Although the main case study of Laura Kipnis's book is the Ludlow case, she also discusses another incident familiar to philosophy readers: the firing of philosophy professor David Barnett from his tenured position at the University of Colorado. Here's an excerpt of Kipnis's account (169-172)
Barnett had a graduate student we'll call Ben. Ben had been found guilty of "forcible nonconsensual sexual contact" stemming from a drunken, chaotic evening at an off-campus house involving several roommates and visitors...Ben himself had no memory the next day of the events; nor did the complainant, whom I'll call Ann. At least that's what Ann said the next morning to the female friend who'd brought her to Ben's place. Three months later, Ann miraculously recovered her memory and filed forcible sex charges against Ben.
Though they never actually had sex, somehow Ben and Ann were in a bedroom naked and yelling at one another when Ben's roommate, Cary, came in to see what was going on. Among the other highlights of the evening were Ann, blind drunk, falling down the stairs; Ann being picked up in a car by her boyfriend; Ann returning to the house later that night and climbing into bed with various of Ben's roommates, whom she tried fondling and propositioning (Cary included), but none was interested...
The university's Office of Discrimination and Harassment [ODH] investigated, and found Ben guilty of the forcible contact charge, though they never interviewed him....Ben was shocked when he received the final report, since it either misrepresented or omitted the statements of the five witnesses they had interviewed. Ben's association with the university was immediately severed...
His professor, David Barnett, tried to help Ben find a lawyer, but none would take the case on contingency, so any legal action would be expensive....[An] alternative was writing up an account of what had been omitted from the report and submitting an appeal directly to the university's president and chancellor...
Ben was out of the country at the time, so Barnett spoke to five of the witnesses and complied a list of thirty-two points omitted from ODH's report, and twenty-one places where witness statements were manipulated, according to the witnesses themselves. One, the female friend whom Ann designated as her character witness, had told ODH that Ann remembered nothing the next day, and she suspected that Ann was making up the assault story to appease her jealous (and violence-prone, according to arrest records) boyfriend....
Barnett wrote up his findings in the style of a philosophical argument....[I]t ended up being thirty-seven pages. He may have been a bit tone-deaf: a couple of sentences could be construed as insensitive to Ann....
[T]he university charged Barnett [with various policy violations and] with retaliation, then hired an outside lawyer to conduct an investigation....
...Ann was made aware of Barnett's report and its frankness about her role in the events of the evening. Before she'd even filed a suit, the university extended a preemptive settlement offer: $825,000...
...Ben's roommate, Cary, brought his own sexual misconduct charges against Ann, for getting into his bed while he was asleep and fondling him. This was a problem for the official story [about that evening]. Solution? Ann was found guilty of sexual misconduct--after getting an $825,000 payout.
....Ann's penalty for sexual misconduct?...[S]he got academic probation...
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