Cultural critic and serial provocateur Laura Kipnis wrote an essay in 2015 for The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new policy forbidding dating between professors and undergraduates at Northwestern University, where she’s a tenured professor of film.
The article ignited a furor that included shocked Northwestern undergrads marching to the president’s office with mattresses on their backs in protest. Two students filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis, claiming her words had created “a hostile environment.”
That low bar is a hot issue. It was the subject of a standing-room-only debate last week at the University of Chicago Law School, by a panel that included Georgetown University professor Nancy Chi Cantalupo, speaking in its favor as “a pillar of the civil rights approach,” and New York University professor (and Hoover Institution fellow) Richard Epstein, arguing against the whole Title IX process as an “overbroad reading of the statute” that he hopes the Trump administration will eradicate.
“This isn’t victim blaming,” she insists, despite what her critics might say. “It’s grown-up feminism.” Kipnis told me last week she’s pleased that Unwanted Advances is “opening discussion on issues that need more transparency.” v
Fri 5/24, 6PM Studebaker Theater 410 S. Michigan chicagohumanities.org
$12 for members, $10 for students and teachers
