Professor Stevens has updated her website, and released a number of documents, most significantly, the June 22 investigative report prepared by outside counsel, Kathleen Rinehart, after Prof. Stevens requested indemnification following receipt of a cease-and-desist letter from Prof. Tillery's lawyer last Spring. (For those who have not been following this case, see the earlier post for a summary of what is known and not known about this affair.)
Among the revelations in the report, one learns that "[a]s a result of the unpredictability of Stevens' conduct and safety concerns expressed by a number of people in the Department, an officer from the University's Police Department provides a daily presence in the Department" (p. 6). The report also states that the undergraduate who allegedly witnessed the March 8 incident "said he never actually saw anything" (p. 8) (this seems hard to square with the declaration posted on-line by Prof. Stevens--see #8 in the earlier account). The Report also states, but does not document with names or testimony, that "the faculty, staff and students intervieweed as part of this process are afraid, exhausted and/or fed up by Stevens' aggressive and unpredictable conduct" (p. 10) and that, "To a person, individuals stated that the interaction between Tillery and Stevens on March 8 was not an isolated event; instead efforts to work with Stevens to accomplish even simple or non-controversial tasks are difficult to impossible" (p. 10). Unless the investigator is simply a liar--and if this ends up in litigation, we will find out--this is extremely damning.
Oddly, Prof. Stevens now includes the following reference to me in her new "Postscript": "If he bothered to fact-check my views on Title IX, he'd discover that his gleeful crowing about the ironies of my being banished after my role in having Peter Ludlow fired is way off." The post to which she alludes is this one. The parenthetical comment of mine to which she now responds at length is the following:
(Longtime readers may recall that Prof. Stevens championed the cause of the undergraduate complainant against Peter Ludlow several years ago, claiming that Ludlow had engaged in "criminal" misconduct. While the University found Ludlow in violation of the university's rules about sexual harassment, they did not find against him on any of the allegations that might have been criminal, and no criminal charges were ever filed.)
Prof. Stevens appears to have only two weapons in her rhetorical armory: (often reckless) hyperbole and the ad hominem. Given the former, I guess my comment could count as "gleeful crowing," but I thought its relevance was that it shows that Prof. Stevens does have a penchant for...reckless hyperbole, which seems not wholly unrelated to the issues raised by her colleagues. Her disjointed response to this in the "Postscript" is par for the course for those who have been following her website. She reports, for example, that,
I sat with her [the student complainant against Ludlow] for a two-hour interview by a Chicago police officer, who was appalled that Northwestern itself did not report the allegations a year earlier. It was obvious that the officer found the student credible and Northwestern remiss for not insuring a criminal investigation of her allegations against Peter Ludlow when NU first interviewed the student one year earlier.
Since then I learned of several other incidents involving faculty assaulting students (one was a social scientist and he did this to more than one student) and that NU's administration hid these episodes.
In fact, the police did not file criminal charges against Ludlow, nor did the University investigation conclude there was any criminal misconduct by Ludlow. (No mention of these facts by Prof. Stevens.) Thus, the original parenthetical observation made in passing stands: Prof. Stevens used the word "criminal" to describe conduct that was not.
I had remarked once previously that Prof. Stevens's rhetorical posture tends to lend support to, rather than discredit, the allegations about her, especially her penchant to combine conspiracy theories with her inability to resist even the most absurd ad hominem attacks. (A striking example are the bizarre series of ad hominem insinuations in Section 5 of this update.) If, as Prof. Stevens reports, she has legal representation, she should have her lawyer vet her public pronouncements.
In any case, this new information still does not resolve questions 9-11 that I raised here and which bear on the academic freedom issues raised by this case.
UPDATE: A couple of readers have now also called to my attention this page created by philosopher Sally Haslanger (MIT) in support of Prof. Jacqueline Stevens. Haslanger admits to having been friends with Stevens for more than twenty years, and also acknowledges that,
She [Prof. Stevens] can be rude. She can even be offensive. But the only times I have seen her be either is when she was provoked by rude and/or offensive behavior by others.
I am not sure it helps Prof. Stevens's case that her friend offers testimony not inconsistent with the general tenor of the allegations against her. Prof. Haslanger also assures us that Prof. Stevens is only "rude" and "offensive" as a tit-for-tat in response to rude and offensive behavior. (The "Trump approach"?) I'm uncertain how reassuring we should find that, given that someone with a propensity for being rude and offensive--not on a blog, mind you, but apparently in real life and to colleagues--may not be the best judge of what counts as rude or offensive behavior by others. Of course, rudeness and offensiveness would have to be quite extreme and disruptive to warrant disciplinary measures, and we still do not know all the details of the allegations against Prof. Stevens on that score and whether they are credible.
AN ADDENDUM FOR LONGTIME PHILOSOPHY READERS (this is irrelevant to the allegations against Prof. Stevens): Philosophy readers may appreciate the irony of Prof. Haslanger excusing "bad" behavior because it was provoked by bad behavior, an excuse that apparently doesn't apply to people who are not her friends [I concede, for the sake of argument only, that my response to the bad behavior of miscreants in 2014 was "bad" behavior; I admit I am not Prof. Haslanger's friend!]. As an added irony, I note that, as one colleague told me and as I've confirmed, Prof. Stevens is a litigious person, a trait I dmire actually, but one that someone might have previously thought Prof. Haslanger did not approve of. But this is not surprising, since, as another famous feminist philosopher observed some time ago "[s]mug, self-righteous, moralistic [people], without any self-critical capacity morally" are unlikely to notice their own hypocrisy.
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