The always provocative Laura Kipnes (journalism, Northwhestern) comments. She alludes, in part, to her own experience with abuse of the Title IX process. The last story she recounts concerns a former PhD student in philosophy at Northwestern:
Not long ago I received a wrenching email from the mother of a former graduate student I’d interviewed and written about in Unwanted Advances. He’d been swept up in the same accusation-fest on my campus that I had. In fact he’d been reported on, he told me, by some of the same people who’d gone after me (friends, he’d once thought), and been, perhaps, collateral damage in the events I was relating. The charges involved his having made drunken passes (six months apart) at two women in his circle, and being, they felt, in various ways invasive.
As a result he was put on disciplinary probation, and his funding was cut; he’d needed $100,000 in loans to get through his final year in the program. He felt thrown under the bus by his adviser, who’d recruited then abandoned him, and ostracized by others in the program. (He’d been too depressed to contest the accusations, a decision he later regretted; some of the details were false or exaggerated, he said, but he hadn’t known his department would be informed about them.) He’d obviously been having difficulties at the time and acting in desperate ways, as the dean’s sanctions letter makes clear: His “dynamic emotional states,” which moved very quickly from sadness to anger, were “perceived as coercive or intimidating” by those he interacted with. Might there have been a way to deal with this person more compassionately? No, the university was far more interested in punishing than helping him.
His mother was now writing me to say her son was dead. She thought I’d want to know. The cause of death proved to be “the toxic effects of bromazolam,” a designer drug you can get on the internet. She wrote that she thought her son had actually died “because of the toxic effects of a higher-education program that caused him nothing but pain and heartbreak.” He’d been totally crushed during the worst of it, especially by having been turned against by people he’d thought of as friends and mentors. The “quasi-legal administrative processes” their son had been through, his father wrote, had ruined their lives.
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