Kipnis on "Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus"

The publisher kindly sent me a copy, which I've been reading and will have more to say about, since its main case study is the Ludlow affair at Northwestern, and its verdict on that case should be of interest to everyone in academic philosophy--on her telling, there are a lot of philosophy faculty and students who have a lot to make amends for. 

Kipnis is often funny and cutting about the weirdness of parts of the contemporary academy; for example (p. 2):

Feelings are what's in fashion.  I'm all for feeling; I'm a standard-issue female, after all.  But this cult of feeling has an authoritarian underbelly:  feelings can't be questioned or probed, even while furnishing the rationale for sweeping new policies, which can't be questioned or probed either.  (I speak from experience here.)

The "experience," of course, was having a frivolous Title IX complaint filed against her by two graduate students in philosophy, a complaint that was then rationalized by the usual clueless suspects in philosophy cyberspace.   (She returns to that in a whole chapter of the book.)

There are other places in the book where she's too glib for my taste, though overall she musters enough evidence to support her verdict on the Ludlow case.  A particularly likeable aspect of her approach is that she takes seriously situational and sexual ambiguity, the ambivalence of feelings, and the existence of unconscious or subconscious motivations, in a way most of the sanctimonious philosophers writing about these issues do not.  Indeed, as she aptly (and amusingly) observes, academic philosophy has become,

a discipline populated by psychological nincompoops.  The self-acuity of the philosophy crowd struck me as an underdeveloped country, though no doubt the same could be said of the sciences, also rife with accusations of sexual misconduct of late.  Are the field that model themselves on the sciences--analytic philosophers, who dominate academic philosophy, who lean in this direction, too--more prone to sexual stupidity?  I offer this as a potential research question for further study.   (p. 116)

I'll have more to say about the book, and some brief excerpts, in the days ahead.  This is a book academic philosophers should read, that's for sure.