesn’t comment on pending litigation). But her readers can (and are)—among them, another provocative academic, University of Chicago law professor Brian Leiter, who’s written about both the book and the case on his Leiter Reports blog. He shared his assessment in a phone interview.
